The cabinet minister who led the UN milestone last year climate change summit in Glasgow has indicated that he could resign if the next prime minister is not fully committed to the net-zero agenda.
Cop26 president Alok Sharma said some of the remaining candidates in the Tory leadership race had been only “lukewarm” on climate commitments.
The leaders of the Cop26 in Glasgow agreed to try to limit global warming to 1.5°C – and the UK has pledged to reach net zero by 2050.
It comes as climate experts warn of increasingly frequent extreme weather, as seen across Europe and the UK, stressing that the effects of climate change are not coming, they are already here.
In an interview with The ObserverMr Sharma urged the new Prime Minister to ‘proactively’ express their support for the net zero agenda and ‘green’ growth.
The Cop 26 president said: ‘I hope every candidate realizes why this is so important to voters in general and why it is important to conservative supporters’
This fire in Gironde, France, led to the evacuation of more than 12,000 local residents this week for their safety
Sharma said the new Conservative Prime Minister must follow in Johnson’s footsteps and understand the gravity of global warming
More than 7,000 hectares of land have been destroyed in the Gironde forest fires, with people fleeing from them
“Anyone who wants to lead our country must demonstrate that they take this issue incredibly seriously, that they are willing to continue to lead and take up the mantle that Boris Johnson started,” he said.
When asked if he could resign if the candidates were weak on net zero, Mr Sharma said: ‘Let’s see, shall we? I think we should see where the candidates are. And we need to see who actually finishes at number 10.
“I hope every candidate realizes why this is so important to voters in general and why it is important to conservative supporters. And I hope that, especially with the last two, we will see a very clear statement that this is an agenda that they do support.’
Pressing a second time, he added, “I don’t exclude anything and I don’t exclude anything.”
Of the five remaining candidates in the contest, only Kemi Badenoch has said she does not support the UK’s goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, describing it as “unilateral economic disarmament”.
The others have expressed varying degrees of enthusiasm for the policy, which is unpopular with some parts of the party over concerns about the impact on the economy.
An orphaned mountain lion cub that was badly burned in a recent Northern California wildfire is cared for at an animal shelter
A turtle, which hid underground to escape the fire, is seen after volunteers rescued it in the Marmaris neighborhood of Mugla, Turkey.
The UK is bracing for several days of record-breaking heat this coming week, with temperatures potentially reaching 40C in England.
In a viral video online, a Met Office weather forecaster predicted what UK summers would look like in 2050 if climate change continued at its current pace – but shockingly, the coming days have a strikingly similar forecast.
BBC weather presenter Matt Taylor took to Twitter this week to urge people to recognize rising global temperatures.
He said 40C is ‘not normal’ for the UK, heat records are becoming more common and added: ‘I never thought it would be this soon.’
Meanwhile, in April of this year, the UN released a bombshell report that exposed the horrific reality of climate change.
It said the world is on track to more than double the 1.5C target this century, and the world must act “now or never.”
Climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University has explained why the 1.5°C threshold is so important.
“At 1.5°C, there’s a good chance we can prevent most of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets from collapsing,” he said.
But hit 2C and those ice caps will collapse.
A firefighter fights a forest fire around the village of Eiriz in Baiao, north of Portugal, on July 15, 202
Trees, plants and animals have been burned and charred by the fires covering large parts of Europe
British fire brigade has warned people to be extremely careful in the heat, make sure cigarettes are well out and not to use barbecues
And there are also serious consequences for coral reefs – 1.5C warming will destroy about 70 percent of the world’s reefs – rising to 99 percent at 2C.
And if current trajectories continue, a third of all animal and plant species on Earth will be extinct by 2050.
Temperatures have been sweltering in parts of Europe this week and wildfires have raged across much of the continent.
More than 12,000 people had to be evacuated as a result of fires in one region of France alone.
Spain, Turkey, Croatia and Portugal have also seen massive fires – 3,000 firefighters were needed this week to fight flames in Portugal, with dozens of people injured in the blazes.
And wildfires have destroyed 3,500 hectares of land in Spain’s Extremadura.
It is unknown how many animals were killed or injured in these fires, but many are believed to have fallen victim to the increasingly brutal weather systems.
Wildfires are also a problem around the world, especially in the US in hot states like California.
The UK government has held Cobra meetings on upcoming cooking temperatures as the NHS is expected to struggle with demand.
The Met Office has issued its first red weather alert for extreme heat, meaning the entire population is at risk, not just those more vulnerable to heat.
On Friday, Secretary of State Liz Truss said she would impose a temporary moratorium on the green tax on domestic energy bills, arguing there were better ways to reach the net-zero target.
The debate took place as fires raged around the world, with some of the worst fires in Portugal, where a fire-fighting plane pilot was killed Friday when his plane crashed during an operation in the northeast.
It was the first fatal fire in Portugal this year, but the fires injured more than 160 people this week and forced hundreds of people to be evacuated.
The fire season has hit parts of Europe earlier than usual this year, following an unusually dry, hot spring that dried out the ground and which authorities attribute to climate change.
As the worst French fire moved closer to inhabited cities, some of the 11,000 people evacuated in the region described fear and uncertainty about what they would find when they returned home.
Footage shared by firefighters showed flames shooting over a mass of pine trees and black smoke stretching over the horizon.
Firefighters focused their efforts Saturday on using fire trucks to encircle high-risk villages and save as many homes as possible, Charles Lafourcade, who oversaw the French firefighting operation, told reporters.
According to the president, some 3,000 firefighters, supported by water-running planes, are fighting the fires in southern France, and Greece sent fire-fighting equipment to help.