The View | How global tax reform can boost climate change fight and create a fairer world

A “code red for humanity”. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres could not have summed up better the chill that grips everyone when reading the report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last month.

Natural disasters, water shortages, forced migrations, malnutrition, pandemics, species extinction – it is scientifically established that life on Earth as we know it will be inescapably transformed by climate disruption when children born in 2021 turn 30.

This is already happening. It was illustrated this summer by the rainfall that plunged China and Germany into mourning, the burning forests from North America to Siberia and the increasingly devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean.

This will now be our lot, with unprecedented human consequences. Specifically in Asia, heatwaves will continue to increase, fire seasons will lengthen and intensify, heavy rains will amplify, shorelines will retreat and coastal areas will shrink.

There is still a window of opportunity to avoid the worst by limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial era, but this window is closing. We must urgently and radically decarbonise our economies, put an end to deforestation and replant wherever possible. On top of that, we must also reduce our energy consumption and massively develop renewable energies.

However, implementing what should no longer be called a “transition” but an energy “switchover” has a cost. The plans just announced by the United States and the European Union to halve their carbon emissions by 2030 must be financed, but we must also help developing countries whose economies are devastated by Covid-19 do the same.