Prince Charles has said that climate change may have been one of the causes of the civil war in Syria.
The heir to the throne has long been a passionate campaigner on environmental issues and linked drought in the Middle Eastern nation with the conflict which has left hundreds of thousands dead, created millions of refugees and seen the rise of Islamic State.
Prince Charles has said that climate change may have been one of the causes of the civil war in Syria.
The heir to the throne has long been a passionate campaigner on environmental issues and linked drought in the Middle Eastern nation with the conflict which has left hundreds of thousands dead, created millions of refugees and seen the rise of Islamic State.
The interview came ahead of Charles travelling to Paris to deliver a keynote speech at the 30 November opening ceremony for COP21, the United Nations conference on climate change which will attempt to reach a new international agreement to help limit global warming to no more than two degrees.
Charles has been a strong advocate of taking action to protect the environment for many years.
In 2007 he set up the Prince’s Rainforest Group to find a solution to save the world’s threatened forests. He addressed a UN international climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 and the following year he gave a keynote speech to the Oslo Climate and Forest Conference.
Last month he used a speech in London to tell the British environment secretary Amber Rudd, her French counterpart Segolene Royal, and other guests that tackling deforestation would be central to combating global warming.
Charles was asked in the Sky interview whether Britain could afford to deal with climate change in a time of austerity.
He said: “The trouble is if we don’t, this is the awful thing, if we don’t it’s going to get so much worse, then life will become very, very complicated indeed, and what we’re experiencing now will be as nothing to the problems.
“I mean the difficulties in 2008 with the financial crash - that was a banking crisis. But we’re now facing a real possibility of nature’s bank going bust. If you see it like that, we’ve been putting so much pressure on the natural systems and all those aspects of nature that we take for granted.”
He added: “Obviously I try to be as optimistic as possible, but sometimes you think that - do we really have to face catastrophes and chaos before we understand that real action needs to be taken? The difficulty with all that, is that by the time you try to take the action, it’s already too late.”
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