• WHO can fail to be proud of the effort Islington citizens have shown helping one another during this awful time.

Clapping our NHS, Islington’s refuse collectors and other vital workers in the evenings, taking one another food parcels and virtually all of us keeping two metres apart on our daily exercise.

Even the current British government (a bit too late) joined other world governments following expert advice in spending money on rapid hospital-building and financial compensation, setting up the current lockdown and giving much-needed health advice.

So listening to experts and acting internationally can save lives when governments want it to, and there will be public support.

The consensus of experts now agrees that unchecked global warming will lead to even more mass-scale death from all sorts of related causes (civil breakdown, mass migration, water shortage and so on) though obviously how many and when remains a matter of debate.

People are already dying in tens of thousands in Bangladesh, for example, when they migrate inland in thousands from the sea delta to Dacca where there is no room.

As one US website says: “an epidemic modelling group said that, in the absence of federal and individual measures, COVID-19 could kill 2.2 million people in the US… We’re currently on track to surpass 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) of warming.

“Some studies show the world is on course for more than 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) of warming… At 2 degrees C, 37 per cent of the world will be exposed to heat waves – 420 million more people. At 2 degrees C of warming, 61 million people more will be exposed to severe drought than if we kept warming to 1.5 degrees C.

“These are just a fraction of the findings in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2019 special report on global warming…” (grist.org/ climate/lessons-from-coronavirus-and-climate-change-dont-be-deceived-by-small-numbers/).

A year ago Islington declared a climate emergency. Let us hope that the one good thing that comes out of this current situation is that world governments will listen to scientific experts and wake up to their responsibilities and act to overcome global warming.

CLLR DAVE POYSER
Chair, Environment and Regeneration Committee