As international public concern over the increasingly dire climate crisis grows, most notably among the world’s youth, a key United Nations climate change conference kicks off in Madrid on Monday.
For Japan, the conference will be used as an opportunity to promote cutting-edge environmental technologies and explain its reasons for continuing to rely on fossil fuel energy, including coal, in the coming years even as calls domestically and abroad to stop all use of coal grow stronger.
The annual meeting of U.N. delegates to discuss ways to reduce greenhouse gases takes place just days after a worldwide climate strike march by the youth-led movement Fridays for Future at 3,000 different locations worldwide Friday, which called for stronger, quicker measures to deal with the climate change.
In Japan, more than 2,000 people across 25 prefectures participated, leaders of the marches estimated.
Japan suffers a lot from natural disasters, and we’ve recently seen an increase in the number of large-scale typhoons, said Masamichi Kobayashi, a Kansai University student and leader of the Osaka chapter of Fridays for Future, the worldwide movement launched by Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg in 2018.
This is a sign of the climate crisis we’re in, and the purpose of the Nov. 29 march is to get more people to realize how global warming is leading to severe weather patterns and damage in Japan and around the world, he told reporters a few days before the march.
THE JAPAN TIMES LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.