By Asitha Jayawardena
We must prepare to face more pandemics in the future if we fail to act on global warming and habitat loss, said Prince Charles in a virtual speech at the One Planet Summit in Paris on 11 January 2021.
The One Planet Summit
At the One Planet Summit, France is mobilising political and business leaders from across the world for action against the erosion of biodiversity. Launched in 2017, this is the third summit with the participation of 121 countries, which act as there’s no Planet B.
The Earth Charter
Launching an ambitious environment project, Prince Charles urged businesses to sign his Terra Carta pledge or Earth Charter, to place the planet first.
“I am making an urgent appeal to leaders, from all sectors and from around the world, to join us in this endeavour, and to give their support to this ‘Terra Carta’ – to bring prosperity into harmony with Nature, People and Planet over the coming decade,” he said.
The Earth Charter aims to raise £7.3 billion in “natural capital” by 2022 with the hope of preserving and restoring the natural world. It will also harness the irreplaceable power of nature while helping reunite people and planet.
“This pandemic will not be the last one unless we are very careful, so that’s why it’s critical to heal the natural world as well as ourselves,” he said.
Like Magna Carta…
Prince Charles said that Magna Carta inspired the belief of the fundamental rights and liberties of the people 800 years ago.
“As we strive to imagine the next 800 years of human progress, the fundamental rights and value of nature must represent a step-change in our ‘future of industry’ and ‘future of economy’ approach,” he said.
Environmental campaigning
At 72, the Prince of Wales celebrated the 50 years of environmental campaigning. When he began speaking about environmental issues in the 1970s, he was considered “completely dotty” because climate change had not impacted as today.
Vaccines for Covid-19
Covid-19 infected Prince Charles in March 2020. Thereafter, his elder son Prince William in April got coronavirus.
Prince of Wales would get the Covid-19 vaccine. His parents, Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, gained the jab in the weekend.
“I think vaccination is critical to ensure we have a way out of this, otherwise it is going to be very difficult,” he said. “Planetary health and nature’s health is intimately linked to our own health.”
Prince William’s Earthshot Prize
The Earth Charter was launched today after the unveiling of another Prize by Prince William in October 2020. The Earthshot Prize was launched as the most prestigious global prize for the environment in history with an amount of £50m in total.
More…
Prince William’s Earthshot Prize: £5m (5 prizes) a year, 10 years until 2030 (£50m in total) https://sustain-blog.com/2020/12/03/prince-williams-earthshot-prize-5m-5-prizes-a-year-10-years-until-2030-50m-in-total/
The One Planet Summit https://www.oneplanetsummit.fr/en
Sustain 
For many years Prince Charles was labelled by the media and many others as being eccentric/dotty if only they had listened then and maybe we would not be where we are now …
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You are right, Carol. In the 1970s, he started talking about environmental issues but nobody listened to him. Now, it is too late!
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I do hope not the natural, world does have a marvelous capacity to bounce back and I have to hope that those that can see sense and do it quickly..
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👍
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Whether it’s Europe’s hottest year on record, unprecedented wildfires in California/Cascadia, unprecedented stalling hurricanes, off-the-chart poor-air advisories, the mass deforestation and incineration of the Amazonian rainforest (home to a third of all known terrestrial plant, animal and insect species), record-breaking flooding in Europe, single-use plastics clogging life-bearing waters, a B.C. (2019) midsummer’s snowfall, the gradually dying endangered whale species or geologically invasive/destructive fracking or a myriad of other categories of large-scale toxic pollutant emissions and dumps—there’s discouragingly insufficient political courage/will to sufficiently address the cause-and-effect of manmade global warming and climate change.
(And, yes, I very much want to be proven wrong!)
To me, our existence has for too long been analogous to a cafeteria lineup consisting of diversely societally represented people, all adamantly arguing over which identifiable traditionally marginalized person should be at the front and, conversely, at the back of the line. Many of them further fight over to whom amongst them should go the last piece of quality pie and how much should they have to pay for it—all the while the interstellar spaceship on which they’re all permanently confined, owned and operated by (besides the most wealthy) the fossil fuel industry, is on fire and toxifying at locations not normally investigated.
The latter is allowed to occur, because blue-shirted liberals and red-hatted conservatives are preoccupied loudly blasting each other for their politics and beliefs thus distracting attention from big business’s moral and ethical corruption, where it should be focused.
Meanwhile, mindless arguments are made, and stupid-sounding catchphrases are repeated, like “It’s the economy, stupid!”
In short, we’re distracting ourselves from our own burning and heavily polluting of our sole spaceship, Earth.
What is sufficiently universal, however, is that the laborers are simply too exhausted and preoccupied with just barely feeding and housing their families on a substandard, if not below the poverty line, income to criticize the former for the great damage it’s doing to our planet’s natural environment and therefore our health, particularly when that damage may not be immediately observable.
(Frank Sterle Jr.)
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Thank you very much for this!
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I hope the money lovers will change their ways one day
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Yes. The way it is going, they have to.
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