Bike rally demands urgent climate action by world leaders

A group of fishing community members and rights activists on Sunday morning organised a bike rally at Sea View to push world leaders to take bold actions to fight climate change at the upcoming United Nations (UN) climate summit in Glasgow.

The event was organised by the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum in connection with similar cycling events held simultaneously in cities of Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh and Nepal ahead of the climate change summit.

PFF Secretary General Saeed Baloch said the main purpose of the rally was to amplify the demands for urgent immediate actions and more ambitious and fair targets. “We only have this decade left before the goal of keeping global temperature’s rise to under 1.5 degrees becomes unreachable. A huge part of the solution is the swift and just transition away from fossil fuel energy,” he said.

Baloch said it was deplorable and alarming that governments of wealthy countries were forcing the UN to downplay the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recommendation to shift rapidly away from fossil fuels to limit climate change.

The report provides new estimates of the chances of crossing the global warming level of 1.5°C in the next decades and suggests that unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting the warming to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach.

PFF Senior Vice Chairperson Fatima Majeed said global temperature was rising day by day and the rate of warming had been increasing. “We are racing against the clock now. Fishing communities are suffering from the climate crisis and our suffering is further compounded by the socioeconomic scourges of the pandemic. We are rightly demanding climate justice from world leaders,” she added.

Lidy Nacpil, coordinator of the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD) who spoke to the rally’s participants online, said the climate campaigners in the region and all over the world were holding a number of coordinated actions to have their demands accepted in the climate summit to be held between October 31 and November 12 in Glasgow, Scotland.

She asserted that the climate activists wanted to deliver a strong message that to ensure a just, safe and resilient future for everyone, the summit must prioritise the people, not the interests of wealthy nations and big businesses.

She said that people and communities from developing countries suffered disproportionately from the adverse effects of climate change but their calls and demands were not highlighted in the UN climate talks.

In 2009, the developed countries had pledged to raise $100 billion a year for climate finance and reiterated that pledge in 2015 as the minimum commitment. “To date, this $100 billion a year has not yet been achieved, and this amount in fact is very short of what they should be paying,” said Nacpil.