The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) has released a report insisting climate change is a bigger danger to humanity than the current Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
IFRC Secretary-General Jagan Chapagain held a press conference this week saying, “Of course, the [coronavirus] is there, it affects our families, our friends, our parents and (…) this is a very, very serious crisis that the world is currently facing.”
He went on to add, “in our view, climate change will have a greater medium- and long-term impact on human life and the Earth,” Paris Match reports.
Since the start of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, around 1.32 million people have died of the virus or of complications caused by it.
“If we are lucky, we will have a vaccine against Covid next year and hopefully in a few years we should be able to manage the impact of Covid-19,” Chapagain said but claimed there was “no vaccine against climate change.”
In the past decade, by comparison, Paris Match states that extreme weather and natural disasters thought to be linked to climate change have led to the deaths of 410,000 people or an average of 41,000 per year over ten years.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), from November 10th to the 16th, there were over 50,000 deaths from the Wuhan coronavirus globally.
The IFRC has called for at least 50 billion dollars to be set aside to meet the adaption needs of 50 developing countries saying, “his amount is paltry in light of the global response to the economic impact of the pandemic.”
The Red Cross statement comes just months after researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) suggested that climate change be listed as a cause of death on death certificates, arguing that deaths from climate change maybe 50 times larger than currently thought.
In August, the Vatican released a document comparing climate change and the coronavirus pandemic saying the virus was, “a harbinger of future crises relating to climate change and the assault on biodiversity.”