Nations must act now

My nine-year-old daughter Emma and I were reading a book about Greta Thunberg the other night. Since I always emphasize the importance of education to her, she was puzzled at why Greta would miss school to advocate for climate change. I told her that the issue probably meant more to Greta than attending school because it threatened our very existence. I said, Greta is also frustrated that the problem is getting worse every year but our world leaders are not taking the commensurate steps to solve the problem. Greta’s frustration is evident when she said, “Adults keep saying, ‘we owe it to the young people, to give them hope,’ but I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”

We are far from acting like the house is on fire.

On April 22, 2025, we celebrate Earth Day for the 55th year. Advocates around the world have used Earth Day to push the world’s nations to take a long view and unite in taking the steps to reverse the damage we have done to our environment. In the years since, there have been some successes – at least on paper – with the passage of pro-environmental laws and international agreements (such as the Paris Climate Agreement), as well as a marked increase in awareness regarding climate concerns.

And yet, for all that, here we are in 2025 and find the state of our planet more perilous than ever.

Each year that passes is the new “warmest year on record,” with 2023 being the warmest yet. Across the board, climate change indicators have breached record levels:

• In 2024, oceans reached their highest level in 30 years, with a rate of global sea level rise increasing around 35 percent higher than expected;

• Glaciers and ice sheets, which hold around 70 percent of the world’s fresh water, experienced their greatest water loss in over 50 years in 2023 – the glaciers in Switzerland lost 10 percent of their total mass just between 2022 and 2023 (one reason that 2025 was declared International Year of the Glaciers);

• In 2023, Antarctic sea ice – which helps shield glaciers from erosion – was the smallest amount ever measured since 1979 (when annual measurements began), with almost a million square miles of ice missing.

• Nearly one third of the global ocean was suffering from a marine heatwave on any given day of 2023.

The numbers are staggeringly catastrophic, and every year advocates and scientists use events like Earth Day to remind the world that change is urgently needed. And every year, it seems that the general populace becomes more and more numb to the numbers, and most world leaders continue to steadfastly ignore them.

Any world leader who at this point refuses to prioritize climate change is acting out of willful ignorance, is being deliberately misled or has simply decided that stopping climate change is not in their interests. Approximately 97 percent of publishing climate scientists agree on the existence and cause of climate change. There is no longer any controversy surrounding the existence of climate change, nor its danger to human life as a whole.

At some level – whether democratically elected or otherwise – every world leader is accountable to their people. And it is the people of the nations who we must reach with the urgency of our message, of the need for action.

Strides have been made in introducing the language and concepts of climate change to the young. Climate literacy has become a core feature in many school curriculums, and over the years international networks have sprung up to facilitate the spread of climate data and information.

Knowing the data, however, by itself, is nowhere near enough. The key to saving the planet has always been climate action, communal action. And in order to move people to action, it is essential that people care. We must find a way to convey information about climate change in a way that moves the hearts of people.

The way to do that is not necessarily going to be by unloading even more information – those of us who are swayed by data have long since been moved to action. We need to find a way to speak to others at an emotional level, to find out what they care about and how climate change will affect that. We have to find ways to make it personal, relevant and immediate to people in all walks of life – just as COVID was during the height of the pandemic. It was easier for the community to demand action then, because we could truly feel the effects of COVID. This, more than any amount of scientific briefings, is what led the people to clamor for action, what led the governments of the world to ultimately take action.

Climate change does not feel like such an immediate threat – but with every passing year, that changes.

For those of us here in the Philippines, the most immediate danger posed by climate change is that of extreme weather such as typhoons. While the exact effects are difficult to assess, warmer oceans do allow storms to pick up more energy and result in higher wind speeds; meanwhile, warmer air can hold more moisture which can lead to more intense rainfall. It’s no coincidence that as the Earth has gotten warmer, we have been hit by an increasing number of disastrous storms.

But extreme weather of all kinds becomes more likely with climate change, and that swings both ways – droughts may become more likely as well, affecting crops, water and electricity generation. And looming in the future, the rise in sea level that comes from all those melted glaciers will hit an archipelagic nation like ours particularly hard.

We must continue to talk about climate change. But we must do so in a targeted, emotion-driven manner to move people to action, to compel states to act.

What moves the heart can move a nation. And if we are to save our planet, save ourselves – nations must act now. We must, as Greta said, “act like the house is on fire.”