Prince William and the Pope join activists to appeal for action on climate change

On Thursday the royal joined forces with David Attenborough to launch a new environmental award, the Earthshot Prize

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, speaking at Countdown Global Launch 2020 on October 10, 2020. AFP

Britain’s Prince William and the Pope, along with other celebrities, politicians and activists, on Saturday appealed for action against climate change in a free live-streamed TED talk series.

“Together, we must protect and restore nature. Clean our air. Revive our oceans. Build a waste-free world and fix our climate. And we must strive to do all of this in a decade,” the Duke of Cambridge said in his talk, given as part of Countdown, TED’s climate initiative.

Pope Francis also joined the royal, activists and other celebrities on the streamed event.

"We are living during a historic moment marked by difficult challenges, as we all know," Pope Francis said while urging people of all faiths to unite to protect Mother Earth.

"The world is shaken by the crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, which highlights yet an even bigger challenge - the socio-environmental crisis."

The Pope said the climate crisis is real and is backed by science, and needs to be urgently confronted in social just ways.

"The Earth must be worked and nursed, cultivated and protected," the Pope said.

"We cannot continue to squeeze it like an orange."

Countdown also focused on ways in which damage to the environment also fuels social and racial injustice.

"Black people breathe the most toxic air relative to the general population, and it is people of color who are most likely to suffer in the climate crisis," said British MP David Lammy.

"It gives all new meaning to the Black Lives Matter slogan 'I can't breathe.'"

Mr Lammy called for climate and social justice leaders to join forces, and for a new international "ecocide" law to criminalise "the most severe actions against nature itself."

Firms that make fortunes from fossil fuels or other greenhouse gas-emitting operations cause damage they don't pay for, while funneling money to politicians who help preserve the status quo, said another speaker, US economist Rebecca Henderson, who called on businesses to step up.

"We let capitalism turn into something monstrous," she said, adding: "It's going to be tough to keep free enterprise alive if most people believe the rich and the white are trashing the planet for their own benefit."

On Thursday, Prince William joined forces with renowned British broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough to launch a new environmental award, the Earthshot Prize, which has grand ambitions to “incentivise change and help to repair our planet over the next 10 years.”

The prize takes its inspiration from the Moonshot challenge that President John F Kennedy set for the US in 1961 to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

Prince William, a long-time climate change campaigner, said the same resources used to tackle the coronavirus pandemic should be devoted to saving the natural world.

The plan envisions five prizes of 1 million pounds ($1.3 million) awarded each year for the next 10 years, providing at least 50 solutions to the world’s greatest environmental problems by 2030.

The prize fund will be provided by the project’s global alliance founding partners, a group which includes the philanthropic bodies of billionaires like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, and Michael Bloomberg.