Search icon

Life

16th Jan 2020

David Attenborough says ‘the moment of crisis has come’ in relation to climate change

Rudi Kinsella

Netflix David Attenborough

“As I speak, south east Australia is on fire. Why? Because the temperatures of the Earth are increasing.”

Legendary nature broadcaster David Attenborough has said that “the moment of crisis has come” with regards to society’s need to tackle climate change.

Speaking to the BBC about what we must do to challenge the crisis, Attenborough said: “We have been putting things off for year after year.

“We can no longer prevaricate. We can’t go on saying ‘but there is hope and we’ll leave it till next year’. We have to change.

“And we have to change not by appeals to different kinds of optimism, but to deliberate, compelling life or death decisions.”

Attenborough then singled out China, saying that the country holds great importance in the fight to tackle climate change.

“Where on the biggest scale are these decisions needed to come next? Answer: China.

“If the Chinese come and say ‘Not because we are worried about the world, but for our own reasons, we are going to take major steps to curb our carbon output, because our climate is changing. We are gonna do it’, everyone else would fall in line, one thinks. That would be the big change one could hope would happen.”

The interview followed the announcement that Attenborough’s new documentary David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet will be released in cinemas in April and on Netflix in the spring.

The documentary is already being billed as Attenborough’s “greatest story,” some claim given the volume and quality of his output to date.