 Calls have gone out for action to fight climate change after Monday's DIA report by a UN science panel. An activist Greta Thunberg says she plans to go to this year's global climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland after all. The major UN conference will test countries' ambition to limit global warming. And a landmark scientific report on Monday warned it was dangerously close to escalating beyond the limits countries agreed on. The fact that 2021 is currently projected to be the year with the second highest annual emission rise ever. That's not something that if you read like newspapers today it seems like people are doing something, countries are presenting net zero targets like decades into the future and we are taking action. That's not really the case that if you look at the reality. So we need to, that's what we need to be talking about. Of course also talking about the people who are suffering from the consequences today. But the only way that we can prevent these symptoms from happening is to actually go to the root cause. That's what to do. It doesn't say you have to do this and then you have to do this. It doesn't provide us with such solutions or tell us that you need to do this. And that's up for us. We are the ones who need to take the decisions and we are the ones who need to be brave and ask the difficult questions to ourselves. Like what do we value? Are we ready to take action to ensure future and present living conditions? So I hope that this can be a wake up call and that it really gives perspective and that it once again can be a reminder that the climate crisis has not gone away. It's only escalating and it's only growing more intense by the hour. And joining us live from Boston in the United States of America is Rachel Kites. She's the Dean of the Fletcher School of Tufts University. Thank you very much for joining us Rachel. It's nice to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Great. It's very interesting that you know what's happening around us is very serious but unfortunately a lot of people do not necessarily understand or even agree that there's anything like climate change. How do you deal with people not knowing or embracing or understanding what climate change really is? Well it's a good point. For 40 years now the science has been warning us that this is happening. It's going to happen sooner. It's coming faster than we predict and here we have with this report after 40 years unequivocal consensus amongst thousands and thousands of scientists pulling together all kinds of different ways of assessing the science that we are causing this problem, that if we stop emitting harmful carbon pollution into the atmosphere we can actually slow and stop warming. That's something that they haven't said before and therefore we need to do something about it. So I think with fires and droughts the impacts that's having on food, the impact that's having on people moving having to be forcibly displaced around the world that more and more and more we can see we're living right in the middle of it now. You talk to any farmer in any village in any country in the world they'll tell you that the climate is changing and so now we need the political leadership to act in response to the science. Well I mean it's clear that in Nigeria we're really backwards when it comes to you know dealing with climate change and like I said for a lot of people they still feel that it's an act of God or you know the flooding is you know a sort of force of nature of sorts but then I was just saying to someone earlier today we still are not recycling as much as we should, we're still not clearing our energies, we're not we're emitting all kinds of harmful substances into the atmosphere and so what how much education is out there for countries that are not like the US or the UK, I mean even the UK still struggling with some emissions but countries like Nigeria and the rest of the world who do not have the kind of information that everybody else has what form of education is out there for people to embrace this because it's becoming more realistic than we used to think of it. Well here's one way to think about it for anybody watching who thinks that maybe this is just you know God and outside of our control is that we've always had droughts, we've always had floods, we've always had extreme weather events but the human impact is that we're now having them more frequently and when they come they are more intense so the heat is getting hotter, the rains are getting more intense in shorter periods of time and that is us the science is saying that's us that's human beings that's humanity so we're making the climate which has always varied much much more dangerous and that's the education that I think is needed together with well so then what can we do and the scientific report doesn't tell us what to do but it clearly points to the things that we know already one we have to just cut emissions two especially in the next decade cut methane well for Nigeria methane emissions out of the gas infrastructure that the country has anything that can limit that will make the world a safer place we need to protect nature we need nature to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere so every time we destroy a forest it makes that less likely so we need to stop deforestation now these are things that we've known that we need to do we now just need to do them urgently. Interesting there is I mean you mentioned something that's really interesting which is deforestation it's a big problem here most of the farmers seem to you know do some form of bush boiling before they start planting season which has also resulted to wildfires but let's come back to the issue of us realizing that we all have a role to play in dealing with the issues in Nigeria where we started having our flash floods and the rains are here it's rainy season and so the flooding is everywhere of course the water levels are going to also go up for the United States and other countries there seems to be a climate agreement of sorts I do not know how many African countries are signatories to that agreement. So every country agreed to the Paris climate agreement in 2015 including every African country and then the United States stepped out of the agreement and stepped back in again with a change in administrations from President Obama to Trump and then to Biden so every country is in every country needs to file a report with the UN every few years saying how it's going to act for its own economy for its own people to take more ambitious action and the Nigerian government has filed its report with the UN this summer. I think this vote we should be very clear the burden of responsibility is on the highly polluting countries so the first order of business is that the United States the European Union China Japan the industrialized the G20 countries that they really have to come with much more ambitious plans to cut their emissions and to provide financing to help other countries cut their emissions and move on to a greener pathway but every African country signed and in fact Africa has constantly African countries have constantly pushed countries to be more ambitious and when we all meet in November at the next climate talks it will be Africa's voice which will be important because there needs to be financial flows into the economies of Africa so that they can grow greener we have to be able to help African farmers adapt to this warmer and more intense weather environment that we have and we have to find lots of exciting jobs for the young Africans that have a future ahead of them a future ahead of them new technologies that use less fuel the renewable energy possibilities that the African continent has so this isn't necessarily doom and gloom there's huge opportunity there and Africa has to demand that other countries take their responsibilities and act quickly. One last question as much as you know we appreciate the fact that there are green cars this green energy um alternative sources of energy we're beginning to um you know have access to them in Nigeria we're beginning to look at those alternatives but they're very expensive for the average person and don't forget that the the lowest person in Nigeria leaves below a dollar per day so if we're incorporating this green energy you know protecting our biodiversity keeping on tapped rains forests the way they are people still need to use kerosene for their stoves because that's what they can afford there are people who need to turn on their generators because we do not have 24 hours power in Nigeria um so do you see this going away anytime soon because it's very difficult to um try to talk that kind of person out of using those things because they cannot afford other alternative sources of energy. No absolutely so every Nigerian should be able to access clean affordable and reliable energy just like every other African like everybody else all around the world and we can't today we have about 700 million people around the world that don't have access to that kind that kind of energy and so uh the good news is that renewable energy uh is actually cheaper than fossil fuel energy in most places in the world and what we have to do is put a policy environment in place which means that the investment flows into greener energy rather than into uh into polluting energy and the secretary general of the united nations called today for an end to fossil fuel subsidies that are harmful you can take those subsidies and apply them to people so that people have cash in their hands so that they can buy the clean affordable energy that they want including alternatives to kerosene for cooking um and so these are we call it a transition because you can't just stop one way of creating energy one day and start another the next day this is a transition weaning ourselves off uh fossil fuels weaning ourselves off the emissions that come from fossil fuels and exploiting the the wind the solar the geothermal the hydropower and then putting carbon capture on any remaining gas infrastructure this is the way that Africa can can grow and all of the evidence is that it could grow very green and very fast and very cheaply but it's going to take political leaders to grasp that opportunity and demand that investment flow into into the continent in order to pack them up well uh Rachel Kite is the dean of Fletcher School at Tufts University in Boston thank you so much for speaking with us we appreciate it thank you hello hope you enjoyed the news please do subscribe to our youtube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates