Monaco’s Prince Albert II calls for leadership on climate

On a visit to Toronto, Monaco’s reigning monarch says Canada has major role to play in greenhouse gas reductions

Theglobeandmail.com
Sept. 10, 2015
By Ivan Semeniuk

Prince Albert II of Monaco has a message for Canada’s federal leaders and the role that one of them will play in steering the nation’s environmental and climate policies after the next election: The world can’t wait any longer for concerted action on climate change.

“We are faced with an incredible challenge to curb our greenhouse-gas emissions around the globe,” he said. “Everyone has to realize this and come to terms with this.”

Monaco’s reigning monarch has used his wealth and influence, including a seat at the United Nations, to encourage world leaders to work together on climate change. With international climate talks scheduled to take place in Paris later this year, he added, Canada has an important role to play because its territory encompasses such a large share of the Arctic, one of the world’s most climate-sensitive regions.

Prince Albert II was in Toronto this week in support of Students on Ice, a Canadian-based program that yearly takes high school and university students on ship-based expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic. He is honorary chair of the program’s board, which met on Wednesday, and has long been an advocate for research and conservation efforts in the world’s polar regions and the oceans – including parts of the global ecosystem that are far removed from the tiny Mediterranean principality but of common concern to the entire planet.

The Prince, who in 2006 became the first head of state to visit the North Pole while in office, said his personal interest in the Students on Ice program has deep roots. “I have a family heritage,” he said, noting that his great-great-grandfather, Albert I, was a pioneer of oceanography and the scientific exploration of the Arctic. The ancestral Albert was also an early proponent of setting aside swaths of wilderness as nature reserves.

Fred Roots, another long-time supporter of the program, was on hand for the board meeting. Now 93, Dr. Roots was the senior geologist in the international scientific study of Antarctica and later established Canada’s Polar Continental Shelf project to help assess the nature and extent of Canada’s northern ocean territory.

Dr. Roots said he now worries that economic pressures to exploit the North would eventually bring devastation to the region. He said today’s politicians need to take a longer view on the enduring value of the Arctic rather than treat the region as an opportunity for photo ops.

“We’re getting ourselves into a shorter and shorter-term perspective, when really what’s happening is a disintegration of the planetary support system all around us,” he said.

Dr. Roots said the international mix of participants in Students on Ice, which include students from all corners of the globe, was helping to lay the groundwork for a better informed and more collaborative generation of decision-makers around polar and climate related issues.

More than 2,600 students and teachers have now taken part in expeditions to the polar regions as part of Students on Ice.

“It’s the best classroom in the world,” said Geoff Green, founder and executive director of the program. “The expeditions really give the students a profound hands-on experience to expand their knowledge of the changing circumpolar world.”

Prince Albert II said that when Students on Ice began in 2000, climate change was barely mentioned. But it is now an integral focus of the program, in part because the rapid transformation of the polar regions due to climate change is now becoming so readily apparent.
Also in attendance at the Toronto meeting was Don Walsh, who in 1960 was part of the two-man team that first reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on Earth’s surface.