GREENPEACE CALLS FOR URGENT ACTIONS BY GOVERNMENT OF BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA TO FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE IN MIDDLE OF UNBEARABLE HEAT WAVES

SARAJEVO, JULY 16 (ONASA) – For more than a week, we have been witnessing unbearable heat approaching 40 degrees Celsius, which meteorologists call heat waves.
Given that they are becoming more common and lasting longer across the country, they are becoming a more permanent reality, rather than a passing affliction.
On Tuesday, Greenpeace activists sent a message from the rooftops in Sarajevo with a symbolic prop, which relates fossil fuels and current heat.
They called on the Government to include mitigating climate change and its consequences among its priorities.
According to the information we received from FHMZ, the current heat wave in Bosnia and Herzegovina began on Monday, July 8 in the Adriatic, and on Tuesday, July 9, in other parts of the country.
Its duration is expected in inland areas until the end of the week, when less warm air is likely to reach our regions.
On the Adriatic, especially in Dalmatia, it will probably continue even longer.
Until now, the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina has mostly declaratively raised climate change as a problem on the global political stage.
For example, last week the Chairman of the Council of Ministers Denis Zvizdić informed the Executive Vice President of the European Commission Maroš Šefčovič about the Council’s priorities, and he placed the green transition at the top.
At the same time, his Government supports the expansion of the LNG terminal and other gas infrastructure, projects worth hundreds of millions of euros.
The fossil industry is the biggest generator of climate change and it is high time to put the well-being and health of the people before the profits of fossil companies.
– The fossil industry makes extra profits and plans to build a new infrastructure that will cement us into the fossil age, the merciless consequences of which we are already feeling on our own skin. For decades, the fossil industry knows full well that it bears the greatest responsibility for the climate crisis, but it deliberately hides the truth and tries to discredit scientific evidence, so as not to continue unhindered with the dirty business that brings it enormous profits. Fossil companies deny their responsibility and do not pay any damages, and the costs and consequences are borne by citizens and society – all of us – pointed out Petra Andrić, program manager of Greenpeace in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
While oil and gas companies earn about US$2.8 billion on average every day for the past 50 years, the most exposed communities and people suffer losses caused by heat waves, record floods, storms, hail, wildfires, droughts that destroy homes and people’s health, and related lives. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, farmers, the elderly and sick population suffer damage with an increased number of medical interventions, but also the youngest and the most active, so the start of the school year has already been postponed.
The sea temperature reaches about thirty degrees in July, and we were also caught by a wave of warm, tropical nights, when the lowest temperature is 20 or more degrees, which is why many sleep under air conditioners.
– We call on the Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina to take the fight against climate change as a real priority and move from words to actions. Instead of new fossil projects, all new investments should be focused on energy efficiency and renewable energy sources, especially solar energy, for which we have enormous potential in Bosnia and Herzegovina – concluded Andrić. (end)