French President Emmanuel Macron has promised an extra €15 billion to fight the climate crisis over the next two years, and a referendum on whether to introduce the crime of “ecocide” for damage to the environment, reports The Guardian. Macron made the announcement at a meeting with members of the Citizens’ Commission for the Climate — a committee of 150 randomly chosen French people.
A new United Nations report warns that more diseases that pass from animals to humans, such as COVID-19, are likely to emerge as habitats are ravaged by wildlife exploitation, unsustainable farming practices and climate change, states NPR. “We have intensified agriculture, expanded infrastructure and extracted resources at the expense of our wild spaces,” U.N. Environment Program Executive Director Inger Andersen said. “The science is clear that if we keep exploiting wildlife and destroying our ecosystems, then we can expect to see a steady stream of these diseases jumping from animals to humans in the years ahead.”