Climate inaction should be seen as crime against humanity

The huge crowd turnout at the "Claim the Climate" march in Brussels on a wet Sunday afternoon came as a big surprise to me because the Belgian capital has a population of just a little more than 1 million.

The Cinquantenaire Park, where the protesters finally gathered, was packed with people of all ages, worried about their own future and that of their children and grandchildren. Local media estimated about 70,000 people attended the march.

In an awakening report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in October, the world's top climate scientists warned that there is only a dozen years left to keep global temperature rise to within 1.5C - beyond which each 0.5C increase will significantly worsen the risks of droughts, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people on the planet. The scientists called for urgent and unprecedented changes to reach the climate target.