Eleven Nobel laureates are set to raise a warning next week in Hong Kong, saying that mankind is living beyond its means and darkening its future.
The Nobel Prize winners will be taking part in a conference from Wednesday through Saturday. That will coincide with the announcement of this year’s recipients.
The laureates will raise a plea for a revolution in how humans live, work and travel.
A 1996 co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Peter Doherty, told AFP that the state of affairs is “catastrophic”. He said that the list of planetary ailments is long and growing. He listed global warming, deforestation, chemical pollution and environmentally-triggered diseases as just some of the ailments affecting the planet.
Next week’s meeting between the eleven prize winners is the fourth in a series of Nobel symposia on the precarious state of the planet. The participants will argue that only by switching to smarter, less greedy use of resources can we avert wrecking the ecosystems on which we depend.