Portugal’s misnamed Minister for the Environment and Climate Action, João Matos Fernandes, recently approved a 15-hectare photovoltaic park that requires the destruction of 1,079 mature and productive cork oaks.

So much aggression across the world is making it increasingly difficult to focus even here in peaceful Portugal on the biggest threat of all to the future of humanity: climate change.

In 2007 SWEDUTECH started, a response to readers of my columns, lectures books, in 4 languages,. At first it was quarterly, then 5 or 6 issues a year, with articles by engineers, businessmen and scientists.

Antonio Guterres, former prime minister of Portugal, now secretary-general of the United Nations, is likely to be one of the most articulate and passionate advocates for urgent action at the gathering of world leaders in Glasgow for the COP26 summit on climate change.

If the sea invades coastal areas, floods start to be recurrent, storms form at a speed never seen before, droughts impede agriculture, global warming causes water shortages, heat waves become the norm, new diseases appear and animals and plants disappear. What could happen?

Portugal has had a shared language and close social ties with Brazil since it discovered and started colonising this huge South American country five centuries ago, but it now finds itself in danger of suffering an environmental catastrophe, partly because of the on-going destruction of the Amazon rainforest more than 4,500 kilometres away.  

So far, it’s been a savage summer with deadly wildfires, storms and flash floods around the world. Hundreds of wildfires in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey have been another reminder, as if one were needed, that the climate is changing.

Climate change and global warming are monumental problems that are threatening the existence of human civilization. Across the globe, many regions have been experiencing a spate of extreme weather events, including cyclones, blizzards, heatwaves, and forest fires. The severity and frequency of such events have also escalated.