As Swiss glaciers melt at alarming rate, voters go to polls over ambitious plans to tackle climate change - Sky News
As Swiss glaciers melt at alarming rate, voters go to polls over ambitious plans to tackle climate change | Climate News | Sky News
As Swiss glaciers melt at alarming rate, voters go to polls over ambitious plans to tackle climate change
The Swiss population will head to the polls today to vote on the bill - which requires the country to achieve "net zero" emissions by 2050 - but critics say the commitment will lead to a hike in electricity prices.
Sunday 18 June 2023 11:32, UK
A referendum is being held in Switzerland to decide on a climate bill aimed at introducing new measures to save the country's melting glaciers.
Swiss voters are heading to the polls after a campaign by scientists and environmentalists argued that the nation's greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced.
Campaigners are backing a government plan that requires Switzerland to achieve "net zero" emissions by 2050, after initially proposing even more ambitious measures.
They argue that the country will be hard hit by global warming and is already seeing the effects of rising temperatures as glaciers melt at an alarming rate.
The plan also sets aside more than 3bn Swiss francs (£2.6bn) to help wean companies and homeowners off fossil fuels.
However, the nationalist Swiss People's Party, which demanded a popular vote on the bill, claims the proposed measures will cause electricity prices to rise.
Projections based on counted votes suggest that 88% of those who took part in the referendum have approved plans to raise the country's business tax to 15%, compared with the current level of 11%.
Meanwhile, 55% appear to have supported the proposed climate law, despite the fact it was rejected in 2021 for being too expensive.
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Swiss glaciers experienced record melting last year - losing more than 6% of their volume.
This shocked scientists, who said a loss of 2% would once have been considered extreme.
Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the Swiss Institute for Technology in Zurich, has posted dramatic snapshots of retreating glaciers and rockslides on social media to highlight the changes taking place in the Alps.
"We need to insist on communicating the urgency of climate action," he wrote on Twitter in May.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.