Earth Day – Budapest mayor calls for ‘green shift’, greater focus on welfare

Hungary needs to make a “turnaround” and focus its attention on environmental issues and efforts to “ensure opportunities for a decent life”, Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony said on Thursday, marking Earth Day, adding that those efforts should come “before the interests of the financial markets”.

In a video published on Facebook, Karácsony quoted Pope Francis as saying that climate change and the destruction of the environment cannot be effectively combatted unless efforts are made to eliminate poverty and to resolve welfare problems.

“Damaging the environment and the planet as well as conserving huge inequalities between people are not separate sins but different consequences of a single sin,” the mayor said.

Karácsony said he believed in a “novel normalcy, a different state of affairs” after the pandemic and called for more sustainable and more humane policies both in Hungary and globally. In light of the pandemic, systemic changes can no longer be postponed, he said.