World Earth Day 2026 – no time to celebrate
22 April is World Earth Day, an event first launched in 1970 by the UN and pioneered by the United Auto Workers Union in the USA. It went global in 1990, the same year that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its first report into Global Warming and ecological decline. That report led to the Kyoto Protocols and the launching of COP a few years later.
Since then, the promise of Earth Day has failed. Aspirations for a sustainable environment cannot be met under capitalism. The constant demand for growth driven by profit maximisation has led to a rapidly heating world. 2024 was the hottest year in over 100,000 years and the scale of warming has outstripped all the climate prediction models.
The UK government knows of the dangers – as all politicians and business leaders do. But they suppress the truth because they cannot escape the logic of their own capitalist system. In October 2025, a national security report into the consequences of climate change was buried by the Starmer government because it was seen as ‘too negative’ (it had to be unearthed through an FOI). The report’s conclusions (drawn up by the Joint Intelligence Committee – not exactly ‘woke climate scientists’) were stark; “ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (irreversible loss of function beyond repair).” The impact on the availability of food and water is clear: “It is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food.” As such it predicts “conflict and military escalation will become more likely, both within and between states, as groups compete for arable land and food and water resources”.
No wonder the politicians and heads of business want this buried. They would rather lie to us than tell us the truth. Because if the people become fully conscious of how little capitalist systems value their lives and survival, there is a danger that we will rise up against them.
We are at the crossroads now between inevitable social collapse and whatever is left of humanity fighting over food and water, or a world where we have ended fossil fuel capitalism and created a sustainable society where our resources are democratically shared.
The collapse of Earth’s ecology is speeding up. But it isn’t too late. What we do over the next few years will be crucial.
That is why we are inviting people to come to Ecosocialism Conference 2026 on 30th May at London South Bank and online (via Zoom) to learn more about the resistance to capitalist barbarism and get organised to build a mass movement that fights for a transition towards a better world for everyone.