Dusseldorf Sophie and Silke Backsen have changed German climate policy like hardly anyone. Sophie, 22, made sure in 2021 with her complaint before the Federal Constitutional Court that climate protection is considered a fundamental right. And Silke, 52, took the federal government to court for the first time because it did not protect the climate adequately. Today, Silke Backsen is a member of the Greens parliamentary group in the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament.
It is thanks to mother and daughter that Germany has committed itself to stricter climate protection goals, which are still in the coalition agreement of the traffic light government.
In the new episode of the sustainability podcast Handelsblatt Green, editor Michael Scheppe talks to the two about whether lawsuits save the climate, why many people do not change their behavior even though science has been warning of the consequences of global warming for decades, and whether it is still worth to fight against climate change.
The Backsen family lives on the North Sea island of Pellworm, which is a meter below sea level and could no longer be habitable in a few decades. In the podcast, the renowned climate researcher Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel classifies the consequences of rising sea levels for other regions and why we only have ten years to save the climate.
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More: Can green hydrogen replace our natural gas? The consequences of global warming are becoming more and more visible – and the time to save the climate is becoming increasingly scarce. What else can citizens do?