Former President Áder opens Planet Budapest 2023 expo

Former President János Áder opened the Planet Budapest 2023 sustainability expo on Wednesday.

Climate change, water crises, diminishing bio-diversity, the exhaustion of arable land and deforestation were “the big, enduring, common stress situations of mankind”, Áder, the event’s founder and chief patron, said in his opening address, adding that the situation was unprecedented. “We must find different forms of adaptation,” he said.

The expo, the largest international sustainability event in central Europe, runs until 1 October.

Read also:

• VIDEO: Corrupt border policemen caught by Hungarian Counter Terrorism Centre
• EUR 1.80/litre for petrol to soon become reality in Hungary – is this Putin’s revenge?

LMP: Hungary ‘is not a climate champion’

“Hungary is not a climate champion,” the opposition LMP party has said in a message to the government, urging more ambitious climate protection targets.

In reaction to a recent speech by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, LMP co-leader Erzsébet Schmuck told a press conference on Wednesday: “This isn’t football where there are winners and champions … our lives are at stake.” The question was, she added, “how much damage there’ll be and how far we can manage the losses”.

Schmuck rejected the prime minister’s statement that Hungary had made progress in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, insisting that while emissions had fallen between 1990 and 2013, they had increased again by 5 percent between 2014 and 2021. In addition, a further increase is expected due to plans of building three gas-fired power plants to serve new battery factories, she added.

Reducing emissions by 40 percent by 2030 from the 1990 baseline was not enough, Schmuck said, and urged a 65 percent target as well as a higher ratio than 21 percent of renewable energy by 2030.

Read also:

• 18+ VIDEO – Hungarian horror slaughterhouse: Rusty saw, bloody floor
• President Novák: Starting a family will save the world

AgMin: Protection of soil, water reserves joint responsibility

The sustainable husbandry of soil and water reserves is key to global food security, the agriculture minister told a meeting of the European Committee on Agriculture of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation in Budapest on Wednesday.

Greeting the meeting, Agriculture Minister István Nagy said that while Hungary was rich in good-quality water, last summer had been plagued by droughts. Preserving water in backwaters and rivers through systematic channelling, reserving water bodies and irrigation is an effective counter-measure against climate change, he said.

Another important factor is quality soil, a key to the production of healthy and high-quality food, Nagy said. Soil improvement and sustainable agriculture are a priority in Hungary, he told the meeting.

FAO’s European Committee on Agriculture is meeting in Budapest on 27-28 September, with the representatives of some 40 states discussing the sustainable use of soil and water in Europe and Central Asia.