The department store’s cultural and leisure space hosted the launch of the new book by the winner of the 2021 Rei Jaume I Prize for Environmental Protection and a member of the CSIC, who spoke at length about the future of the planet, the challenges we will face and some of the motivations for bringing about change.

“The book came about after a few years of enduring many ups and downs, such as the pandemic and everything that has happened with climate change. It is unacceptable that humankind should be incapable of charting a different course and that we allow ourselves to be swept along by our mistakes time and time again,” stated Valladares.

For the CSIC scientist, “science tells us what needs to be done, and from that I distilled this somewhat provocative and concise idea of ‘stumbling blocks’ as things we inflict upon ourselves – obstacles we set for ourselves without anyone forcing us to do so – but which are sometimes inertia, selfishness, hypocrisy, major messes and a refusal to face reality.”

Regarding the recently concluded climate summit, COP28, Valladares states that “solutions such as the agreements reached at this latest climate summit are clearly insufficient. We’ll view them favourably, but they fall well short of the mark. People are calling it a historic summit because the issue of oil is finally being addressed, but we need to step up the pace because climate change is happening very quickly. And just as we would say about climate change, we could say the same about, for example, water use: in many parts of Spain, and indeed across the world in general, there are serious drought problems, and far from using water sensibly, we use it as if it were infinite. And for me, that is a real challenge that demands the best of us. And we won’t bring that out in ourselves unless we add a dose of optimism, if we do not look for examples that might work well, if we do not see how science can help put humanity back on track – and all this requires a, shall we say, proactive attitude to see the positive despite the avalanche of bad news,” emphasised the 2021 PRJ.