On the ocassion of the World Environmental Day, an event organised under the leadership of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) we invite secondary schools to participate in the LIQUIDICE online lesson! The theme of this year’s edition is “A Global Call for Climate Action”.
Title: Climate change, a problem that is not going away
Date & place: 3 June 2026, 9:00-9:45, online
Description: With world events taking attention away from the ever-present threat of climate change, we need to remember the threat is still there. Until recently the Pentagon defined climate change as a “threat multiplier”; with sea ice retreating, the Arctic Ocean is more accessible than ever, a fact that was probably behind the US President’s obsession with Greenland and the threats he made. This is a call to remember climate change exists and is already affecting us in many ways.
Expert: Warren Raymond Lee Cairns – an analytical chemist specialised in trace elemental analysis. His work is to determine the role, fate and toxic effects of heavy metals in the environment and their impact on humanity. All of these parameters are being heavily affected by climate change, so he is a reluctant climate scientist because he has had to study climate change to understand the results he is seeing.
He has participated in 3 Antarctic Expeditions to Concordia Station and Mario Zucchelli Station. He is the Italian Observer on the POPs and Mercury Expert Groups of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program as well as on the Arctic Contaminants Action Program of the Arctic Council.
He has co-authored over 100 publications and he is the coordinator for the Atomic Spectrometry Updates Environmental Analysis review of the Royal Society of Chemistry.