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A mother has told how she will miss her daughter's wedding to join an environmental protest.

Mary Smail will be taking part in an Extinction Rebellion demonstration on Wednesday afternoon to push for Derby City Council to take more action to prevent climate change, rather than attending her daughter's wedding.

She said: "It's not that I want to miss it. Like everyone else, I'd rather be there eating and drinking with my family. It would be inappropriate to be sitting and drinking when there's an opportunity to confront politicians about this.

"Every council should have this at the top of their agenda because our survival depends on it. The council themselves declared an emergency but there is no sense of urgency."

The mother-of-four from Ashbourne said: "An emergency is an emergency. If your house was on fire you wouldn't sit around waiting for it to get worse. I think it's an inconvenient truth to tell people their life has to drastically change now.

(Image: Mary Smail)

"People want to go home from work and watch the telly and think everything is fine when it's not. Within five or ten years we will see shortages of foods that we import.

"Things are only going to get worse, the longer we leave it the worse it will be."

She has suggested a carbon tax to "make people think about how much they consume" and has herself committed to using public transport and second hand clothes to reduce her impact on the environment.

Ms Smail claims that her daughter supports her decision to attend the protest rather than the wedding.

She said: "I've brought my daughter up with the right ideas about the environment. She's seen the effects of climate change while working with refugees in London.

"She's on the same pulse as me."

(Image: Derby Telegraph)

The Met Office has reported that "by the end of the 21st century, all areas of the UK are projected to be warmer" though has stopped short of predicting food shortages.

NATO however, has said food and water shortages in the Middle East and other regions are possible while the World Economic Forum said, citing a 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, that "every decade of warming that happens decreases the amount of food the world can produce by 2%".

Flooding and extreme weather could also effect food production. The UK has reduced carbon emissions by 40% since 1990 and ratified the Paris climate agreement in 2016 which sets targets for countries to reduce their environmental impact.

Derby City Council declared a climate emergency in May 2019 and created a strategy to solve the problem which included "energy efficient homes" a "renewable energy supply" while maintaining "a thriving sustainable economy".

Extinction Rebellion maintains that not enough has been done, a spokesman said: "Staggeringly, the council have yet to even hold a meeting to plan what action to take concerning this emergency. Two months have passed. Words are not enough, action must be taken.

"The need to act is urgent. Derby, like the rest of the world, is in the grip of a climate and ecological emergency. We must act now to stave off catastrophic climate collapse."

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Extinction Rebellion was formed in October last year to fight what it calls "an unprecedented global emergency" that will leave life on Earth "in crisis".

They hope to prevent "a mass extinction of our own making".

The Derby branch of the national group will protest outside Derby City Council on Wednesday, July 24, from 5pm.