Members of the Zelena Akcija ("Green Action") environmentalist group, staged a protest in front of the government building in Zagreb on Thursday, calling on the government to "urgently adopt" a five-year action plan to implement its proclaimed strategy to adapt to climate change.

Head of the group, Luka Tomac, said that Croatia’s Climate Change Adaptation Strategy was adopted in 2017, and that the action plan that should define concrete measures, deadlines and financing is “almost three years late,” while at the same time “we are witnessing an increasing number of extreme weather conditions and natural disasters.”

The group made a petition and collected signatures over the past two weeks for a formal appeal intended to be handed over to the government, with “hundreds of Croatians” joining the call for a more responsible approach to climate crisis, Tomac told reporters.

Tomac listed some of this year’s “environmental disasters” in Croatia, for example, the unusually large rainfall in Rijeka in September, a huge wildfire that broke out on the outskirts of Pula, and the wildfires near the cities of Sibenik and Drnis.

“These all hint at what awaits us in the future, yet we are not yet prepared on a systemic level to respond to these problems, even though the alarm has been ringing for the last 20 years,” Hina quoted Tomac as saying.

Tomac was asked what he expected the Prime Minister, Andrej Plenkovic, and his government to do at the upcoming COP27 climate change conference in Egypt.

“We expect a more ambitious deadline for abandoning coal as a fuel. The Prime Minister announced in Glasgow (last year) that this would happen by 2033, but there’s no reason for it not to happen much earlier, because we have been importing coal for many years,” said Tomac.

“We don’t expect a lot from the government, but we still hope that Croatia and Plenkovic will recognize the climate crisis not only as a threat but also as an opportunity to transform society,” Tomac said.