"96 months left" before it may be too late. Earth on brink of environment disaster, Prince Charles warns The Daily Telegraph Published: July 09, 2009, 22:46 London: Nature, the world's biggest bank, could fail, the Prince of Wales has said in an apocalyptic warning that Earth is on the brink of environmental disaster. Giving this year's Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC Television, the Prince said the next generation would face a "living hell" if governments did not urgently tackle climate change and stop plundering the planet's resources. "In failing the Earth, we are failing humanity," the Prince said, drawing parallels with the global financial crisis. "Just as our banking sector is struggling with its debts ... so nature's life-support systems are failing to cope with the debts we have built up there too. "If we don't face up to this, then nature, the biggest bank of all, could go bust. And no amount of quantitative easing will revive it." He highlighted that the dual challenge of an economic system with "enormous shortcomings, and an environmental crisis of climate change" threatened to "engulf us all". "We need urgently to look deeply into ourselves and at the way we perceive the world and our relationship with it. "If only because, surely, we all want to bequeath to our children and our grandchildren something other than the living hell of the nightmare that for so many of us now looms on the horizon," he added. The Prince re-emphasised the urgent need for action, saying there were "96 months left" before it may be too late to reverse the impact of climate change.