Prince Charles has urged business leaders to take action on climate change after watching ‘heartbreaking’ wildfires rip through his late father’s country of birth.

The future king has made a striking public intervention to warn ‘we have been busily testing our world to destruction and have left everything to the last minute’.

He revealed it had been ‘truly the stuff of nightmares’ to watch out of control fires spread in Greece, where Prince Philip was born, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. 

Writing in the Daily Mail, Prince Charles said the Cop26 summit in Glasgow in November presented those in power with an opportunity to avoid a rise in extreme weather events in the future.

He wrote: ‘We now have no alternative – we have to do all we possibly can in the short time left to us to avoid the enormous climate catastrophe that has already begun to show its face in the most terrifying ways, most recently in the Mediterranean.

‘World leaders, working closely with the private sector, have the power to make the difference. Cop26 affords them an opportunity to do so before it is finally too late.’

He said the world has ‘been in the last chance saloon for too long already’ and, without action, ‘the world as we know it is done for’.

Charles has repeatedly called on the private sector to support his Magna Carta-style charter launched in January.

The pledge, called the Terra Carta, aims to safeguard the planet by convincing firms to commit to sustainability and invest 10 billion dollars (£7.3 billion) in ‘natural capital’.

Around 400 firms have joined up so far but the prince said greater cooperation between governments and private businesses is needed.

He called the upcoming climate change summit ‘crucially important for our very survival’.

Ahead of the G7 summit in Cornwall in June, Prime Minister Boris Johnson threw his support behind Charles’s ‘Coalition of the Willing’.

The group of chief executives presented initiatives to G7 leaders in Cornwall to help drive the change to a sustainable world.

The leaders gathered at the summit committed to support a ‘green revolution’ that creates jobs, cuts emissions and seeks to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C.

They also promised to increase the amount of climate finance on offer to developing countries.

Earlier this month, Prince Charles made a donation to the Hellenic Red Cross (HRC) to support the organisation’s humanitarian response to wildfires in Greece, which along with Italy and Turkey.

Greece’s prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has described the fires as the greatest ecological disaster his country has witnessed in decades.

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