Planet Earth is about to fall off a cliff - urgent action required!
If there's no action before 2012, that's
too late. What we do in the next two or three years will determine
our future. This is the defining moment.
These remarks were made by Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the
Head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
during his acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of
the IPCC in 2007. 2,500 scientists from over 80 countries agreed
with this stark assessment of our planet's future when they
assembled in Copenhagen in March this year.
The best science in the world has recently confirmed what the
rest of us have intuitively known for some time - our planet is
accelerating towards a cataclysm the magnitude of which is almost
impossible to imagine. And yet there's a monstrous mismatch between
the sense of urgency the scientists are bringing to the table and
the speed with which governments and businesses are prepared to
take up the challenge.
What's to be done?
Reality check
First, let's quickly review some of the crucial findings
presented in Copenhagen:
- Global temperatures rose by 0.37 degrees Celsius in 2008 - this
is 20 times more than normal
- Melt from Greenland and the Antarctic is now enough to cover
the State of Texas in 6 metres of water every 24 hours
- 350 ppm of CO2 is considered by most scientists to be the
threshold beyond which the dangers of global warming increase.
We're now at 383 ppm and expected to pass 400 ppm within a few
short years
- The Arctic Ocean and melting tundras of Siberia are releasing
millions of tonnes of methane into the atmosphere every day -
methane emits TWENTY times more global green house gases than the
burning of fossil fuels
Or, put more simply, extreme weather events can be used as a
yardstick to measure the effects of global warming on planet Earth
- in 2008 there was an average of one extreme weather event,
somewhere in the world, every day. The number of extreme
weather events has quadrupled since 1987.
Is government action enough?
So what are our governments doing? Most are beginning to take
the situation seriously and are making commitments to reduce carbon
emissions by 80% by 2050. The European governments are promising to
reduce their CO2 emissions to between 20%-40% of 1990 levels by
2020. These commitments are important, but a recent study by MIT
states that if all the governments completely fulfil their current
promises, which essentially are pointed toward reducing carbon
emissions by 80% by 2050, we will have reached over 600 ppm of CO2
by then and global temperatures will have risen at least 4 degrees
Celsius.
The implications of this are frightening. According to the
2006 Stern report, prepared by the former Head of
the IPCC Nicholas Stern, a rise of 4 degrees Celsius would put
upwards of 300 million more people at risk of coastal flooding each
year, there would be a 30-50% reduction in water availability in
southern Africa and the Mediterranean and increased droughts around
the world, agricultural yields would decline by 15%-35% in Africa
alone and the world would face severe food shortages, and 20%-50%
of animal and plant species would face extinction. A 4C
rise would also lead to the loss of 85% of the Amazon
rainforest.
A 5C rise would mean that all our coastal cities would be
threatened by rising sea levels and increases in ocean acidity
would severely disrupt marine ecosystems and fisheries. An increase
of more than 5C - equivalent to the amount of warming that occurred
between the last ice age and today - is, according to the Stern
report, "likely to lead to major disruption and large-scale
movement of population." The report concludes that the effects
would be "catastrophic" and "far outside human experience."
Mobilisation, mobilisation, mobilisation
So what the planet needs is mobilisation on an unprecedented
scale. Being green needs to be at the forefront of humanity's
collective mind - and that means in the forefront of every
individual's mind.
This last remark is an easy one to make. It's one thing for
those of us who live in relatively coddled and affluent societies
to have the leisure to tear our hair out and think about changing
our individual and collective lifestyles - and indeed a tremendous
amount is being done by a large number of people to "do their bit".
It's quite another thing for that part of humanity which labours
under extreme economic hardship to spare the required time and
energy from the basic need to earn a subsistence living. Be that as
it may, if the planet is to be saved then every part of the global
community, and its every system, needs to get engaged. As Jim
Garrison, Founder and President of the State of the World Forum,
the non-profit institution dedicated to developing a more
sustainable global civilisation, writes on the World Forum
website:
First, we must understand that we are confronted
by a planet-wide problem and we are all in the same boat together.
There is no us versus them on this one.
Second, we will need to involve an amazing
variety of populations across the world and the full spectrum of
every kind of organization in every sector of the economy,
governance and civil society in order to succeed.
Third, we cannot treat anyone or any group
in isolation, trying to solve one problem at a time, because we are
all linked together as the planet starts to become one world for
the first time in history. Planetary integration is our next
industrial revolution. This presents us with both a grand
opportunity and a tough challenge. All of us -- as individuals,
communities, organizations, and governments are, or are becoming,
part of one planetary network of systems.
Fourth, practical success at getting things done
will be helped by making strategic and integrated use of all of our
technology, all of our leadership, all of our plans, and all of our
individual and collective values and actions. Greening our
economies therefore requires a complete shift in thinking, values,
actions and intentions.
The State of the World Forum is launching a global
2020 Climate Leadership Campaign and a Brazil 2020 Campaign with
other campaigns forming in Australia, Holland and Mexico. It is
doing so because the urgency of global warming mandates that each
and every one of us become climate leaders. For the first time in
our lives, indeed for the first time in history, all of us must
take responsibility for our climate, whether at the individual,
community, company, institution, state, or national level. We are
all responsible for global warming. We must all share in the
leadership required to solve it, for nothing less than the fate of
human civilization is at stake. The crisis is that stark, the
choice is that clear, the leadership required is that urgent.
The Forum believes that if we rise to this
challenge, if we take climate leadership, we will generate climate
prosperity and climate justice because it is precisely our capacity
to solve our greatest crisis that affords us our greatest
opportunities for growth within the context of sustainability and
alignment with natural systems.
A paradigm shift is what planet Earth needs - the role of
business and governments
Everyone has to be involved - but big business and governments
have to be absolute and committed leaders in a global movement to
save the planet. As Dr Kim Møller of the Oxford Group tells us
elsewhere in this newsletter, consumer- and investor-led adherence
to values of Corporate Social Responsibility are on the rise in the
global business playground - and this is undeniably a very good
thing. But is it time for a paradigm shift in strategic corporate
and governmental thinking? What if the corporate and government
sectors redefined their criteria for success in the most
fundamental way imaginable? What if the "growth at any cost" mantra
were to be squarely examined, analysed, and shelved? The
18th October 2008 issue of New Scientist magazine
posed the question frankly:
Consumption of resources is rising rapidly, biodiversity is
plummeting and just about every measure shows humans affecting
earth on a vast scale. Most of us accept the need for a more
sustainable way to live, by reducing carbon emissions, developing
renewable technology and increasing energy efficiency.
But are these efforts to save the planet doomed? A
growing band of experts are ... arguing that personal carbon virtue
and collective environmentalism are futile as long as our economic
system is built on the assumption of growth. The science tells us
that if we are serious about saving earth, we must reshape our
economy.
This, of course, is economic heresy. Growth to
most economists is as essential as the air we breathe; it is, they
claim, the only force capable of lifting the poor out of poverty,
feeding the world's growing population, meeting the costs of rising
public spending and stimulating technological development - not to
mention funding increasingly expensive lifestyles. They see no
limits to that growth, ever.
In recent weeks it has become clear just how
terrified governments are of anything that threatens growth, as
they pour billions of public money into a failing financial system.
Amid the confusion, any challenge to the growth dogma needs to be
looked at very carefully. This one is built on a long-standing
question: how do we square earth's finite resources with the fact
that as the economy grows, the amount of natural resources needed
to sustain that activity must grow too? It has taken all of human
history for the economy to reach its current size. On current form
it will take just two decades to double.
Scary. The time to think the unthinkable is here.
Find out how
Brazil is taking the lead in the battle to transform corporate and
public attitudes
Find
out more about the State of the World Forum to be held in
Washington DC in February and March 2010 and register
to attend