In the last few months, we have seen wildfires rage across California and Portugal and heavy rainfall causing floods in central and Eastern Europe. Now two category 5 hurricanes have blown across south-eastern US causing flash and urban flooding while flooding has also devastated 20 provinces in Thailand.
This increase in extreme weather events and the severity of their impact has been linked to climate change by scientists at World Weather Attribution. [1]
Recent climate-related reports paint a bleak picture
The Germany Agriculture Ministry (BMEL) has just published its Federal Forestry Inventory [2] which finds that the loss of biomass due to consequences of climate change has caused forests across Germany to become a source of carbon dioxide rather than a natural carbon sink.
At the same time, the first Planetary Health Check [3] from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research was launched at NY Climate Week 2024. The report indicates that Earth is approaching many critical thresholds as it breaches six of the nine planetary boundaries (climate change, change in biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater change, modification of biogeochemical flows and introduction of novel entities), with an imminent breach of a seventh (ocean acidification).
Planetary Health Check 2024. Design: Globaia
Just this month, the fifth annual report by a group of 15 international climate scientists ‘The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth’ [4] was published. It assesses 35 planetary vital signs, 25 of which are at record levels. These include the amount of heat in the oceans, thickness of glaciers, tree cover loss and greenhouse gas levels.
It concludes with a stark warning, “Despite six IPCC reports, 28 COP meetings, hundreds of other reports, and tens of thousands of scientific papers, the world has made only very minor headway on climate change… We are currently going in the wrong direction, and our increasing fossil fuel consumption and rising greenhouse gas emissions are driving us toward a climate catastrophe. We fear the danger of climate breakdown.”
What can we do to reverse the climate catastrophe?
The warnings are clear, the world is in crisis. For the first time, Earth has surpassed 1.5 degrees C of warming above the pre-fossil fuel average for a whole year (June 2023 to June 2024). We are closely reaching the point of no return.
The state of the climate report suggests we urgently need to implement the following:
- Phasing out fossil fuel use
- Pricing and reducing methane emissions
- Reducing overconsumption
- Strengthening education and rights for women and girls to reduce the rate of growth of the population
- Supporting plant-based eating
- Integrating climate change education into curriculums worldwide
- Immediate efforts to protect, restore and rewild ecosystems.
The good news is, we have the means and much of the technology to do something about it, but we need to act right now.
Sources and further reading
- https://www.worldweatherattribution.org
- https://www.bmel.de/DE/themen/wald/wald-in-deutschland/bundeswaldinventur.html
- https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/earth-exceed-safe-limits-first-planetary-health-check-issues-red-alert
- https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biae087/7808595?login=false
