Our Climate Emergency Response

It’s a tumultuous time for the biosphere. Just a few weeks after the feeble outcomes of COP29, it’s as if Mother Earth has decided to redouble her reminder to us of the elemental forces of a warming planet. Catastrophic wildfires in California, deadly floods in Spain and billions of pounds of damage caused every year from the costs of addressing climate chaos. Against a backdrop of increasingly vociferous and unambiguous warnings from the scientific community, including of course the menacing compendium of truth in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report. Humanity looks to be entering the unchartered territory of an approaching and increasingly likely sixth mass extinction. We weren’t around for the previous five but they all were associated with climate change.

So why, given the now irrefutable science and the unfolding actuality of the climate crisis, are we not treating it to be the emergency that policy makers have declared it to be? Is the human condition so apparently unevolved from our primeval ancestors that we lack the capacity, foresight and ability to collaborate effectively in staving off what is the greatest threat to civilisation? (Ignoring geopolitical instability, which of course is a likely end state of climate breakdown in any case.) Certainly anthropologists have previously pointed out our collective inability as a species to co-operate and to start planning only when crisis is at our very door. Well, the metaphorical climate end game lion is now firmly knocking at our modern-day cave door, and it’s about to devour us. Not helped by obfuscation and in some cases outright denial of the facts by global leaders and their sympathetic media supporters.

It is increasingly evident that even with ‘only’ one and a half degrees of planetary warming above pre-industrial levels we are encountering very rapid changes in the climate system. Extreme weather events are increasing in scale, frequency, and consequence for humans and nature. As the atmosphere warms, the tipping points and feedback loops we have been hearing about for years are now happening all around us, further undermining the capacity of our already exhausted natural systems to provide mitigation. Of particular concern is the scale at which climate breakdown (let’s stop calling it ‘change’) is happening relative to the average global temperature uplift, and much more quickly than the most sophisticated climate models could have predicted. Like Ernest Hemingway’s famous commentary on bankruptcy, first it is gradual, then it is sudden. It’s starting to go quickly, as anyone with even a passing awareness of the news headlines – or just the increasingly pronounced weather events around them - can now see.

Is it too late to do anything? Political systems, national governments, international institutions, and even the efforts of some NGOs have failed. To have any chance of meeting the Paris Agreement’s objective of holding atmospheric heating below 2 degrees Celsius (the news today confirms we shot past 1.5 degrees in 2024), emissions need to stop growing this year, and be reduced by at least 45% by around 20230. This is a tall order. But inaction is not a solution when there is no place (on Earth) to hide. So we must act and continue to think what we can do as professionals, as individuals, and as communities. Before adaptation becomes a byword for building a bunker.

Doing more each day, making changes in our own consumption patterns, adopting renewable energy, restoring habitats and a whole host of other actions can help. As can becoming more active in the debate and the urgency of our response. And as environmental professionals we need to go further. We should challenge whether to continue working for, or with, organisations that contribute to increased carbon emissions or nature loss. We hear a lot in the press now about greenwashing. If we don’t pursue a climate positive approach in our work then surely we stand guilty of hypocrisy. Ethical business practices are indisputably part of the solution, but they require honesty, integrity and sufficient altruism by corporate leaders to genuinely consider models based on the ‘triple bottom line’ and not on prioritising shareholder value and profit. For that to really happen across the economy requires genuine sustainability rather than tokenism in our businesses, the bravery to be a pioneer, and – importantly – stakeholder and employee pressure. We all have a stake so perhaps we should be asking, just how good is the company you work for?

There are increasing calls now for a seismic shift in society and the economy as the only realistic means of effecting the changes needed to our governance and patterns of consumption if we are to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis. So-called incrementalism might have worked if we had started adopting it 25 years ago but it’s too late now. It’s difficult to see where this transformation will come from and how. It’s doubtful that technology can save us, and we don’t have time to wait to find out. The rise of climate and social activism may, with sufficient support, usher in the sort of systemic change needed to avert climate chaos. The suffragettes made it happen for women’s rights, so perhaps it can rise from the collective efforts of communities, local and municipal governments, the third sector, and ethical businesses. It’s a social re-ordering that recognises the deep interplay between human rights, health, education, limits to growth, and planetary health.

As environmentally motivated people, perhaps we need to think more about lending our voice, and action, to this call of nature. This is no longer a fringe agenda, it is about the future of the planet as a place we can live in without facing the worst of outcomes associated with ecological collapse. We can’t all glue ourselves to runways in protest but we can have a good hard look at our lives, lifestyles, employers, the needs of our children and families, and decide how we can help bring about the changes so urgently needed. After all, it starts gradually and then it changes suddenly…

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