Bend It Like…Christiana?
From COVID-19 to climate change — there are many more curves that we need to bend
Maybe it’s coincidental, but I started to read Christiana Figueres’ new book, writing with Tom Rivett-Carnac: The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, just as the coronavirus crisis intensified in February. Of course, we would all know her from her leadership and steering of the Paris Agreement, but what aligned perfectly in my consciousness over what I was seeing on the news were her three mindsets for co-creating the world we want: Stubborn optimism; endless abundance; and radical regeneration. Exactly what we will need when we set off to bend the curves that illustrate humanity’s impact on our natural systems — and especially in a post-COVID world.
Flatten the curve! Flatten the curve!
Over the last few months, a few terms have become ubiquitous: social distancing, community spread, and flattening the curve. On one hand, it’s made everyone a casual epidemiologist, but on the bright side, it’s shown that these complex issues of risk, resilience, adaptation and so on can be understood and more importantly, acted on by massive numbers of people at the same time.
So why has everyone in your family sent you forwarded messages to do your part to flatten the curve? Actions to flatten the curve aim to slow the rate at which the virus is spread, however not necessarily reducing the total numbers that may be affected.
This slower rate of spread gives the healthcare system a fighting chance to provide the required treatment to those who are infected and need hospital care. It reduces the pressure on the healthcare institutions and enhances the chance of proper and lifesaving action. In other words, the system can maintain its resilience, or rather, its capacity to not be overwhelmed in the face of disturbances.
Disturbances to our systems will, if nothing is done, become a familiar part of our reality. We cannot forget that we are looking down the barrel of the existential threats of climate and environmental change that will determine our future on this planet. Those threats have curves that are just as scary and must be bent.
The Great Acceleration
Even if we skipped Integrated Science class, we all know that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are directly related to the phenomenon of climate change. CO2 and other greenhouse gases trap outgoing infrared radiation, leading to a warming climate. Small Island States like Trinidad and Tobago and other vulnerable countries worked hard to ensure that the lauded Paris Climate Agreement limited warming within this century to 1.5°C, at worst 2°C, above these pre-industrial levels to ensure our continued ability to live in the places we call home. Above 2 degrees, global temperatures and environmental change may make many of our homes uninhabitable. At 2 degrees and above, global ecosystems will face massive shocks that include the complete degradation of all coral reefs and the substantial reduction of agricultural yield for staple crops around the world.
According to the Climate Action Tracker, we’ve already overshot these targets. With countries’ current pledges for reducing their CO2 emissions, the world will warm by at least 2.8°C by the end of the century, with expectations to hit the 1.5°C mark within just 12–15 years.
Species extinction, ocean acidification, freshwater usage, conversion of land to agriculture, global energy usage and the consumption of resources; the shapes of all these curves will look eerily familiar — shooting skywards all at once within a system whose resilience is weakening. Some have titled this trend in biological, physical and social indicators since the Industrial Age: The Great Acceleration.
However, as we’ve unfortunately seen over the last few months — when the curves don’t bend in time, a system can enter into collapse and catastrophe.
Growth is not infinite
The governments and citizens of the world need to follow the roadmaps they’ve agreed on, just like they’ve listened to the best available science put out by the World Health Organisation and others around COVID-19.
To meet the 2°C limit by the end of the century, we have a budget — a carbon budget that details what we’re allowed to use from the existing reserves of fossil fuels. To bend the CO2 emissions curve, we must commit to only burning on average 27% of all coal in reserve on earth, 41% of oil and 32% of natural gas. This can only be done if countries and the large global energy companies commit to a safe future for everyone, which they have not done. A recent report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative highlighted that every major oil company, post-Paris Agreement, had approved current or future capital expenditure on projects that depended on the world not being ‘Paris-compliant’. Governments — pressured by citizens — need to align their short and medium-term recovery plans with the UN Sustainable Goals and the Paris Agreement, specifically including any bailouts for the private sector.
With a world population expected to grow by another 2 billion people within the next 20–25 years, the pressure on land systems to produce food will increase dramatically. The clearing of land puts us more and more into contact with diseases like the coronavirus family and significantly impacts elements of the environmental system such as freshwater supply and biodiversity. However, we can bend this curve starting from today. Almost a quarter of the calories produced today are not consumed by anyone because of food waste and almost 200 million hectares of land are used to produce food that we do not eat. Additionally, the world’s consumption of beef is expected to continue being one of the leading causes of the increased losses of Amazon forest cover because of land clearing by cattle ranchers.
By adjusting our personal consumption patterns, which include where we buy our food from and what we buy, we can have a critical role to play in altering the current system. Research has shown that by adopting a low-meat diet while staying within the framework of a ‘healthy diet’ emissions can be reduced by almost one-third. Of course, to effectively catalyse such lifestyle changes, issues of nutrition security and access for the most marginalised sectors of society must be a priority.
These curves are just examples of the growing pressures on the natural systems that support our life here on earth. It’s been a matter of daily conversation how the rates of infection have increased so rapidly with infections taking approximately 68 days to reach the first 500,000 worldwide and then just 8 more days to double to 1 million. This, unfortunately, shows us how rapidly changes to a system can occur when its resilience is overshot. Changes in any system, a man-made healthcare system or natural ecosystems like coral reefs, often don’t happen in a linear way or one change occurring predictably after the next, but rather multiply in ways that you often cannot predict.
Again, we have the science and the frameworks to use for demanding action from our leaders, companies, and ourselves. The Planetary Boundaries framework, as an example, has identified nine (9) global processes and systems that support the resilience of the earth’s natural systems that include climate change, change in biosphere integrity, ocean acidification, and land-system change. However, four (4) out of these 9 boundaries have already been crossed, including the core processes of climate change and biosphere integrity.
Our national, regional, and global economic/development agendas must start placing such frameworks in the centre of discussions, especially as we look to recover in a post-COVID world. As voters and citizens, we have to better understand and take into consideration our management of these natural systems if we have any hope of a sustainable future.
We’ve shown that we can act together to keep each other safe, to think about the most vulnerable in our communities and demand that our leaders do the right thing. There is a light at the end of the tunnel for the coronavirus pandemic, but we have an even longer tunnel ahead. We are entering into a critical decade in which our governments and the private sector must make and keep their commitments to the climate and the earth. We must hold them and ourselves to these commitments so we can look forward to a future that is safe for all humanity. In other words, we have no choice but to bend these curves.
As Ms Figueres says, “…to meet the challenges of the climate crisis and preserve all that we hold dear; to retain democracy, social justice, human rights, and other hard-won freedoms in the future, we must part ways with that which threatens to destroy them. Now is the time to make profound shifts in how we live, work, and relate to each other.”
