Climate Change Is Not Our Most Important Problem

But is that relevant?

Picture: Rob Vellekoop. He wrote an article about the farmer protests (Dutch language).

Climate change seems to be our biggest long term problem, coming closer every day. Our newspapers and social media are full of it. Greta Thunberg talks about nothing else and leaders lash out at her saying she is naive. ‘It’s not so simple,’ they say.

Everybody seems a bit stuck with that phrase: ‘it’s not so simple’.

Well, it isn’t simple, but it isn’t too complicated either. We can find ways to see our predicament more clearly and then find ways out of this chaos. In this article, I hope to give some perspective, do some suggestions about other ways to look at the problem(s) and give solutions for real-life examples.

First of all, climate change is NOT our biggest problem. In 2015 the Stockholm Resilience Center published a new framework to understand planetary boundaries. In this model, they calculated for 9 important planetary boundaries how much we overstep the limits. This is the result.

This picture shows the planetary boundaries and if we stay within them (or not). As you can see, climate change is not far out yet, nitrogen and biodiversity are. Credit: Stockholm Resilience Center.

As you can see: biosphere integrity and biochemical flows are much more out of limit than climate change is. Things like genetic diversity, nitrogen and phosphorous…