'Monsoon doesn't seem to end this year! This doesn't even feel like winter! It feels like summer's heat has taken over the cycle!'
We all have heard or said such comments at some point of time while conversing but the dark reality behind these things often stays unnoticed, unexplained & unsaid. Climate change is the most pressing problem of today's world yet the most ignored. Its impact is seen in every nook & corner of the world- a world so lost in its own chaos that it's unable to focus on the life-threatening crisis spreading into society. Only a fraction of people is working on an issue that is affecting every life out there. How can efficient & impactful solutions be expected with this situation? How can solutions be proposed if humanity doesn't come together to accept their faults, discuss them elaborately & be change-makers? The science & statistics about climate change and related environmental problems have been around for decades and with time, the only thing that has changed is the numbers, only for worse; yet our ignorant mindsets, lack of institutional & individual actions & reckless greed-centric behavior continues. Even after innumerable international conferences, social & scientific reports, we are still on the path of rising emissions, destroying ecosystems, & safeguarding the culprits majorly responsible for the crisis when citizens & governments should be taking responsibility & confronting the loopholes in our society & stringently addressing them. Almost everyone must have heard that 'we are running out of time to solve the crisis' but not everyone knows why. Is there a deadline?
Actually, there is a limit to the damage we can afford. This means that the average rise in temperature compared to pre-industrial levels due to emission rise, biodiversity loss, and so on cannot keep on rising because it comes with serious implications. We have to limit the average global temperature rise to 1.5 °C ( Paris Agreement, 2015 ). But the alarming fact is that we have already crossed 1.2°C & with our lack of intent to stop this, the critical point is that can we hold the rise to 1.5°C? With our ever-rising emissions, the rise will be unstoppable & rise beyond 1.5°C-2°C will have catastrophic results some of them being habitat loss, unprecedented disasters (like floods, droughts, and wildfires), food supply chain disruptions & increase in social affairs like poverty, inaccessibility of resources, inequality. It is spine-chilling to just imagine such impacts which have the potential of collapsing entire economies & societies. Earth has a 50:50 chance of crossing the 1.5°C limit by 2026. It’s important to change our mindsets of ‘climate change is a future threat’ to the fact that ‘we are in the initiation of global catastrophe and with time & no action, it will keep getting worse’.
If we don’t want to breach these global warming limits, we have to cut down our carbon dioxide emissions by 45% by 2030 compared to 2010 levels. ( IPCC Report, 2018 ). That’s less than 7 years remaining and this is a dangerous deadline.
Our emissions are still rising but countries are supposed to be on track of reducing emissions by around 7.6% per year in this decade! Our current climate pledges are highly insufficient compared to the gigantic targets we need to achieve in minimal time. The planet has a carbon budget that we cannot exceed. Humans only have 380Gt ( gigatons ) of carbon budget left. That means at maximum only around 380 Gt of more CO2 can be released. Breaching these limits directly means all those catastrophic results will impact us on an unprecedented & unadaptable scale. Recently, at the COP15 biodiversity conference, the biodiversity target '30x30' again came into the limelight. According to this 30% of terrestrial & marine habitats must be conserved by 2030 whereas the natural ecosystems are in apocalyptic decline at present. Unfortunately, scientific studies cite that 30x30 would reduce the extinction rate insufficiently by half. The world is on the brink of at least 5 major tipping points. It's getting difficult to stay inside the limits of such critical thresholds.
To encapsulate, Yes! We are short of time. Important deadlines such as 2030 targets are not far away & there's a lot that needs to be done rather I would say undone & done ( restored & beyond ). United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres rightly said ‘We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator’. We might be believing that 'This is our time'. On the contrary, the doomsday clock is ticking toward the unfortunate reality that seemed an art of fiction.
Are we so blinded by our lifestyles that we compromise & sacrifice on ourselves, future generations & life on this planet?
Are we so blinded by our destructive mindsets that we choose death for us & the planet every single day?