Environment & Sustainablility – By Ashreeta Mohanty for The Earth Conference 2024
Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing our planet. Its negative effects on health, the biosphere, and labor productivity are already being felt throughout the world. Aware of the danger, communities, households, and governments have started taking measures to reduce their exposures and vulnerability to weather shocks and climate change.
After good progress in the beginning of the decade, global carbon emissions have started to pick up again. This recent trend sets the world on a dangerous path: to slow the pace of climate change, carbon emissions need to be reduced.
Our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through various mitigation measures—phasing out fossil fuels, increasing energy efficiency, adopting renewable energy sources, improving land use and agricultural practices—continue to move forward, but the pace is too slow. We have to scale up and accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy. At the same time, we must recognize that climate change is already happening and affecting the lives of millions of people.
The world is getting hotter, resulting in rising sea levels, more extreme weather like hurricanes, droughts, and floods, as well as other risks to the global climate like the irreversible collapsing of ice sheets.
Rain forests are shrinking. Polar icecaps are retreating as the ocean warms, and coral reefs are disappearing as the ocean acidifies. Fertilizer runoff injects excessive phosphorous and nitrogen into watersheds, damaging freshwater and coastal ecosystems. Microplastics are entering food and drinking water. Our planet’s biodiversity is imploding.
As climate change continues to affect both the frequency and severity of natural disasters, how can vulnerable countries do more to prepare and cope with their consequences?
Climate change adaptation can lessen the economic costs of climate change, as illustrated by our model simulation and various examples around the world. But investing in successful adaptation strategies is expensive. It will further stretch the budgets of already very poor countries, where the adverse effects of climate change are most pronounced.
Hence, it is imperative that the international community, particularly the advanced economies, which have emitted the lion’s share of greenhouse gasses, help finance adaptation related projects in poorer countries.
Mother Nature is trying to tell us something. The longer we wait to act on climate change, the greater the loss of life and damage to the world economy.
