A new report by the United Nations has recently been released that states global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 7.6% every year for the next decade, for us to avoid a complete climate catastrophe.
Inger Anderson, Environment Program Executive Director for the U.N. released a statement:
Our collective failure to act early and hard on climate change means we must now deliver deep cuts to emissions (of) over 7% each year if we break it down evenly over the next decade. This shows that countries simply cannot wait.
Unfortunately, the world has overlooked these problems and has not placed enough urgency on these issues for far too long as Anderson points out. “We need quick wins to reduce emissions as much as possible in 2020, to kickstart the major transformations of economies and societies. We need to catch up on the years in which we procrastinated.”
The weather extremes that the world is now seeing is a result of global warming. From the rising floodwaters in Italy, the extreme cold weather and heavy snow in the U.S. The high summer heat with droughts and forest fires. Everything will continue to get more extreme. She goes on to say that without this urgent action, the world’s fate will be sealed within the next few years. The carbon levels will continue to rise and will become irreversible in our lifetime.
Oceans around the world will become more acidic and the rising sea levels will threaten coastal cities as we already see happening in Italy.
Kelly Levin of the World Resources Institute agrees with the U.N. statement and speaks about how we have failed in our efforts up to this point:
While there have been examples of rapid change in specific technologies or sectors, there is no precedent in our documented history for the rate of change at the scale required for limiting warming to 1.5C. We have never before witnessed such widespread rapid transitions, and they will need to be made across energy, land, industrial, urban and other systems. Achieving 1.5C will require unprecedented transformative efforts by all
Unfortunately, the population has been a victim to governments and big businesses making decisions for the masses for so long and they just don’t care about the planet or the popular opinion.
Rana Adib is the Research Coordinator at REN21, here is what she had to say:
This truth is hard to face. The emissions gap report shows the harsh reality: countries collectively fail to stop growth in greenhouse gas emissions. We have the necessary means to pursue the energy transition. What we need is the political and institutional will to make the transition a reality.
Next year, under the Paris agreement, governments are expected to come up with plans to substantially cut emissions by 2030. The problem is the pledges made by current countries under the agreement would cause temperatures to rise by 3.2°C this century.
It’s past time for people worldwide to wake up and make changes on an individual level. The one thing we can do is choose for ourselves who to support when buying products. Using plastic, buying vehicles, etc.. Waiting around for someone else to make changes or improve upon things is not working. This needs to be a collaborative effort, or sadly, we will all perish together. The younger generation has woken up to this crisis, now its time for the adults to follow suit.
