By Christos Politis, Year 13
This summer was the warmest one that I have lived through in southern Europe. Even the hard-core lovers of heat were complaining they could not bear to spend a whole day at the beach anymore. The relentless heat continued day and night, leaving everyone exhausted after only a week of vacation. This left me thinking; how did we get here so fast? This was not supposed to happen for a while — or so I thought.
The truth is, that we have been warned of the anthropogenic climate change threat since 1972, and these claims have been supported by regularly published climate data since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded in 1988. In response to indisputable warnings, and to avoid the unwanted consequences of a possible climate collapse, the majority of countries entered landmark agreements to act against climate change, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. Despite these efforts, it is now evident that we have failed to effectively redesign our processes and are now facing the threat of exceeding 1.5 degrees of global average surface temperature increase. According to James Hansen, director of the program on Climate Science Awareness and Solutions at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, “The 1.5–degree limit is deader than a doornail.”
1.5 degrees may not seem like a large increase, but scientists warn that surpassing a 1.5 degree rise in temperature can trigger a domino effect of devastating consequences on our climate. Most of us have already been experiencing extreme weather events, disruptions that not only affect our daily schedules, but have also begun to affect our infrastructure that was built to cater to past conditions — for example, steel structures are expanding and asphalt is cracking, posing safety threats. According to ‘People’s Climate Vote 2024,’ a global survey by the University of Oxford and the UNDP, the public’s increasing concern is evident; 80% of people globally want stronger climate action from their leaders, 32% think about climate change daily, while 76% are worried about the effects of climate change on the next generations. So why aren’t government and business leaders driving radical change?
From personal interviews that I conducted with executives from the United Nations and the consulting sector, the key message I received was that both public officers and business managers rarely wish to take on the responsibility of initiating effective climate action, and there are a few reasons for that. Firstly, they hesitate to sacrifice convenience both on a personal and business level; managers know that it is difficult for people to change their lifestyle habits, something that would be required on a massive scale to move away from fossil fuels once and for all. Secondly, they do not dare to compromise profits, as the business case for greener technologies is not yet proven and people have become afraid of the obvious alternative, which is nuclear power. And thirdly, any radical change is made even harder by the fact that managers’ performances are assessed using short term metrics, and that means that investing in long term socioeconomic benefits would harm their immediate advancement prospects.
Furthermore, the immense financial and political power held by large polluting corporations prevents reforms that threaten their business interests and makes positive change at a large scale arduous. This leaves our world trapped in a system that serves the economic stability of these unsustainable polluters.
These obstacles are further reinforced by our biological inclination to only react to imminent life-threatening danger. According to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert on the NPR media organization, gradual changes are easier to accept: “We see global warming as a threat to our distant futures, but not to our afternoons.” But, how can that change? How can we finally use the data we are given from a multitude of sources, to justify effective action, and prove the author of the recently published book Not The End of the World, Hannah Ritchie, right, by becoming the first generation to hand over an improved environment to the next generation?
Great hope comes from progressive education aiming to change people’s mentalities from a young age; the International School of Geneva, for example, not only has an ambitious sustainability plan in place, but actively aims to show students that adults are actually practicing what they preach. According to the Director General, Dr Conrad Hughes, “If schools do not embrace regenerative and sustainable systems through the global goals as a clear imperative, and put their heads in the sand, they will be tacitly contributing to the demise of our planet.” Attitudes like these are indeed very encouraging for the next generation.
However, it is evident that we also need to implement systemic and faster acting improvements in our technological processes and policies. It is time we openly recognize that we need to restore life — present and future — at the top of our values and accelerate our directional change. It is certain that it can be done if we are all willing, as we saw in the recent example of the radical overnight measures implemented globally to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, where in coordinated global agreement, the economy shut down virtually overnight.
So maybe the solution is a radical but simple one; maybe all we need to do is change the wording, coordinate communication and reframe the issue as an imminent danger. In the words of Daniel Gilbert, “…the human brain is indeed designed to respond to certain kinds of threats. So why not make climate change into one of those?”
