As warm words about climate change and behaviour change continue to spread on the broadcast news, whilst councils re-open roads to traffic and property investors urge people back to the office, it’s perhaps worth reading this UN study.
Over the next few years we’re going to need to get used to there not being food on shelves at the supermarket; about summers that are unbearable; and about weather-blocking patterns that’ll either trap us under a wall of heat or a mountain of snow and ice.
Writing in the foreword to the report, UN chief António Guterres warned that the world is currently “way off track meeting either the 1.5°C or 2°C targets that the Paris Agreement calls for”, referring to the commitment made by the international community in 2015, to keep global average temperatures well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
Flagship UN study shows accelerating climate change on land, sea and in the atmosphere | | UN News
The climate crisis is now effectively locked in and on current trends we are heading for 3 degrees of warming. We’ve gone past the point of being able to change course. Now we need to save as much life as we can. This is where crops start to fail, where people are displaced in huge numbers and where systems start to collapse, permanently.
It was all perfectly avoidable, of course, but capital didn’t see all that much profit in it when it might have made a difference. Finally we are starting to see some focus on ESG investing; and in business being part of the solutions, but frankly it’s too little too late and there’s more than a little greenwashing mixed in. We’re already seeing explosive permafrost; drought and forest fires and who knows what is in store for us in future.
We don’t know exactly what will happen, but we understand that, at the very least, disruption of the biosphere and climate is forcing us to change how we live, and may lead to global societal collapse. Deep Adaptation is a way of framing our current global situation that can help people to refocus on what’s important in life while our social order collapses under the weight of its own consumption, pollution, and inequality. We are finding new ways of being with ourselves and being together, no matter what happens.
What is Deep Adaptation? – Deep Adaptation Forum
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