Sir David Attenborough
emer-gency / n A serious, unexpected and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action
COVID 19 is not a ‘black swan’ – a singular, unexpected event. It is the first in a series of what NYT’s Tom Friedman referred to as a ‘herd of stampeding black elephants’ – multiple, predictable and economically catastrophic events. Events that everyone knows are coming but our political and business leaders have consciously chosen not to deal with.
Choices have consequences….
Climate change has suddenly surged in the public consciousness. We face a deluge of stories about natural disasters, heatwaves, burning forests and melting ice. We see school strikes, civil disobedience and talk of existential risk and economic crisis - even of collapse. Amidst it all, the term climate change is being replaced with the ‘climate crisis’ and the ‘climate emergency’.
How do we unpack all this? Is this just a temporary new wave of awareness or have we really entered a whole new state? What is ‘an emergency’ and what would it mean if climate change were one?
ClimateEmergency.com summarises the arguments, referenced to the work of experts and thought leaders from different disciplines, to help answer these and other key questions about the climate emergency. Our aim is to inform, provoke debate and provide guidance on what might come next, as a resource for anyone working on, or seeking to understand, the climate emergency.
While the climate crisis is perhaps the most serious and confronting threat humanity has ever faced, it is also ‘fixable’. It will require radical and disruptive transformation of global markets, our economies and society. But we have succeeded at this before, and we are certainly capable and well positioned to succeed again. First however, we have to understand what we face.
“Is the threat we are facing really of such magnitude, and the timing so urgent, that climate change is now a climate emergency?”
The evidence from the world’s most respected and qualified experts in science, risk, economics, human rights, ecosystems and geopolitics says it is….
In this section we explore this evidence, providing the rational arguments for why climate change is now an emergency. And explain what it would mean to actually treat it as one.
If we accept that the climate crisis is now an emergency then, by definition, we need an emergency mobilisation in response.
What would it take to shift society from where we are today, to having an emergency mobilisation that effectively addresses the threat? Is it even remotely realistic to think that we would act in this way? And what are the roles of different parts of society - the state, the market, the activist community - in getting us to the point of mobilisation?
This section describes what this process might look like. We then return below in “Actions Required” to discuss the actual measures that would need to be taken.
Deciding to act is the hard part. The science of ‘fixing’ climate change is actually quite simple. The climate crisis has been triggered by an imbalance in the system: global emissions of warming gases have overtaken global absorption → the excess then heats up the planet, changing the climate and leading to a serious crisis and instability for us and the natural systems we rely on.
To ‘fix’ the climate crisis we need to restore equilibrium to the system. We do this by stopping the release of warming gases, removing excess gases from the atmosphere and increasing the capacity of the natural systems to soak up the excess carbon. We may have to also, as a temporary measure, actively cool the planet by, for example, increasing reflectivity.
This section explores and summarises the key actions we will need to take. The objective is not to present the perfect plan but to show that it is possible, and in fact just not that difficult, once we decide the alternative of risking economic and social chaos and possibly collapse is not acceptable.
Central to the climate debate for the last three decades has been economics. What is the cost of acting, who will pay for it, which countries will lead, will the consequences be fair, who should be compensated? That whole debate was predicated on an idea that is now clearly wrong - that if we didn’t act, the economy would carry on, as it had been, and therefore action on climate change imposed new costs and risks to the economy.
We now need to jettison all that and start again. The economics of our situation today - and of a climate emergency mobilisation - are completely different. There are three key reasons.
The cost of not acting in emergency mode could be the collapse of the global economy. A collapse is not certain but the consequences would be so great, it would quite irrational to ignore the risk. Whatever the ‘cost’ of acting is, it will be less than the ‘cost’ of collapse.
It seems increasing likely that a well-managed emergency mobilisation would be enormously beneficial for the economy and society, driving innovation, creating wealth and enhancing quality of life globally. Not just better than the alternative risk of collapse, but better than what we have today.
With the historical assumption of ‘action = cost’, the follow-on assumption was that action would therefore only occur through policy intervention (e.g. a carbon price). This is now totally flawed. Firstly action no longer always means extra cost, in fact very often the opposite. Secondly we live in a modern globalised market economy, where financial risk is managed considering constantly adapting assumptions about the future context of policy, physical impacts and public attitudes. Together these have unleashed powerful market drivers that are now accelerating change.
This section explores these issues.
