Where are we and what needs to be done?
The world is changing, fast and sometimes irreversible. To tackle climate change, one needs to know where we are and also what needs to be done.
Paris agreement
Whenever politicians, debaters or activists talk about climate change they usually refer back to the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement is an agreement between 195 countries to limit climate warming to 2 degrees celsius, preferably to 1,5 degrees. The agreement was passed in the United Nations in 2015 and is divided into different parts. One part is the NDC, Nationally Determined Contribution, where each country describes what they as a member can contribute to the agreement. The NDCs are updated every five years and are mandatory for all members. In the EU's latest NDC, The EU is committed to reduce their net domestic emission by 55 % in 2030 from 1990. Another part of the agreement is the financial part. A fund was created to provide support to poorer countries in their fight against climate change. The Paris Agreement also heavily relies on technology to come up with smarter and more efficient ways to convert society to become sustainable and resilient to climate change. To track the progress, as of 2024, members of the Paris agreement must start report transparently to the enhanced transparency framework (ETF) on “action taken, and progress in climate change mitigation, adaptation measures and support provided or received.”
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Someone that is taking a big role to stop climate change is Greta Thunberg. Greta is a young girl from Sweden who in 2018 started protesting outside the Swedish government every Friday. This sparked a revolution amongst young people all over the world to protest so that the leaders of the world would commit to the Paris Agreement. Greta uses the report from the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that is agreed upon by 195 countries as her main source. In 2022 the IPCC released a new report, based on 34 000 studies, telling about a “widespread and pervasive” impact on society. The impacts include increasingly frequent and intensive natural disasters. Other aspects, sometimes irreversible, are effects on the biodiversity because of the changing climate and smaller areas of farmable lands.
“It’s very clear to us that no amount of adaptation can compensate for failing to limit warming to 1.5C.”
Madeleine Diouf Sarr, the chair of the Least Developed Countries
A problem that Greta discuss is how countries measure their emissions. The UK government says in 2019 that their annual emission of greenhouse gasses have been reduced by 44 % since 1990. This sounds good, Greta says, but if you consider that the UK buys in organic fuel from Canada and the US, the number is no longer the same. The UK measures domestic emissions and not international aviation, shipping and import. It is harder to measure these aspects, since it is not controlled by each country and some emissions might be counted for more than once. WWF, World Wildlife Fund, estimates that the actual decrease is just 15 % for the same time period.
So, at the moment, according to IPCC, the window of opportunity for action is “brief and rapidly closing”. Our main agreement to keep the window open is the Paris agreement with tools that could help countries in the change of creating a sustainable society. To get there we need innovative research and new technology to make the change cheap and doable.
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