Hello and welcome to a special edition of Just Have Another Think.
In October 2017 this research article was published by a team of ecology and entomology
experts from Germany, The Netherlands and the UK. It reported the findings of a 27-year field study
of European insect diversity and it said this : "Our analysis estimates a seasonal decline of 76%,
and mid-summer decline of 82% in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of the study."
Then in 2019 the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem services,
or IPBES, published their global assessment report. That paper was the culmination of
three years of painstaking work by a team of experts from over 60 countries.
It was thoroughly peer reviewed, gaining more than fifteen thousand reviewer comments in total.
The paper found that there are currently an estimated one million animal and plant species
on our planet threatened with extinction. That's about 10% of all the insects and
25% of all the other species. That's not good! Species have been going extinct since
the dawn of time of course, that's a completely normal part of earth's evolutionary process.
But the rate of extinctions we're witnessing now is unprecedented in human history.
Now you might be thinking that's all a bit sad and unfortunate and everything,
but that it's not really something that affects you directly in your day-to-day life,
nor is it something that you could personally have any effect on.
Trouble is, the consequences are a lot closer than most of us realize. More than 75% of global food
crops, including fruits and vegetables and some of the most important cash crops like coffee cocoa
and almonds, rely on animal pollination. If we lose the pollinators, we lose our food crops. And
that's really not good! The species that we share the planet with, and the natural processes that
they drive, also sustain air quality, fresh water and healthy soils. And they regulate the climate.
The ecosystems in our oceans and soils capture about 60% of human carbon emissions and stop
them going up into the atmosphere. But as this December 2020 European Union study points out,
we humans are now changing that climate and those ecosystems far faster than they can keep up with.
That report said this : "Deforestation and the shift of natural areas to human dominated areas
result in large-scale loss or degradation and fragmentation of habitats and
wildlife populations. The increasing human encroachment in fragmented natural areas,
including livestock grazing, promoted higher contact rates between pathogens and vectors
with domesticated animals and humans." As part of the 2015 Paris Agreement,
governments around the world all pledged to put in place nationally determined contributions or NDCs
towards keeping the mean global atmospheric temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius
above pre-industrial levels, with a more ambitious target of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Those pledges were
updated in 2020 but they still put the world on track for about 2.6 degrees Celsius of warming,
with about a 66% chance of limiting warming to 2.8 degrees. Some way off where they need to
be. And the world is some way off even meeting those targets! According to this very recent
analysis by the climate action tracker, "In the absence of policies, global warming is
expected to reach 4.1 to 4.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century."
That means our kids and grandkids will face those changes within their lifetime. Five degrees
Celsius of warming was enough to pull the planet out of the last glacial period 12,000 years ago,
and it'll certainly be enough to completely wreck our global food systems and make large parts of
the planet uninhabitable for human beings. And that's really really not good!! Metaphorically
speaking, we're driving a car at 80 miles an hour down the wrong side of a motorway,
straight into oncoming traffic. We can swerve and miss some of the vehicles coming towards us,
but the chances of crashing at some point are extremely high. Those NDCs I mentioned are about
as effective as slowing the car down from 80 miles an hour to 60. But you know, a head-on collision
at 60 is mostly indistinguishable from a head-on collision at 80. What we actually need to do is
slam the anchors on, do a handbrake turn, and start driving back in the opposite direction.
The way to do that in the real world is to rapidly switch off greenhouse gas or GHG emissions caused
by human activity. And the way we measure that is with a GHG emissions budget that gives the limit
to how much we can use up relative to keeping the rise of global mean temperatures to a minimum.
The more GHGs we pump out, the hotter the earth becomes. And to simplify things a bit more, the
carbon dioxide equivalent value of all greenhouse gases has been calculated, so that we can use the
more familiar carbon budgets that you've no doubt heard about in the media. The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, estimated in 2018 that if we wanted to have just a 66%
chance of staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, then we could afford to emit no more than
420 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent between that date and the end of the century.
And you might be thinking that gives us loads of time to sort it all out. And you'd be wrong! We
put about 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, so on our
current path we'll have used up all of our budget by 2030. Nine years from now! And that's assuming
we avoid all the tipping points that climate scientists are now increasingly warning us about.
After that we'll be scrambling to build vastly expensive machines and infrastructure to try
and suck carbon dioxide back out of the air again and find somewhere to put it. And you can't easily
wrap up 40,000 million tons of anything and just pop it away in a downstairs cupboard every year.
The challenge is enormous, and it's one that every nation on earth
now faces. It might be tempting to point a finger at other large industrialized countries
and say, 'well they're not doing enough, so why should we bother?'
But here in the global north we're historically responsible for the vast majority of cumulative
carbon dioxide emissions going all the way back to the industrial revolution. The Paris Agreement
includes principles of fairness, which means rich countries who've emitted the most over time should
be contributing over and above emerging economies. So each country probably needs to focus on
getting their own house in order before they start pontificating about the progress of others.
Here in the UK, our parliament passed a climate change act way back in 2008
which put in place a set of five yearly carbon budgets setting a statutory cap
on total greenhouse gas emissions between 2008 and 2032. The fourth of those budgets
covers the years 2023-2027 and the fifth budget covers 2028-2032. That legislation was certainly
ground breaking at the time, and it provided a model for many other countries to follow.
But the targets are now woefully out of date and in desperate need of an upgrade. It's not until
we reached the sixth budget, set just in September 2020 for emissions between 2033 and 37, that our
activities fall in line with the 2050 net zero carbon target recently set by our Prime Minister.
The UK government points to a track record of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40%
since 1990, but a good deal of that has been achieved by outsourcing much of our
manufacturing to other countries around the world and handing the emissions problem over to them.
That's a cop-out! If those outsourced emissions were properly accounted for
then the real UK reduction since 1990 would most likely only be somewhere between 10% and 15%. And
until this sixth budget was published there'd been no accounting for the not insignificant emissions
from shipping and aviation either. Even ignoring all those glaring emissions,
we're not actually on track to meet either the fourth or fifth budgets anyway,
so things are really not quite as rosy as some government ministers may like us to think.
And it gets worse. This country's own Climate Change Committee recently highlighted that our
government has failed to meet 17 of its 21 progress indicators and only 2 out of 31 key
milestones have been achieved. So, in 2020 new legislation to fundamentally address the
deficiencies in our environmental policies was tabled in parliament by the MP Caroline Lucas.
It's called the climate and ecological emergency, or CEE bill. It's not aligned with any one
political party. It was researched and developed by an organization called the CEE Bill Alliance
based on the best scientific evidence from world leading experts in the field. It goes way beyond
party politics and it could serve as a blueprint for all advanced economies. It's got three main
goals. The first goal is to ensure that the UK sets and meets targets that genuinely contribute
towards limiting atmospheric warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by reducing overall greenhouse gas
emissions as soon as possible. The target accounts for all the emissions that UK consumption results
in. That means not just direct emissions from within this country but also emissions produced
overseas in countries where goods and services are produced specifically for UK consumption.
And it means taking responsibility for our share of emissions from aviation and shipping too.
The second critical goal is to reverse the decline in the state of nature in the UK by 2030,
underpinned by the principles set out by The Leaders' Pledge for Nature.
This includes restoring and expanding natural and cultivated ecosystems,
but also enabling them to act as resilient carbon sinks and regenerative ecosystems.
The bill calls for significant measures to reduce bio-abundance and biodiversity loss,
land degradation, air, soils and water pollution and waste caused by our cycles of consumption,
including the damage to nature along our UK global supply chains.
It ties together the ecological emergency I talked about earlier, with the climate emergency so that
mitigation and adaptation measures can be put in place in a more coordinated way.
Climate and ecology are inextricably interlinked, and if they're not tackled
together, and with equal urgency, then we've got no chance of solving either of them.
Thirdly, the bill gives ordinary folks like you and me a proper say in how we adapt our society
from now on, not only to make sure we recover from the global pandemic in a sustainable way, but also
to ensure we genuinely meet the crucial targets that'll get us back onto the path set out in
the 2015 Paris Agreement, and so lead the world by example when the UK co-hosts the all-important COP
26 Climate Conference in Glasgow this November. This crucial decision making will be achieved
through a mechanism called Climate Assemblies, set up by an expert independent body and involving
groups of randomly selected people from up and down the country, broadly representative of the
population in terms of things like ethnicity, gender, age and socioeconomic status. The groups
would meet over several weeks or months to hear from experts on all sides, debate the issues,
and produce recommendations which would make up the strategy to meet the objectives of the bill.
Parliament will be part of the debate too, so that the overall process will be progressively
democratic. It's not a new idea either. Assemblies like these have been held in the past in Canada
and The Netherlands, and perhaps most notably in Ireland, where they were very successfully used to
broach and resolve the previously politically untouchable issues of same-sex marriage
and abortion. In 2019, France held a Citizens Convention on Climate, to come up with measures
that will enable that country to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030.
And here's where you and I come in. Although it might not feel like it sometimes, members
of the UK parliament work for their constituents. That's the only reason they exist - to represent
you and me. UK residents can email or write to their local constituency MPs, who are obliged to
respond. You can even book an appointment to see them in person! So, why not contact your elected
representative to find out where they stand on the bill? You might think your one voice won't
make any difference, but we're extremely fortunate to live in a democratic society where collective
action is still important, so if an MP suddenly starts getting dozens of letters and phone calls
about a single issue then they do tend to sit up and listen, knowing full well that their
career may be jeopardized at the next election if they ignore the wishes of their voting public.
The contact details for all MPs are freely available at this government website.
I'll leave that link in the description section below this video. I'll also leave a link to the
CEE Bill Alliance Website, where you can get really useful resources like Twitter templates
and information to include in a letter or email. There's also a facility to check if
you've received a standard letter back from your MP, rather than a personal reply, and there's
advice on how to respond to that. At the time of making this program there are a hundred MPs
already publicly backing the bill. The names of those MPs are scrolling across your screen now.
If one of them is your MP then that's fantastic! Maybe send them a quick email to say well done.
But that does leave 550 MPs who are yet to express their support, and there are currently no
Conservative MPs on the list. So if there was ever a time for the Great British public to demonstrate
their collective influencing power, then this surely is it. One of the most common questions
I get asked on this channel is 'what can I do as an individual to lower my carbon footprint?'
Contacting your MP on this issue is one of those things. It'll cost you absolutely nothing, except
a few minutes of your time and it could just make the difference between climate / nature success,
and catastrophic failure. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you soon