Climate change, climate change, climate change,
climate change is now rapid, widespread and intensifying.
The year is 2081.
You get up from bed and pour your artificial coffee.
You wonder what real coffee used to taste like.
Oh, no... You're late again.
Time to run out and also put on that damn mask.
It's been really annoying to wear one since the start of the COVID 77 pandemic.
All jokes aside, what does the world around you actually look like?
Is the weather chaotic? Are cities under water?
And is there any wilderness left?
In this video, we're exploring how life on earth could look like
in 60 years time that many of us could actually live to experience.
Well, run you through the existing research and the latest climate reports
to try and answer these questions and make seven key predictions
on how life on Earth might look like in 2081.
Hi Everyone, I am Duarte and welcome to Mossy Earth.
If you're new here, this is a space where we explore ideas and solutions
that help fight climate change and stop the loss of biodiversity.
And then go ahead and implement the strangest and most exciting of those
ideas through our Mossy Earth membership and our on the ground rewilding projects.
If that sounds interesting to you.
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Now let's get into it.
Let's start by looking at something that affects you on a daily basis, the weather.
The first thing you might notice is the difference
in temperature, depending on how well we do in the next few decades.
In 2081, you can expect the global temperature average to be between a degree
and a half to three degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial levels.
A great way to visualise this are the results of a study published
in Nature that looked at how some cities will feel like in 60 years,
San Francisco may feel like Los Angeles and New York may be more like Arkansas.
This might sound pleasant if you hate the cold, snowy winters in New York.
But there is a bit more to it.
These temperature increases bring about drastic changes to our living environment
and lead to a significant destabilisation of weather patterns,
resulting in an increase in the likelihood of extreme weather events.
That is more extreme and frequent heat waves, droughts and wildfires,
as well as extreme rainfall, cyclones and floods to bring in some research data.
Let's have a look at the latest IPCC report.
In it the authors estimate
that extreme events that used to happen once every 10 years
will be occurring almost every year or at least every other year.
As an example, we just need to look at this summer, the conditions for wildfires
in Greece and Turkey and the extreme floods in northern Europe
can be expected to happen every couple of years.
And a hurricane like Katrina could be expected to make landfall
multiple times in a decade.
That is chaos in 2081.
Extreme weather will rule our lives and we will have to adapt to that new reality.
This means better forecasting systems, better houses
and better infrastructure will be essential to survival.
This leads me to the next question.
What does all of this change mean for wildlife and biodiversity?
If you think about the changes we discussed earlier, an ecosystem
in San Francisco might, in the space of a few years, get the weather of LA.
Imagine what this can do to all the small and fragile natural processes
that lead to an equilibrium within these wild ecosystems.
Many species might adapt.
Some will migrate, but many others will simply go extinct.
This U.N. report estimates that, in 2081, up to a fifth of the Earth
will have undergone a transformation from one ecosystem type to another.
Meaning that 18 percent of insects, 16 percent of plants and eight
percent of vertebrates, well, they've lost more
than half of their geographic range due to temperature increases
at a global temperature increase of two degrees Celsius.
Ninety nine percent of all coral reefs will be gone for good.
Let that fact sink in for a little bit.
That is all coral reefs gone within our lifetime.
All of this is only due to temperature increases.
It does not account for all the other wonderful stuff that we do if we continue
to deforest overfish and pollute ecosystems at the rate we currently are.
We could be dealing with a mass extinction of millions of species
and the full collapse of our natural ecosystem
that is them the animals and not you or me.
So what does that mean for our lives in 2081?
For me, seeing the forests
and oceans devoid of life as I know it will be depressing.
It's bad enough as it is, but I definitely would not want
to trade this for a future that looks more like Blade Runner.
We will see fewer insects, flowers and birds and even those creatures
we rarely get to see, such as a wolf, a lynx or a shark.
In 2081, this will make us feel sad and depressed
and potentially resentful of the past.
But there's a lot more to this.
How will the human population be doing as a whole, 10 billion
and 690 million humans?
That is a lot of people.
It represents a 40 percent increase from our current level.
India is now the most populous country on earth, followed by China
and then Nigeria, along with other pressures.
This population increase will make life complicated for us.
It's simply less space and more mouths to feed.
The good news is that based on our current fertility rates,
this global population growth will start to slow down and flatten
by 2100 and perhaps even go down a bit in the next century.
The sea level will have risen somewhere
between 50 to 80 centimeters, displacing millions of people.
Poverty and inequality are expected to increase in more vulnerable
populations, particularly due to extreme weather
and what it does to the stability of agricultural systems.
The increase in temperatures
will also lead to the increase in the spread of vector borne diseases
such as malaria and dengue fever that kill millions every year from this point on.
There are so many implications that we could theorize
on that it is practically impossible to make scientifically accurate predictions.
War over resources, the collapse and rise of new nations, genocide and famine.
Who knows what happens when we opened Pandora's box?
However, I want to make one last bold prediction,
not based on a scientific report, but on my own gut feeling.
I firmly believe that no matter how bad things look right now,
we have it in us to persevere and then to ultimately succeed at this task.
As a society, we can decarbonize our economies by cleaning up our energy
grid, finding better ways to manufacture goods
at better means of transport and better ways to build our houses.
We can reduce our impact on the surrounding natural ecosystems
and bring back large scale wilderness areas to give biodiversity
some space and a shot at avoiding extinction.
There will be ten point six billion people here in 2081.
We will get to shape what that world looks like.
And I believe we can craft a future that provides for all of us in a fair way.
But it will require me and you to take up the challenge and rise to the occasion.
I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor.