More than 80 large fires...
at least ten large fires
Impact of climate change…
2021 is a make-or-break year
[Spanish] red alert for climate change.
three,
two,
one,
What a year.
there were so many fires and floods,
protests,
and thanks to COVID, not a lot of meetings
except for COP26.
Every year I come up with
New Year's resolutions and try…
to do them.
And I thought, why not come up
with some resolutions for the climate:
the goals, the promises,
and the realities?
You remember Laurie, right?
Well, since I last spoke to her,
I thought I'd ask her what
we should all pay attention to
when it comes to the climate
in the year ahead.
We've got a lot of pledges now.
They're actually covering
90% of the global economy,
which is fantastic.
But a lot of those
pledges are voluntary,
and they're going to need
to be turned into reality,
and very quickly.
Mid-century is not fast
enough to take action.
We know we need action by 2030.
We need to halve the amount of emissions
that we're creating by then.
So this stuff has to happen this year
and then the very
quickly coming next years.
It's not just the money
in some climate funds,
it's all the money out there
now needs to be climate-smart.
Do you know that every year,
the IMF estimates
there's $6 trillion
of fossil fuel subsidies
around the world?
If we were to get rid of those,
that will funnel money
into national budgets
to try to make some of these changes
and really get things going.
So one really interesting
thing that happened late last year
at the COP26 meeting
was that they announced
they're going to spend
$8.5 billion in the coming years
to help South Africa
transition to a green economy.
And so this is a kind of
really interesting project
that might work,
and we hope,
that if this works in South Africa,
it may be expanded to other countries
that are also dependent on coal,
like Indonesia or maybe India.
So I think what we'll do
is we'll go to commercial break
and we will be right back.
Please Brie. Don't cut away.
Let's let's look up.
Seriously!
We see the heatwaves, the floods,
the fires, the storms
that are becoming bad everywhere.
There's nobody that's sitting
well away from these now.
And the thing is,
the cost of these disasters
is falling on the people who often
who are least able to pay it.
Bangladeshi people
that have been displaced
by flooding and other impacts
and are trying to deal
with these pressures,
they're spending $2 billion
a year out of their own pocket
to deal with it.
That's twelve times
as much as they get from
international finance.
US local economies and businesses
will face tens of billions of dollars
in losses from floods alone in 2022.
There's a really strong argument
that it should be
the developed countries
that have created most of this problem
through their use of fossil fuels
over the years [who pay these costs].
But a really interesting thing
happened late last year.
Scotland, which hosted
the UN climate talks
in Glasgow, gave £1 million
to an initial loss and damage fund.
They're the first country ever
to contribute money to this.
It's a tiny amount,
but it might help other people
start thinking about doing this
and just kind of open the gates
to more of the funding
that we really need to see, to help
the most vulnerable people.
What was that?
It's been four misfires
and the sink was off.
Okay.
We're all fine.
Everyone's fine.
No, because it doesn't work out!
There's not like some
happy tech solution at the end
that solves it.
If you ignore it, it doesn't go away.
It's exactly this.
It's going to hit all of us
and we're just deciding
how hard it's going to hit right now
because if we act,
it'll be less hard.
And if we don't, it's
you know, very bad.
Let us know in the comments
below what you want to know
about the climate in 2022.
Don't forget to hit the like button
and subscribe to our channel, and
thanks so much for watching.