[ CLIMATE CHANGE ]
[ Why is climate change happening so fast? ]
Allo! It’s me again.
Johora singaporensis, the Singapore freshwater crab, better known as Jo.
I’m still here.
But for how much longer, who knows?
In the last episode, I talked about what climate change is.
Now I want to talk about why it’s happening so fast.
Levels of carbon dioxide from natural things like volcanic eruptions or decomposition,
have been rising and falling for millions of years.
This time it’s different.
Levels of bad-boy blanket gases are rising very fast,
sticking around and already making life very unpleasant.
In 2019, Singaporeans sweated through the hottest temperature ever recorded.
Phew!
But before you switch on the air-con, be aware that energy for buildings, industry and transportation contributes nearly 75% of bad-boy blanket gases.
The other 25% is mainly due to agriculture and food production.
Livestock like cattle and applying fertilisers for crops, release bad-boy blanket gases
such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
What’s more, over 90% of all food eaten in Singapore is imported.
Transported by planes, ships and vehicles from as far away as Europe and the Americas.
All burning fossil fuels, and swiftly turning good-guy greenhouse gases into bad-boy blanket gases.
Crabs like me are tiny. There aren’t many of us and we don’t eat very much.
You might not fancy my diet of soggy worms and leaves, but it’s ecological and great for recycling forest nutrients.
But you humans are bigger and there are 7.8 billion of you,
munching a whopping 5,000 tonnes of food, every minute of every day.
To meet this enormous demand for food, more land and forests are being cut down, cleared and converted to agriculture.
In the past 10 years, an area 2,000 times bigger than Singapore
has been cleared to make way for crops, livestock, buildings and raw materials like wood or palm oil.
When we lose our forests animals like me lose our homes.
Orangutans in Borneo have watched helplessly as half of their forest homes have been torn down to make way for oil palm plantations and industrial agriculture.
Sad for an animal whose name means “person of the forest”.
Forests contribute to removing 1/3 of carbon emissions.
This is done during photosynthesis.
And when we lose our forests, we lose our biggest ally in the battle against bad-boy blanket gases.
And all of this deforestation is completely unnecessary, because the world’s farmers already produce enough food
to feed the entire human population, one and a half times over.
The problem is that the food isn’t being fairly distributed.
About 2/3 of people eat too much while about 1/3 of people go to bed hungry.
In fact, nearly 1/3 of food produced worldwide is thrown away or spoilt before it can be consumed.
And here are some other shocking facts to chew over...
Consumption habits of 10% of the world’s richest people
make up half of the bad-boy blanket gases that contribute to global warming.
While the world's poorest people contribute only 10%, but suffer the most from the effects of climate change.
Singapore may be a tiny country with a relatively small population,
but our individual carbon footprint is among the highest in the world.
So we’re all contributing to global warming and we should all help to slow it down.
We can start by reducing the amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere
and stop the bad-boy blanket gases from doing even more damage.
Turn up the air-con temperature or use a fan,
don’t waste water
and only eat or drink what you really need.
Our combined efforts can make a difference.
And together we can help fight climate change!