UN report on climate change

New Delhi: Unless human beings rapidly alter land use patterns and dietary habits, the world will not be able to avert a climate crisis, the latest report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned.

Even more dire is the report’s stress on the fact that such a crisis would happen even if fossil fuel emissions are cut according to terms agreed upon in the Paris climate agreement of 2015, unless our ties with food and land change.

Human activity directly affects over 70% of the global ice-free land surface. Deforestation, agriculture and other land use activities now account for 23% of the total human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Since 1961, the per capita supply of vegetable oil and meat has more than doubled. About 30% of the total food produced is wasted.

These factors contribute to significant greenhouse gas emissions, the report said.

The global population is using land and freshwater resources at an ‘unprecedented’ rate with agriculture accounting for about 70% of global fresh water use. In addition to increased greenhouse gas emissions, this has led to the loss of natural ecosystems and biodiversity and has speeded up the process of land degradation and desertification which are already exacerbated due to climate change.

The first UN report in this series had made a grim prediction of rising global temperature. Photo: Craig ONeal/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The report has also found that the rate of soil erosion is up to 100 times higher than the rate of soil formation on lands that are being tilled and up to 20 times higher on lands that are not being tilled.

Also read | It’s Raining Sand: How Anantapur Came to Resemble a Desert

This problem becomes particularly acute because climate change causes more land degradation and more land degradation in turn results in more climate change. As land degrades, its ability to absorb carbon dioxide reduces, which in turn fuels climate change.

The IPCC report, approved by members of the UN, focuses on land and is the second in a series of special focus reports of the panel.

The first report, released in October last year, warned that the world is warming faster than was previously thought and that a global temperature rise of 1.5° Celsius is likely between 2030 and 2052.

Forests act as carbon sinks by absorbing carbon dioxide. Photo: Clive Varley/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Unsustainable use of land worsening matters

The latest IPCC report has argued that the rise in global warming as a result of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions is, in part, a result of the unsustainable use of land for agriculture, forestry and livestock rearing.

Loss of forest cover has also contributed to the crisis. Forests act as carbon sinks by absorbing it from the air and reducing the impact of carbon emission on global temperatures.

Also read: New Carbon Dioxide Emissions Data Shakes up Our Vision of Earth’s Future

Increased consumption of meat too has added to the problem. The supply of meat depends on the use of land for livestock grazing and cultivation of animal feed. As more land is cleared for these, deforestation increases.

This, in turn, means that absorption of carbon from the air reduces, leaving it in the atmosphere and adding to global warming. To make matters worse, the animals themselves emit another greenhouse gas – methane.

Consequently, the IPCC has recommended a change in dietary habits. “Balanced diets featuring plant-based foods, such as coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, and animal-sourced food produced sustainably in low greenhouse gas emission systems, present major opportunities for adaptation to and limiting climate change,” said Debra Roberts, co-chair of the IPCC’s working group two.

To help combat global warming, afforestation needs to happen at a faster rate than deforestation. Photo: World Resources Institute/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Land as an ally

Amidst the gloom, the IPCC has also seen some light in the capacity of land to act as an ally in the fight against climate change. “Sustainable land management can contribute to reducing the negative impacts of multiple stressors, including climate change, on ecosystems and societies,” it said. While land is a source, it is also a sink of greenhouse gases.

But the world’s current land use patterns will have to change for it to stand a chance of staying ‘well below’ 2° Celsius of global warming, as was envisaged in the Paris agreement.

Afforestation, for example, can help combat climate change by absorbing and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon is stored in tree trunks, roots, branches and leaves. More forests will mean that the earth’s ability to sequester carbon dioxide will increase.

But for this to happen, afforestation would need to take place at a rate faster than deforestation. Current patterns, however, are worrying. The Amazon rainforest – the world’s largest tropical forest – is being cut at an alarming rate. Deforestation in the part of the rainforest contained in Brazil increased 88% between June 2019 and 2018.

Also read: What the UN Can Do to Stop Brazil’s Rapid Deforestation

Restoration of peatlands is critical as they can sequester carbon for centuries, the report said. It has also argued that increased food productivity, more climate friendly dietary choices and reduction of food wastage can reduce the demand for more land to be used for the purposes of supplying food. Potentially, this could also free up land that can then be used to implement other strategies of combating climate change.

Desertification has stood in the way of curtailing carbon emission. Photo: Reuters

The report sees another benefit in ‘avoiding, reducing and reversing’ desertification as doing this would ‘enhance soil fertility, increase carbon storage in soils and biomass, while benefitting agricultural productivity and food security.’

“There is real potential here through more sustainable land use, reducing over consumption and waste of food, eliminating the clearing and burning of forests, preventing over harvesting of fuelwood, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, thus helping to address land-related climate change issues,” said Panmao Zhai, co-chair of the IPCC’s working group one.

This potential can be realised only if the world acts now. The more time taken to act, the more carbon will be released into the atmosphere, which in turn will need larger amounts of land to sequester the additional carbon.

Not only that, land may well turn to an adversary from an ally. Increased emissions will lead to ‘irreversible impacts on some ecosystems’ which could in turn mean substantial additional greenhouse gas emissions from those eco systems, thereby accelerating climate change.

The report also makes it clear that acting on sustainable land use alone will not solve the problem. Reducing fossil fuel emissions remains key.

Netflix recently released a new nature documentary series, Our Planet, and its bland title is only the first indication that it is attempting to compete with the BBC’s popular Planet Earth and Blue Planet series. As with those shows, it too has soothing narration by David Attenborough, and it likewise involves the editing down of unimaginable hours of nature footage into narratives neat enough for humans to consume. The producers of all three series also seem to have concluded that the easiest way to make plants and particularly fungus compelling is to present them in a very fast time lapse. (They’re right!)

The biggest difference between the shows is that Our Planet is unnervingly explicit about humans’ impact on Earth and its creatures. While the BBC series tend to save any discussion of climate change and human devastation for the end of episodes or, more often, the last episode of each season, in Our Planet, the narrative beat “… and we’re destroying them” seems to recur in every segment.

This makes for a dramatically different viewing experience—a profoundly uncomfortable one—and since “profoundly uncomfortable” isn’t really what most people are going for when they watch TV, it’s not surprising to me that a bunch of people I know who have started the series have ended up abandoning it midway through. It’s easy to lap up Planet Earth’s servings of wonder. Our Planet is asking us to do something tougher: stare at destruction, and reckon with our share of the blame.

In different circumstances, I might be inclined to be slightly judgmental of the choice to turn Our Planet off—we should all look more directly at the consequences of our actions. But it’s hard to argue that Our Planet is the best way to do that. In May, the UN released the first iteration of its latest report on how human beings are screwing up the planet, taking an expansive view of all types of human-driven harms, from land use to pollution to climate change, and concluding, as the New York Times summarised in its headline, that “humans are speeding extinction and altering the natural world at an ‘unprecedented’ pace.”

Also read: Scientists Warn of a Looming Mass Extinction of Species

This follows October’s terrifying report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the one that teens have been using as their evidence that we have just 12 years to turn this ship around before things get really bad. (This is not exactly accurate—we both have less and more than 12 years to act, as one of that report’s authors recently clarified in a smart essay.) But either way, the broad takeaway is basically that the world’s scientists are banding together to issue extreme warnings that our current course of action is unsustainable. They’re deploying increasingly hyperbolic language in the hopes of jolting governing bodies and regular people into action, because they think that it’s warranted given the size of the threat.

The question is whether their alarm-ringing is working. Given the sheer scale of the warning and the apparently insufficient response, it seems like the answer is “nope.” (The fact that lots of people can’t even get through Our Planet is maybe another indication of this disconnect.)

But one thing that struck me while reading the valiant efforts of journalists attempting to convey the gravity of the scale of the UN report (a 1,500-page document that its authors distilled into a 40-page summary, which reporters had to distil into a normal-size news story), is the sheer impossibility of that task. “Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded,” Brad Plumer’s Times story begins. Where do you even go from there?

Where Plumer goes from there is an attempt to explain the massive scale of the problem in a way that might allow us to see the full, devastating picture. He attempts to demonstrate the utility of a functioning planet by summarising the assumed monetary value it currently provides (“in the Americas, nature provides some $24 trillion of non-monetised benefits to humans each year”). He explains how individual problems cascade into bigger problems, noting how the degradation of bees ends up hurting the food supply, and how the loss of coral reefs and mangroves eliminates a natural buffer against flooding.

He summarises the sheer volume of species in danger—we’re risking “the disappearance of 40% of amphibian species, one-third of marine mammals and one-third of reef-forming corals” along with 500,000 land species—while still zooming in on the plight of some crowd favourites, like the orangutan, whose habitat has been devastated by palm oil farming. Like most of the stories out there on the report, it was a valiant effort to economically convey the scale of the problem.

The attempt reminds me of Our Planet, and not just because the show features a particularly devastating sequence on the orangutan’s plight. Rather, both the UN report and Our Planet perfectly highlight the futility of any endeavour of “getting people to care about nature.” The sheer numbers are too overwhelming for most of us to internalise. The individual stories are too depressing for most of us to keep watching or reading. If you can neither zoom in nor zoom out, what else can you do?

One answer, maybe, can be found in a subtler argument put forth by the UN report. Despite its endless recitations of how many types of species are being harmed and how much abundance we have already lost, the crux of the report’s urgency is derived from its acknowledgement that the degradation of nature is not simply a problem of nature—though it certainly is that—but a problem of ours. Our impact on the planet quite literally threatens our ability to survive and prosper.

Also read: Study Suggests There May Be No Tigers in the Sundarbans by 2070

That’s why, as Plumer summarises, “the authors note that the devastation of nature has become so severe that piecemeal efforts to protect individual species or to set up wildlife refuges will no longer be sufficient.” This is correct, though I would go further—piecemeal efforts to protect individual species or to conserve swaths of land have never been enough. Conceiving of nature as something separate that ought to be preserved, rather than the foundation of our lives, is how we got here. For far too long, we’ve operated under a misguided assumption that the responsibility to care for nature can be cordoned off under the header of “environmentalism,” a good thing to do if we can manage it. But this isn’t about altruism. It’s about necessity.

I think that we are starting to understand this, sort of. The idea of necessity is what provides the clear and easy justification for the climate strikes. It’s why we’re starting to see economic stakeholders become more and more upfront about the importance of taking action on emissions. It’s also the argument behind the Green New Deal—that not taking action is hurting us, and we need to do something about it for our own good. It’s true that, in the story of climate change, we are the villain. But we’re also the victim. The first fact helps explain why watching a show like Our Planet sucks. The second fact helps explain why, even if we haven’t figured out exactly how to convey the scale, or how to tell this story in a way that doesn’t prompt some of us to turn away, the message is finally starting to sink in.

This piece was originally published on Future Tense, a partnership between Slate magazine, Arizona State University, and New America.

Tag: UN report on climate change

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