The Future We Choose, a new book by the architects of the Paris climate accords, offers contrasting visions for how the world might look in thirty years (read the worst case scenario here)
"It is 2050. We have been successful at halving emissions every decade since 2020. We are heading for a world that will be no more than 1.5C warmer by 2100
In most places in the world, the air is moist and fresh, even in cities. It feels a lot like walking through a forest and very likely this is exactly what you are doing. The air is cleaner than it has been since before the Industrial Revolution. We have trees to thank for that. They are everywhere.
It wasn’t the single solution we required, but the proliferation of trees bought us the time we needed to vanquish carbon emissions. When we started, it was purely practical, a tactic to combat climate crisis by relocating the carbon: the trees took carbon dioxide out of the air, released oxygen and put the carbon back where it belongs, in the soil. This, of course, helped to diminish climate crisis, but the benefits were even greater. On every sensory level, the ambient feeling of living on what has again become a green planet has been transformative, especially in cities.
Reimagining and restructuring cities was crucial to solving the climate challenge puzzle. But further steps had to be taken, which meant that global rewilding efforts had to reach well beyond the cities. The forest cover worldwide is now 50% and agriculture has evolved to become more tree-based. The result is that many countries are unrecognisable, in a good way. No one seems to miss wide-open plains or monocultures. Now we have shady groves of nut and orchards, timber land interspersed with grazing, parkland areas that spread for miles, new havens for our regenerated population of pollinators."
www.theguardian.com/...
Christiana Figueres Karen Christiana Figueres Olsen is a Costa Rican diplomat with 35 years of experience in high level national and international policy and multilateral negotiations. She was appointed Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in July 2010, six months after the failed COP15 in Copenhagen. Wikipedia
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an international environmental treaty adopted on 9 May 1992 and opened for signature at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June 1992. It then entered into force on 21 March 1994, after a sufficient number of countries had ratified it. The UNFCCC objective is to "stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system".[1] The framework sets non-binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions for individual countries and contains no enforcement mechanisms. Instead, the framework outlines how specific international treaties (called "protocols" or "Agreements") may be negotiated to specify further action towards the objective of the UNFCCC.en.m.wikipedia.org/...
When the alarm bells rang in 2020, thanks in large part to the youth movement, we realised that we suffered from too much consumption, competition, and greedy self-interest. Our commitment to these values and our drive for profit and status had led us to steamroll our environment. As a species, we were out of control and the result was the near-collapse of our world.
"We emerged from the climate crisis as more mature members of the community of life, capable of not only restoring ecosystems but also of unfolding our dormant potentials of human strength and discernment. Humanity was only ever as doomed as it believed itself to be. Vanquishing that belief was our true legacy."
• This is an edited extract from The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, published by Manilla Press (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com.
.
On Daily Kos:
The planet is now rapidly moving towards an uninhabitable future... But that future is NOW. Our leaders are not taking this crisis seriously, or taking action, and are thus failing us, and future generations, as well as planet Earth. The end of our present societies means the end of human and animal lives and the potential death of planet Earth. We have little time left to alter our societies, governments, and to prevent this catastrophe happening. Our Methods: Uses of nonviolent resistance to protest against climate chaos, biodiversity loss, and total ecological collapse. inspiration from grassroots movements such as Occupy, Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement, and Extinction Rebellion. To create support worldwide and a sense of urgency, to tackle total ecological breakdown. Protest and Direct Action to deal with the inaction of world governments. Making a commitment to saving the planet, and trying to create a sustainable Green future for all.
To Join:
dailykos.com
(GreenRevolution is the Sister Action group
to Regenerative Culture.
We work in conjunction to help transform our planet
before it is too late.)
=====================================