Honey-Eater

Bean enjoys a teaspoon of honey every couple of days. She's getting a wee bit extra while she has an ear infection, because surely it will help her mend. That's what she tells me anyway...


The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its latest report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability earlier in the week. 

The report is over 3000 pages and ’ve only read various summaries, but the message is clear: we have little – if any – time left to mitigate climate change effectively, and we need to start adapting to it very fast.
 
Mitigation: the action of reducing the severity, seriousness, or painfulness of something.
 
Adaptation: the process of change by which an organism or species becomes better suited to its environment.
 
Despite what it may feel like in Europe right now, the climate crisis remains the most existential threat that we have to face at the moment, but it runs the risk of being put on the back-burner (pun intended) while the world tries to deal with Putin and his cronies.
 
We can’t afford to stop thinking about – and acting upon – the irrevocable increase in climate instability. We are all being impacted already. And this is just the beginning.
 
To understand the issues a bit more I signed up for a zoom conference organised by the Royal Society Te Aparangi : “Te Aroha ki a Papatūānuku Love for our World - Public hui on climate change”. It was fascinating, as well as confronting.
 
The main things I took from it were:
·         We are not all in this together. About 3.5 billion people worldwide are in climate change hotspots and are already being affected significantly, and they tend to be lower income and vulnerable populations.
·         The impacts are magnified in cities, where more than 50% of the world’s population lives. And those impacts are magnified even more in cities close to the sea. (Interesting fact: in NZ more than 65% of the population lives within five kilometres of the sea.)
·         Progress to adapt to climate change is uneven and nowhere is it fast enough. There are plenty of plans, but there has been very little action.
·         ¼ of the funding available for climate change initiatives is being spent on adaptation, with ¾ is being spent on mitigation which is becoming increasingly irrelevant because of the speed of change.
·         Whilst the importance of ‘climate resilient development’ has been increasingly recognised as being essential in the past decade at all levels of government throughout the world, the speed of climate change is challenging current thinking about what is actually ‘climate resilient’.
·         More work is urgently needed to identify anticipatory responses to climate change, rather than the reactive mode which most decision makers have adopted.
·         There is a need to move away from short term profit to medium- to long-term resilience and survival mechanisms.
 
I would love to know how these messages can be communicated to each and every person on the planet in a way that helps them understand the existential risk of ignoring them. For ignoring them is what the vast majority of humanity is doing. 
 
Existential risks: risks that threaten the destruction of humanity's long-term potential i.e. our ability to exist.
 
It wasn’t the most cheerful way to spend a Friday morning, but I do feel better informed. Forewarned is forearmed after all.