WINCHESTER CEE
BILL ALLIANCE

What is the climate emergency and why does it matter?

In 2015, the historic Paris Agreement was signed, holding world governments to keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5°C. As a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018 showed, just that extra half a degree of heating could:

‘...expose tens of millions more people worldwide to life-threatening heat waves, water shortages and coastal flooding. Half a degree may mean the difference between a world with coral reefs and Arctic summer sea ice and a world without them.’

Alarmingly, we are not even on track to limit temperature increases to 2°C. According to the UN, current policies will lead to around 3°C of warming by the end of the century - but it could easily be 4°C or more. These levels of global heating would open us up to unacceptable risks, including the loss of the Amazon rainforest, simultaneous failures of staple crops and multimeter sea level rise. Many scientists believe 4°C would be ‘incompatible with any reasonable characterisation of an organised, equitable and civilised global community’.

There is still time to prevent these catastrophic levels of heating, but only if we are prepared to take unprecedented action now.

What is the ecological emergency and why does it matter?

There has been a massive erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services, such as pollination, food, water resources, flood prevention and decomposition, all essential to civilization and human wellbeing. This ‘biological annihilation’ underlines the crisis for humanity. Indeed, the consequences of human activity outstripping its planetary boundaries have resulted in what scientists now define as the arrival of the sixth mass extinction. The scientific evidence is irrefutable as scientists have warned of looming ecological collapse if policy-makers fail to take emergency action.

Whilst this is the global perspective, the State of Nature report, 2019 on the UK’s biodiversity states:

• 41% of all UK’s species have declined since the 70s (hedgehogs have declined by 95%)

• 26% of the UK's mammals are at a very real risk of becoming extinct

• A third of the wild bees and hoverfly species have sustained losses, likely due to pesticides, habitat loss and climate change

• 97% of the UK’s wildflower meadows have been lost in the last century

Why ecological collapse matters is captured in the single reality that our biodiversity is the steward of our life support systems.

Isn’t the UK already taking steps to address the crises? Why is 2050 too late?

According to the UN IPCC’s 2018 report, ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ are needed if we are to stand a chance at limiting global warming to 1.5°C.

If global emissions of carbon dioxide are halved by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050, it gives us a roughly 50:50 chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C, according to the IPCC. The Climate Change Committee (CCC), which advises the UK Government, has taken this recommendation and applied 2050 as an appropriate net zero target for greenhouse gas emissions in the UK. However, any serious consideration of equity, as enshrined in the Paris agreement, shows that the UK needs to reduce emissions faster, by at least a factor of two.

In May last year, MPs passed a motion declaring a climate emergency. This, along with the Climate Change Act 2008 (2050 Target Amendment) Order, seemingly calls for urgent action, yet this took place over a year ago.

Since then, the CCC’s 2020 Government progress report has said that “policy implementation has not yet met the required ambition”. Hence, we are not even on track for the current 2050 Net zero target.