By Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Before COVID-19 crashed into our world, governments (click here) had two major crises to tackle: the oil price crash and the climate crisis. Now that three crises have converged, so too can the path through them. We can rebuild clean and healthy with trillions of dollars of stimulus, transitioning away from fossil fuels to clean infrastructure and industries that create millions of jobs, overcome deep social inequalities and create a thriving economy.
In our book, The Future We Choose, we outline two possible futures; one where we act to halve emissions in this decade, and the one imagined in extract below, if we fail.
It is 2050. Beyond the emissions reductions registered in 2015, no further efforts were made to control emissions. We are heading for a world that will be more than 3 degrees warmer by 2100.
The first thing that hits you is the air.
In many places around the world, the air is hot, heavy, and depending on the day, clogged with particulate pollution. Your eyes often water. Your cough never seems to disappear. You can no longer simply walk out your front door and breathe fresh air. Instead, before opening doors or windows in the morning, you check your phone to see what the air quality will be. Everything might look fine—sunny and clear—but you know better. When storms and heat waves overlap and cluster, the air pollution and intensified surface ozone levels can make it dangerous to go outside without a specially designed face mask (which only some can afford).
Our world is getting hotter, an irreversible development now utterly beyond our control. We have already passed tipping points, like The Great Melting of the Arctic sea ice, which used to reflect the sun’s heat. Oceans, forests, plants, trees, and soil had for many years absorbed half the carbon dioxide we spewed out. Now there are few forests left, most of them either logged or consumed by wildfire, and the permafrost is belching greenhouse gases into an already overburdened atmosphere....
It is 2050. Beyond the emissions reductions registered in 2015, no further efforts were made to control emissions. We are heading for a world that will be more than 3 degrees warmer by 2100.
The first thing that hits you is the air.
In many places around the world, the air is hot, heavy, and depending on the day, clogged with particulate pollution. Your eyes often water. Your cough never seems to disappear. You can no longer simply walk out your front door and breathe fresh air. Instead, before opening doors or windows in the morning, you check your phone to see what the air quality will be. Everything might look fine—sunny and clear—but you know better. When storms and heat waves overlap and cluster, the air pollution and intensified surface ozone levels can make it dangerous to go outside without a specially designed face mask (which only some can afford).
Our world is getting hotter, an irreversible development now utterly beyond our control. We have already passed tipping points, like The Great Melting of the Arctic sea ice, which used to reflect the sun’s heat. Oceans, forests, plants, trees, and soil had for many years absorbed half the carbon dioxide we spewed out. Now there are few forests left, most of them either logged or consumed by wildfire, and the permafrost is belching greenhouse gases into an already overburdened atmosphere....
