Individual action won't achieve 1.5℃ warming - social change is needed, as history shows

October 10, 2018 6.07am EDT



Following the 2015 Paris Agreement to hold the global increase in climate to below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was asked to produce a report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5℃. The report focuses on what must be done if we want to avoid warming above 1.5℃, and the difference between 1.5℃ and 2℃ warming. The general message is that the ecological and social impacts of 1.5℃ are significantly more manageable than 2℃ – half a degree of warming is a big deal.

The IPCC thinks we still have a chance of keeping warming to 1.5℃. But current nationally determined pledges to take action to reduce warming, when combined, are emphatically “not on track to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”. The window of opportunity is small and shrinking – perhaps 12 years before a 1.5℃ target is unattainable, assuming in the meantime there is concerted global action to rapidly scale back carbon emissions. Without that action “researchers find very few (if any) ways to reduce emissions after 2030 sufficiently quickly to limit warming to 1.5°C”.

The report is also pretty explicit in claiming that “unprecedented changes” are required to limit warming to 1.5℃. The language is dry and technical, so it’s easy to be lulled into a techno-fix mindset. For example, the required “system transitions” can be “enabled” by “an increase of adaptation and mitigation investments, policy instruments, the acceleration of technological innovation and behaviour changes”.

But look closer, and in an important sense, the IPCC report is all about change and upheaval, especially for the well-off citizens of the developed nations. But it is change on a scale we have never experienced before: “There is no historical precedent for the scale of the necessary transitions, in particular in a socially and economically sustainable way.”

https://theconversation.com/individual-action-wont-achieve-1-5-warming-social-change-is-needed-as-history-shows-104643