It’s been seven years in the making, has involved thousands of scientists around the world, and covers topics that I spend most of my day thinking about. But when the IPCC Climate Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability report landed on Monday I still felt a sense of shock. Our burning of coal, oil, and gas has heated the planet by over 1C since pre-industrial periods. 2C of warming was previously thought as the boundary between safe and dangerous climate change. This report tells us that this was wildly over-optimistic.
At 2C, coral reefs are effectively exterminated. Wildfire will rage with greater intensity. Vast swathes of forest risk dying – including the great tropical rainforests. António Guterres, Secretary General of the UN, has dubbed this report an “atlas of human suffering and damning indictment of failed climate leadership“. For millions of people around the world, climate change is already here. It’s already washing away crops, homes, livelihoods, and sometimes lives. What this new report brutally makes clear is that millions will soon become billions. About half of the global population live in areas that are vulnerable to climate change impacts. As warming continues, ever-larger fractions of humanity risk losing everything.
What do we do in response to reports such as these? As an academic who focuses on climate and sustainability, my teaching and research should be helping to keep humanity safe. But it clearly isn’t. Sometimes my wife introduces me by saying, “this is James, he is academic”, which is equal parts amusing and cuttingly true. Reading through the 3,675 pages of the IPCC report I felt increasingly academic. By the end I felt utterly demoralised. All those warnings we have been making over the decades. And all that carbon we have pumped up into the atmosphere regardless.
Is this my academic role now – to report, in ever greater detail, civilisation’s slide into chaos? Current events don’t give much cause for optimism. When we should be mobilising economies to ramp up renewable energy creation, we are instead ploughing billions into weapons and destruction. More blood and treasure will be spilt in Ukraine at a time when what all of humanity desperately needs is cooperation.
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One thing this latest report makes clear is that we cannot entertain any more magical thinking. Everything is not going to be fixed by buying LED lightbulbs or electric cars. The most optimistic scenario the IPCC can paint is one in which warming exceeds 1.5C but then the deployment of machines that can remove vast amounts of carbon dioxide means that temperatures will be brought down by the end of this century. This is currently in the realms of science fiction. Or perhaps dystopian fiction because it risks our civilisation on imagined technological salvation. Who is going to make these machines? How are we going to power them?
For too long, climate change has been framed as a technological or economic issue. But given that fossil fuels touch almost all aspects of our lives, rapidly phasing them out means changing nearly everything. Ensuring that all of humanity – including people yet to be born – are safe and can have good lives will require work across all aspects of society. It’s here that I remain stubbornly optimistic about the role academia can play.
As well as producing vital research about the climate and ecological crisis, we can also be part of the solutions. That’s why I worked as a member of a team to create Faculty for a Future. We believe that academia can have a transformative impact, but unfortunately too much of academia is currently caught up in chasing league tables, tuition fees and funding. If we academics can’t come up with new ways of thinking about how to live sustainably on our home planet, then we need to think very carefully about what is our value to society. That doesn’t mean professors should be protesting out on the streets – although some do. There are many ways that the professional networks, experience, and skills that academics acquire will prove vital when navigation out from our current mess.
The IPCC report has shown us that the time to act is now. Let’s not kid ourselves this will be easy. But it’s not impossible, and I can’t think of anything more important to do with my life as an academic, as a citizen, and perhaps most important of all as a father.
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