Climate change – the precipice looking at us

Last week I participated in a very interesting conversation about climate change at the Social Good Brasil Festival, when I had the honor of interacting with Natalie Unterstell, president of Talanoa - International Institute of Public Policy, Ricardo Galvão, professor at the University of São Paulo's Physics Institute (IF-USP) and former director of the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) and Silvia Luz, executive director of Social Good Brasil.

As a support for my talk, I have drafted the points below, which I would like to share. These are my answers to the two motivating questions:

Why do we need to talk about climate change?

Because climate change is the biggest threat to human life on Earth!

Look: I'm not talking about life in general, but selfishly I mean human life itself. My hope is to see if, at least in this respect, people who are still skeptical or denial about humanity's role in climate change finally open their eyes.

It is human life that is directly at risk.

That’s because, in fact, life is very resilient. Just think that planet Earth has already gone through some mass extinction events. In the most extreme case, that of the Permian, around 250 million years ago, it is estimated that around 96% of the species existing on the planet have disappeared. All life on the planet today is therefore heir to the 4% that remained at that time – and that was even before dinosaurs dominated the planet for more than 100 million years, until they were extinguished by an event beyond their control.

This UN video brings a message from the dinosaurs to us. We need to hear the voice of experience:

We, homo sapiens, on the other hand, have gone from hunter-gatherers to the realm of agriculture, thereby laying the foundations for what we understand by civilization, just 12,000 years ago – the millionth of the blink of an eye's time, in terms of the planetary timeline.

Yet, we are creating the conditions for a new process of mass extinction of life. In fact, we are already the promoters of several species extinctions, but the impact of industrialization and our consumption habits are affecting the delicate balance of the planet to a point where our very survival is at risk.

Here comes an additional point: it is no longer possible to talk about “future generations”, this kind of abstract concept that was so fashionable until a few years ago. The impact is already felt today, here and now. Even those people who are in their 50s, if they manage to maintain their average life expectancy and reach 75 or 80 years of age, they will see, and feel in their skin, the consequences of climate change, translated into increasingly more extreme, surprising, and destructive weather events. Imagine who is now 30 years old or 10 years old? What will these people, our children or grandchildren, feel and experience as a result of climate change?

In other words, it is we, living today on planet Earth, who will witness the beginning and consequences of this global disaster.

Unfortunately, reversing the effects of our impact on the planet will take many decades. Therefore, there is no more room for extension. The time to act is today.

How can we act daily to help solve this great social problem?

The truth is that translating this sense of emergency into people's daily lives is still not an easy task. In this sense, we are learning in the worst possible way - with extreme weather events playing the role of drawing in our faces the consequences of our actions on the planet. Heavy rains and floods in Germany, New York, China; sandstorms in Brazil’s countryside; forest fires burning millions of hectares in Australia, California, and Portugal; Siberia literally melting under a historic heat wave, and so on. Scenes from a Hollywood catastrophe movie happening before our eyes.

At COP26, taking place this week in Glasgow, Scotland, political leaders once again gather to debate the results of the IPCC's latest report with a global snapshot of climate science validating what nature has already drawn for us all. Is the political leadership that we have now on the planet equal to the historic moment in which we are living, as a species? My pessimistic side tells me to go in the direction of doubt, but I continue to believe that a combination of individual and collective actions can generate important pressure to move political leaders beyond the point of inertia.

It's important to keep in mind that individual actions are important but insufficient. They must be combined with permanent, systematic, and strategic pressure on governments and companies.

In this sense, acting has these two aspects:

(1) Individual action, in which we ask ourselves every day: what can I do today, in my daily life, to fight climate change? We need concrete, feasible actions that we can implement in our lives – and thus stimulate and serve as an example for the people around us. It is the power of exponential network mobilization that translates, in practice, the idea that we are the others of others. That is, we are the example for others to be inspired and follow. Here are some simple actions that can be carried out on a day-to-day basis, but which can have an effective impact if done en masse, by many people.

(2) Collective action, in which we join with others to pressure and move those who have the power to produce structural changes, whether within governments or large companies. Collective and collaborative action - more than a strategy - becomes urgent precisely because there is no more time to waste. The paths to be taken collectively are many, followed by youth movements, including the mobilization of original populations, racial or gender identity movements, environmentalists, and even mobilizations for the disinvestment in fossil fuels. What is important is the collective focus of pressure on the status quo, on those who have the power to change the course of the Titanic, now that we are on the verge of ramming the iceberg.

We're all on the edge of the precipice – and it's looking at us.