Developed nations are waking up to climate change, but the rest of the world has felt climate…
2020 has felt like an apocalyptic novel — a pandemic, record heat waves, intense storms, raging wildfires.
2020 has felt like an apocalyptic novel — a pandemic, record heat waves, intense storms, raging wildfires.
People have joked (or seriously believe) that this is the end. NASA even said an asteroid could strike Earth before election day in the United States.
But this is what climate scientists have been warning us about for decades, so why are we surprised? It’s pretty simple: Climate change is here and now, and developed nations are just now waking up to the reality of compounding climate disasters.
“For so long in studying climate change, we’re studying the future,” said Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, in a recent interview with CNN. “And now the future is here.”
The U.S. is in a record Atlantic hurricane season and fire season. Earlier this summer, Eastern Europe saw devastating floods amid a pandemic. And last year, Australia had record heat, droughts, and bushfires.
This isn’t the first time developed countries have seen compounding disasters, but things are obviously getting worse. And most of the world has been coping with this reality for years.
In fact, 10% of the Earth’s surface already faces life-altering climate change impacts. Parts of the Philippines have seen a 16.9–19.3% increase in rainfall over two decades, while droughts have intensified in the western part of the country. Just last year, a heatwave in India killed 137 people, followed by floods and heavy monsoon rains that displaced millions.
Much of the developed world is unaware of these impacts, though. A study published in July found that coordinated global reporting is lacking, and research and tracking of climate change impacts are biased toward developed countries.
But just because these disasters aren’t reported as much, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. And the consequences of that ignorance can be deadly, especially for the already poor and vulnerable communities that have disproportionately faced impacts of climate change for years.
“We have seen continuous natural disasters taking place across the globe,” climate activists Greta Thunberg, Luisa Neubauer, Anuna de Wever, and Adélaïde Charlier wrote in The Guardian last month. “Yet, when it comes to action, we are still in a state of denial. The gap between what we need to do and what’s actually being done is widening by the minute.”
We can’t keep kicking the can down the road. Climate change is here, has been here, and will only get worse the longer we ignore it.
In 2016, a commentary in the journal Nature (signed by 22 notable climate scientists) warned that policy changes made in the next few years “are likely to result in changes to Earth’s climate system measured in millennia rather than human lifespans.” Four years later, emissions are still rising and many countries are ignoring or completely denying the problem.
Europe seems to be stepping up its game. Earlier this year, the European Union pledged a record 550 billion euros over the next seven years as a part of its green recovery plan. It’s unfortunate that it took a pandemic, as well as compounding climate disasters, to force this deal, but it does show that countries are capable of climate action.
Millions of people have been facing climate change impacts for years. It’s about time we work together to do something about it.