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Ten solutions to climate change that will actually make a difference

Jun 20, 2022

Man inspecting his papaya fruits on his farm (seeds provided by Concern).

At this point we need solutions bigger than any one person. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

There are a lot of differing opinions on whether it's too late to climate change — and, if it's not the best way of going about it. Some say recycling is useless and that individual action means nothing against the larger policy reforms that need to happen. This is, in part, true — although you should absolutely still be recycling. But it doesn’t tell the whole story, and it doesn’t help those who are currently on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Here, we break down 10 solutions to climate change that will actually make a difference — and how you can help make them all a reality.

Stand with the people most affected by climate change

1. shift to renewable energy sources in all key sectors.

The United Nations identified a six-sector solution to climate change, focusing on actions that can be taken by the energy, industry, agriculture, transportation, nature-based solutions, and urban planning. If all of these actions are completed, the UN Environment Programme estimates we could reduce global carbon emissions by 29 to 32 gigatonnes, thereby limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5º C.

One key element of this plan is shifting to renewable energy sources, both at home and at work. “We have the necessary technology to make this reduction by shifting to renewable energy and using less energy,” the UNEP writes of our personal energy consumption (generally, fossil fuels power our homes, keeping the lights on, our rooms warm, and Netflix streaming). But the energy usage of the industrial sector also plays a key role: Addressing issues like methane leaks and switching at large scale to passive or renewable energy-based heating and cooling systems could reduce industrial carbon emissions by 7.3 gigatonnes every year.

Graphic of the United Nations Environment Program's Six Sector Solution to Climate Change

2. Reduce food loss and waste and shift to more sustainable diets

There are a few different ways that climate change and hunger go hand-in-hand. Whether it’s kale or Kobe beef, producing food accounts for some measure of greenhouse gasses. In 2021, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated we consumed more meat than ever before . By 2050 this will, by some estimates, increase greenhouse gas emissions from food production by 60%. Likewise, many farmers use nitrous-based fertilizers to grow more crops, more quickly to meet demand.

It’s important to reduce food waste at every step of the food system . For us as consumers, we can commit to eating what we buy and composting what we don’t get to in time. We can also switch our focus to plant-based and other sustainable diets, supporting farms that use organic fertilizers and making beef and other meat products the exception rather than the rule at the dinner table.

Woman and her vegetables for sale at the central market of the town of Manono, Tanganyika Province.

3. Halt deforestation and commit to rebuilding damaged ecosystems

The rapid deforestation of the Earth, especially over the last 60 years, has contributed to climate change, creating “heat islands” out of land that would normally be protected by trees and other flora from overheating. Simply put, this has to stop. There are actions each of us can take as individuals to help halt this—going paperless and buying recycled paper products, planting trees or supporting organizations that do this (like Concern ), and recycling.

But change has to happen at a larger scale here. Illegal logging happens both in the United States and abroad. Last year, world leaders committed to halting this and other harmful practices by 2030 as part of COP26. You can help by holding your own elected leaders to account.

A tree nursery in Bangladesh

4. Embrace electric vehicles, public transport, and other non-motorized options for getting around

The carbon savings on junking your current car in favor of an electric model are basically nullified if you aren’t seriously in the market for a new vehicle. However, mass adoption of electric vehicles and public transport — along with walking, biking, skating, and scooting — is key to cutting the greenhouse gas emissions from fuel-based motor vehicles.

Woman riding a bicycle with a man standing behind her

This is another issue you can raise with elected officials. Earlier this year, for example, you may remember hearing that President Biden had been encouraging the US Postal System to adopt electric vans as part of its new fleet. This didn’t come to pass , but it’s changes like these — changes beyond any one person’s transportation method — that need to happen. You can call on your representatives to support these switchovers for delivery vehicles, cab and taxi fleets, ambulances, and other auto-centric services. Or, if your city or town lacks decent public transportation or enough bike lanes or sidewalks to make those alternatives to driving, lobby for those.

5. Subsidize low-carbon alternatives for urban planning

In tandem with low-carbon alternatives for public transportation, governments need to commit to similar measures with our growing cities. New buildings mean a new opportunity to reward green design methods that help to decrease the strain on urban resources, whether they’re apartments or entertainment venues. (Fun fact: The Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center in Athens runs almost entirely off of solar panels during the bright and sunny summer months. ) In cities like New York, we’ve seen the toll that excessive power use can take through rolling blackouts and brown-outs, especially in the summer months. Changes to public infrastructure that reduce our reliance on the power grid will help to keep the system from becoming untenably overloaded.

A solar-powered water point in Marsabit, Kenya

6. Strengthen resilience and climate adaptation methods in MAPA communities

So far, we’ve looked at solutions to climate change that can take place within our own homes and communities. However, these only go so far to mitigate the damage that the climate crisis has already inflicted on a large portion of the world. The most affected people and areas (MAPAs) are largely in the Global South. Many are located in low-income countries without the resources or infrastructure to respond and adapt to climate disasters, even as they become more frequent and destructive.

Countries like the United States and organizations responding to the climate crisis must support MAPA communities, particularly the most vulnerable, in developing and carrying out strategies specific to context and designed to bolster resilience where it’s needed most. Often these communities know what needs to be done to mitigate the effects of climate change, and they simply need to be supported with access to additional research and meteorological data, new technologies, and funding.

solve problem of climate change

What we talk about when we talk about resilience

The word “resilience” has taken on new meanings and contexts in recent years, but at Concern it still has a specific definition relating to our emergency and climate response. Here’s what we mean when we use it.

7. Address poverty and other inequalities that increase vulnerability

The tem MAPA can also apply to individuals within a community. Women, disabled people, children, the elderly, people living in poverty, indigenous peoples, and LGBTQIA+ people are among those who are most likely to be hit harder by climate change because of preexisting societal marginalization. This is why it’s critical that they also have a seat at the decision-making table when it comes to solutions to climate change within their own communities. Ending poverty and the other systemic inequalities that give some people greater access to resources than others will help to offset some of the greatest threats posed by the climate crisis.

Esime Jenaia, a Lead Farmer for conservation Agriculture, at her plot in Chituke village, Mangochi, Malawi, with neighbor Esnart Kasimu. Concern has been carrying out Conservation Agriculture and livelihoods programming in Malawi since 2012, with the assistance of Accenture Ireland.

8. Invest in disaster risk reduction (DRR)

Disaster Risk Reduction (otherwise known as DRR) protects the lives and livelihoods of communities and individuals who are most vulnerable to disasters or emergencies. Whether the crisis is caused by nature or humans (or a combination of both), DRR limits its negative impact on those who stand to lose the most.

We can’t undo much of climate change’s impact so far, but we can help the communities who are hit hardest by these impacts to prepare for and respond to these emergencies once they strike.

9. Commit to fair financing and climate justice

Of course, DRR strategies and other resilience, adaptation, and mitigation practices cost money. Money that the countries most affected by climate change often lack. As part of a global commitment to climate justice , countries with the highest carbon footprints should be making restitution to those countries with lower footprints, countries that tend to be more vulnerable to global warming.

Countries like the United States must increase investments in disaster prevention and DRR strategies, such as early warning and response systems, forecast-based financing mechanisms, and adapted infrastructure. What’s more, these funds need to be made rapidly dispersible and flexible so that when emergency strikes, they can be accessed more quickly. Additional investment to prevent conflicts over the use of natural resources will also help countries facing both fragile political systems and a high risk for climate-related disasters.

solve problem of climate change

Project Profile

Responding to Pakistan's Internally Displaced (RAPID)

RAPID is a funding program that allows Concern to quickly and efficiently deliver aid to people displaced by conflict or natural disaster.

10. Guarantee these changes in the long-term via policy reform

Few of the solutions listed above are not sustainable without policy reform. You can help by encouraging your elected officials to consider the above points, and to support bills that incorporate one or more of these solutions to climate change, many of which are currently being written and shared at the local and national levels.

Smart climate policy will prioritize people over corporations, consider the framework of climate justice — including land and water rights of indigenous peoples and rural communities, address the intersectional effects of climate change on hunger, poverty, and gender equality, and enforce regulatory frameworks and standards that commit people and institutions to honoring these new standards. Bold and aggressive action must be taken if we’re to reach the goal of not exceeding 1.5º C and mitigating the current effects of climate change by 2030. But it’s not a lost cause yet. It’s on all of us to now support those actions that are needed most.

Support Concern's climate response

Solutions to Climate Change in Action

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Ten countries with water stress and scarcity — and how we're helping

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Climate Smart Agriculture: Back to the basics to fight climate change and hunger

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Ten of the countries most affected by climate change

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Problems Brought on By Climate Change and the Solutions

Problems Brought on By Climate Change and the Solutions

We know that climate change will have devastating impacts on the planet. We’re already seeing it now, with extreme weather events causing thousands of deaths around the world and greenhouse gases creating environments inhospitable to leading enjoyable lives. These are some of biggest climate change problems and solutions to help mitigate the crisis. 

What are the Problems Caused of Climate Change?

Outdoor air pollution.

Poor air quality kills people. In 2016, outdoor air pollution caused an estimated 4.2 million premature deaths , about 90% of them in low- and middle-income countries. Also, preliminary studies identified a positive correlation between COVID-19-related mortalities and air pollution.

In the long term,   air pollution has been linked to higher rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke and asthma. In fact, in the US alone, nearly 134 million people—over 40% of the population—are at risk of disease and premature death because of air pollution, according to American Lung Association estimates . 

In the short term, air pollution can cause sneezing and coughing, eye irritation, headaches and dizziness. Without fossil fuel emissions, the average life expectancy of the world’s population would increase by more than a year , while global economic and health costs would fall by about USD$2.9 trillion .

Species Extinction 

According to a 2020 analysis , the sixth mass extinction of wildlife on Earth is accelerating. More than 500 species of land animals are on the brink of extinction and are likely to be lost within 20 years; the same number were lost over the whole of the last century. Scientists say that without the human destruction of nature, this rate of loss would have taken thousands of years. 

This rapid rate of species extinction is caused by an ever-increasing human population and natural resource consumption rates. Further, species are links in ecosystems and, as they disappear, the species they interact with are likely to disappear as well.

When a species dies out, the Earth’s ability to maintain ecosystem services is eroded to a degree. Humanity needs a relatively stable climate, flows of fresh water, agricultural pest and disease-vector control and pollination for crops, all services that will be impacted as the sixth mass extinction accelerates. 

Many endangered species are being affected by the wildlife trade, both legal and illegal, which poses a threat to human health. And it’s a major cause of species extinction and is eroding the ecosystem services that are vital for our survival. 

Ocean Acidification

Ocean acidification is a direct consequence of increased human-induced carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere. The ocean absorbs over 25% of all anthropogenic emissions from the atmosphere each year. As CO2 dissolves in sea water it forms carbonic acid, decreasing the ocean’s pH and leading to a variety of changes collectively known as ocean acidification. 

This causes water to heat up, killing marine life and affecting the ocean’s ability to continue absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Ocean acidification also affects coral, weakening its skeleton and causing breakage.

Ocean acidity has increased by 26% since 1850 , 10 times faster than any period within the last 55 million years. 

Food Insecurity

The climate crisis poses a significant threat to agriculture as changes in temperature and precipitation affect crop yield and shift agricultural zones. 

A common misconception about the climate crisis is that warmer temperatures result in plants growing larger and for longer periods. While rising temperatures are causing the shifting of seasons, prompting plants to sprout and turn green sooner than usual, plants are becoming less nutritious, signalling a nutrient collapse and threatening food security. 

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that wheat and rice, which are highly sensitive to changes in CO2,  are the main source of protein for 71% of the world’s population. A paper published in Environmental Health Perspectives predicts that given this dependence on plant-based proteins, more than 15% of the global population will be protein deficient, resulting in 90.9 million days lost to illness and 2 million deaths annually by 2050. 

companies deforestation, sandile ndlovu

Deforestation 

For the past 20 years, the world has lost around 5 million hectares of forest every year to deforestation, mostly in the tropics. A third of tropical deforestation is concentrated in Brazil, home to the Amazon rainforest, where deforestation has surged to a 12-year high under far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. Alongside Brazil, Indonesia also stands out with the second largest proportion of tropical deforestation in a single country. 

Forests are one of the most important carbon sinks on the planet as a whole, and the carbon they absorb is released when they are cut down or burned. Because of this, eventually forests will become sources of carbon , as opposed to carbon sinks. Unfortunately, this process has already started in the Amazon rainforest.

Food production is the leading cause of deforestation, beef, soy and palm oil in particular. In fact, three quarters of all deforestation today is linked to agriculture.

Plastic Waste Crisis

Every year, 500 billion plastic bottles are produced globally and ​​there is more than 150 million tons of plastic waste in the ocean. Scientists have found microplastics in virtually every part of the world, from the deepest depths of the Mariana Trench to the highest point of Mount Everest.

It is estimated that 100,000 marine mammals and turtles and 1 million sea birds are killed by marine plastic pollution annually.

Producing one tonne of plastic generates up to 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide and plastic production has been forecast to grow by 60% by 2030 and to treble by 2050. Sadly, only about 9% of all plastic ever produced has been recycled. About 12% has been incinerated, while the rest — 79% — has accumulated in landfills, dumps or the natural environment.

Other Problems

Other problems brought on by climate change, including rising maximum and minimum temperatures, rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers and thawing permafrost.

What are Some Climate Change Solutions? 

Reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The importance of this can’t be stated enough –  greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced rapidly in order for the planet to have a chance of meeting climate goals. However, current efforts won’t have the effects that are needed; as of April 2021, commitments will still lead to 2.4°C of warming by the end of the century if implemented in full. Scientists at the IPCC have said that emissions should fall 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 to limit temperatures to 1.5°C by 2100, however the latest IPCC report has found that global temperatures will very likely rise 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2040. It is up to governments to ensure that corporations stop emitting harmful greenhouse gases, and arguably the best way to do this is to implement a carbon tax.

Implement a Carbon Tax

Imposed by a government, a carbon tax is a per-ton tax on the carbon emissions produced by burning fossil fuels or other pollutants. By putting a direct price on greenhouse gas emissions, carbon-intensive activities and products become more expensive, and so people, businesses and governments are incentivised to lower emissions through cleaner fuels. This is be one of the more effective climate change solutions we have at the moment. 

As one of the first countries in the world to impose a carbon tax, Sweden is a leader in the carbon taxation sphere . In 1991, the country introduced a carbon tax on transport fuels at $26 per ton of CO2, steadily increasing to today’s rate of $126 – the highest in the world. It currently covers approximately 40% of Sweden’s greenhouse gases emitted due to the numerous exemptions for the industrial sector, as well as the mining, agricultural and forestry sectors. The result? The carbon tax has been credited with being an environmental and economic success. Since the tax was introduced, CO2 emissions from transport declined almost 11% in an average year, with 6% being from the carbon tax alone. Similarly, in the electricity, gas and heat sector, greenhouse gas emissions were 31% lower in the first quarter of 2020 , compared with the same period in 2019; this can be attributed to the substitution of fossil fuels for biofuels.

As of 2019, carbon taxes have been implemented or scheduled for implementation in 25 countries; while 46 countries have put some price on carbon, either through carbon taxes or emissions trading schemes. 

Go On a Plant Based Diet

The UN predicts that there will be close to 10 billion people in the world by 2050. To meet this demand, we will need to increase food production by 50%. Agriculture takes up around 50% of all habitable land, equal to roughly 50 million sq km. The global production of food is responsible for releasing 30% of greenhouse gases and a massive part of this is raising animals for meat. 

Switching to a plant based diet is one of the more easily achievable climate change solutions, and it will reduce deforestation – according to the World Wildlife Fund, beef and soy drive more than two-thirds of the recorded habitat loss in Brazil’s Amazon, where the bulk of tropical rainforest loss occurs. It would also help reduce the amount of land used for agriculture by three quarters; this is due to the amount of cropland and pasture that goes into animal rearing. 

Reduce Food Waste

Roughly one third  of the food produced that is intended for human consumption every year – around 1.3 billion tons and valued at USD$1 trillion- is wasted or lost. This is enough to feed 3 billion people. The water used to produce the food wasted could be used by 9 billion people  at around 200 litres per person per day. 

If food loss was a country, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter , behind China and the US, making it an incredibly important sector to focus on when devising emission-reducing strategies.

Consumers also need to be given more education on how they’re unknowingly contributing to food waste; ​​according to a survey conducted by Respect Food , 63% of people don’t know the difference between the “use by” and “best before” dates. Foods with “use by” dates are perishable and must be eaten before the given date. Foods with “best before” dates can be eaten after the given date, but it won’t be at its best quality. 

A big cause of food waste is the myth perpetuated by supermarkets that food must look “perfect” to be edible. Unfortunately, because of quality standards that rely too much on appearance, crops are sometimes left unharvested and rot. 

One of the many climate change solutions we can also consider is to support small farmers and local farmer’s markets to reduce food waste. 

plastic pollution, plastic waste, ziaul huque

Reduce Use of Single Use Plastics

While plastic has undeniably made our lives easier and more convenient, it has had a massive negative impact on the planet. 

Some ways to reduce your intake of single use plastics include avoiding plastic straws, plates and cutlery, buying in bulk so as to use less packaging, using reusable containers, doing your food shopping at a local farmer’s market, recycling the plastic you do use, buying less clothing and ensuring that the clothing you do buy is made from natural fibres like cotton, hemp and linen and composting food to use less plastic garbage bags. 

Invest in Renewable, Clean Energy

Mining for fossil fuels burns carbon dioxide, one of the major greenhouse gases driving climate change. We need to shift away from coal rapidly to have a chance of meeting climate goals; global unabated coal use must fall by around 80% this decade if warming is to be limited to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, according to recent Carbon Brief analysis.

Transitioning to clean energy is one of the most effective climate change solutions out there. And it’s already cheaper than fossil fuels; o f the wind, solar and other renewables that came on stream in 2020, nearly two-thirds – 62% – were cheaper than the cheapest new fossil fuel , according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

Retiring coal plants would stop the emission of about three gigatonnes of CO2 a year – 20% of the reduction in emissions needed by 2030 to avert climate catastrophe.

Further, cheaper renewables give developed and developing countries a reason to phase out coal while meeting growing energy demands, saving costs and adding jobs to the economy.

Wildlife Conservation Efforts

Governments need to class endangered species as such in law and provide funding so that their preservation can be focused on by animal and wildlife conservation groups. Further, heavier penalties for hunting protected animals should be implemented and strictly enforced. 

To mitigate climate change and prevent a catastrophic global climate breakdown, we need a combination of solutions that consumers can take in their daily lives, innovative technological solutions and government intervention to stop emissions at the source. Our lives quite literally depend on it.

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November 26, 2007

10 Solutions for Climate Change

Ten possibilities for staving off catastrophic climate change

By David Biello

solve problem of climate change

Mark Garlick Getty Images

The enormity of global warming can be daunting and dispiriting. What can one person, or even one nation, do on their own to slow and reverse climate change ? But just as ecologist Stephen Pacala and physicist Robert Socolow, both at Princeton University, came up with 15 so-called " wedges " for nations to utilize toward this goal—each of which is challenging but feasible and, in some combination, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions to safer levels —there are personal lifestyle changes that you can make too that, in some combination, can help reduce your carbon impact. Not all are right for everybody. Some you may already be doing or absolutely abhor. But implementing just a few of them could make a difference.

Forego Fossil Fuels —The first challenge is eliminating the burning of coal , oil and, eventually, natural gas. This is perhaps the most daunting challenge as denizens of richer nations literally eat, wear, work, play and even sleep on the products made from such fossilized sunshine. And citizens of developing nations want and arguably deserve the same comforts, which are largely thanks to the energy stored in such fuels.

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Oil is the lubricant of the global economy, hidden inside such ubiquitous items as plastic and corn, and fundamental to the transportation of both consumers and goods. Coal is the substrate, supplying roughly half of the electricity used in the U.S. and nearly that much worldwide—a percentage that is likely to grow, according to the International Energy Agency. There are no perfect solutions for reducing dependence on fossil fuels (for example, carbon neutral biofuels can drive up the price of food and lead to forest destruction, and while nuclear power does not emit greenhouse gases, it does produce radioactive waste), but every bit counts.

So try to employ alternatives when possible—plant-derived plastics, biodiesel, wind power—and to invest in the change, be it by divesting from oil stocks or investing in companies practicing carbon capture and storage.

Infrastructure Upgrade —Buildings worldwide contribute around one third of all greenhouse gas emissions (43 percent in the U.S. alone), even though investing in thicker insulation and other cost-effective, temperature-regulating steps can save money in the long run. Electric grids are at capacity or overloaded, but power demands continue to rise. And bad roads can lower the fuel economy of even the most efficient vehicle. Investing in new infrastructure, or radically upgrading existing highways and transmission lines, would help cut greenhouse gas emissions and drive economic growth in developing countries.

Of course, it takes a lot of cement, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, to construct new buildings and roads. The U.S. alone contributed 50.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2005 from cement production, which requires heating limestone and other ingredients to 1,450 degrees Celsius (2,642 degrees Fahrenheit). Mining copper and other elements needed for electrical wiring and transmission also causes globe-warming pollution.

But energy-efficient buildings and improved cement-making processes (such as using alternative fuels to fire up the kiln) could reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the developed world and prevent them in the developing world.

Move Closer to Work —Transportation is the second leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. (burning a single gallon of gasoline produces 20 pounds of CO 2 ). But it doesn't have to be that way.

One way to dramatically curtail transportation fuel needs is to move closer to work, use mass transit, or switch to walking, cycling or some other mode of transport that does not require anything other than human energy. There is also the option of working from home and telecommuting several days a week.

Cutting down on long-distance travel would also help, most notably airplane flights, which are one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions and a source that arguably releases such emissions in the worst possible spot (higher in the atmosphere). Flights are also one of the few sources of globe-warming pollution for which there isn't already a viable alternative: jets rely on kerosene, because it packs the most energy per pound, allowing them to travel far and fast, yet it takes roughly 10 gallons of oil to make one gallon of JetA fuel. Restricting flying to only critical, long-distance trips—in many parts of the world, trains can replace planes for short- to medium-distance trips—would help curb airplane emissions.

Consume Less —The easiest way to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions is simply to buy less stuff. Whether by forgoing an automobile or employing a reusable grocery sack, cutting back on consumption results in fewer fossil fuels being burned to extract, produce and ship products around the globe.

Think green when making purchases. For instance, if you are in the market for a new car, buy one that will last the longest and have the least impact on the environment. Thus, a used vehicle with a hybrid engine offers superior fuel efficiency over the long haul while saving the environmental impact of new car manufacture.

Paradoxically, when purchasing essentials, such as groceries, buying in bulk can reduce the amount of packaging—plastic wrapping, cardboard boxes and other unnecessary materials. Sometimes buying more means consuming less.

Be Efficient —A potentially simpler and even bigger impact can be made by doing more with less. Citizens of many developed countries are profligate wasters of energy, whether by speeding in a gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicle or leaving the lights on when not in a room.

Good driving—and good car maintenance, such as making sure tires are properly inflated—can limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from a vehicle and, perhaps more importantly, lower the frequency of payment at the pump.

Similarly, employing more efficient refrigerators, air conditioners and other appliances, such as those rated highly under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program, can cut electric bills while something as simple as weatherproofing the windows of a home can reduce heating and cooling bills. Such efforts can also be usefully employed at work, whether that means installing more efficient turbines at the power plant or turning the lights off when you leave the office .

Eat Smart, Go Vegetarian? —Corn grown in the U.S. requires barrels of oil for the fertilizer to grow it and the diesel fuel to harvest and transport it. Some grocery stores stock organic produce that do not require such fertilizers, but it is often shipped from halfway across the globe. And meat, whether beef, chicken or pork, requires pounds of feed to produce a pound of protein.

Choosing food items that balance nutrition, taste and ecological impact is no easy task. Foodstuffs often bear some nutritional information, but there is little to reveal how far a head of lettuce, for example, has traveled.

University of Chicago researchers estimate that each meat-eating American produces 1.5 tons more greenhouse gases through their food choice than do their vegetarian peers. It would also take far less land to grow the crops necessary to feed humans than livestock, allowing more room for planting trees.

Stop Cutting Down Trees —Every year, 33 million acres of forests are cut down . Timber harvesting in the tropics alone contributes 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. That represents 20 percent of human-made greenhouse gas emissions and a source that could be avoided relatively easily.

Improved agricultural practices along with paper recycling and forest management—balancing the amount of wood taken out with the amount of new trees growing—could quickly eliminate this significant chunk of emissions.

And when purchasing wood products, such as furniture or flooring, buy used goods or, failing that, wood certified to have been sustainably harvested. The Amazon and other forests are not just the lungs of the earth, they may also be humanity's best short-term hope for limiting climate change.

Unplug —Believe it or not, U.S. citizens spend more money on electricity to power devices when off than when on. Televisions, stereo equipment, computers, battery chargers and a host of other gadgets and appliances consume more energy when seemingly switched off, so unplug them instead.

Purchasing energy-efficient gadgets can also save both energy and money—and thus prevent more greenhouse gas emissions. To take but one example, efficient battery chargers could save more than one billion kilowatt-hours of electricity—$100 million at today's electricity prices—and thus prevent the release of more than one million metric tons of greenhouse gases.

Swapping old incandescent lightbulbs for more efficient replacements, such as compact fluorescents (warning: these lightbulbs contain mercury and must be properly disposed of at the end of their long life), would save billions of kilowatt-hours. In fact, according to the EPA, replacing just one incandescent lightbulb in every American home would save enough energy to provide electricity to three million American homes.

One Child —There are at least 6.6 billion people living today, a number that is predicted by the United Nations to grow to at least nine billion by mid-century. The U.N. Environmental Program estimates that it requires 54 acres to sustain an average human being today—food, clothing and other resources extracted from the planet. Continuing such population growth seems unsustainable.

Falling birth rates in some developed and developing countries (a significant portion of which are due to government-imposed limits on the number of children a couple can have) have begun to reduce or reverse the population explosion. It remains unclear how many people the planet can comfortably sustain, but it is clear that per capita energy consumption must go down if climate change is to be controlled.

Ultimately, a one child per couple rule is not sustainable either and there is no perfect number for human population. But it is clear that more humans means more greenhouse gas emissions.

Future Fuels —Replacing fossil fuels may prove the great challenge of the 21st century. Many contenders exist, ranging from ethanol derived from crops to hydrogen electrolyzed out of water, but all of them have some drawbacks, too, and none are immediately available at the scale needed.

Biofuels can have a host of negative impacts, from driving up food prices to sucking up more energy than they produce. Hydrogen must be created, requiring either reforming natural gas or electricity to crack water molecules. Biodiesel hybrid electric vehicles (that can plug into the grid overnight) may offer the best transportation solution in the short term, given the energy density of diesel and the carbon neutral ramifications of fuel from plants as well as the emissions of electric engines. A recent study found that the present amount of electricity generation in the U.S. could provide enough energy for the country's entire fleet of automobiles to switch to plug-in hybrids , reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

But plug-in hybrids would still rely on electricity, now predominantly generated by burning dirty coal. Massive investment in low-emission energy generation, whether solar-thermal power or nuclear fission , would be required to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And even more speculative energy sources—hyperefficient photovoltaic cells, solar energy stations in orbit or even fusion—may ultimately be required.

The solutions above offer the outline of a plan to personally avoid contributing to global warming. But should such individual and national efforts fail, there is another, potentially desperate solution:

Experiment Earth —Climate change represents humanity's first planetwide experiment. But, if all else fails, it may not be the last. So-called geoengineering , radical interventions to either block sunlight or reduce greenhouse gases, is a potential last resort for addressing the challenge of climate change.

Among the ideas: releasing sulfate particles in the air to mimic the cooling effects of a massive volcanic eruption; placing millions of small mirrors or lenses in space to deflect sunlight; covering portions of the planet with reflective films to bounce sunlight back into space; fertilizing the oceans with iron or other nutrients to enable plankton to absorb more carbon; and increasing cloud cover or the reflectivity of clouds that already form.

All may have unintended consequences, making the solution worse than the original problem. But it is clear that at least some form of geoengineering will likely be required: capturing carbon dioxide before it is released and storing it in some fashion, either deep beneath the earth, at the bottom of the ocean or in carbonate minerals. Such carbon capture and storage is critical to any serious effort to combat climate change.

Additional reporting by Larry Greenemeier and Nikhil Swaminathan .

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What are the solutions to climate change?

Climate change is already an urgent threat to millions of lives – but there are solutions. From changing how we get our energy to limiting deforestation, here are some of the key solutions to climate change.

Climate change is happening now, and it’s the most serious threat to life on our planet. Luckily, there are plenty of solutions to climate change and they are well-understood.

In 2015, world leaders signed a major treaty called the Paris agreement  to put these solutions into practice.

Core to all climate change solutions is reducing greenhouse gas emissions , which must get to zero as soon as possible.

Because both forests and oceans play vitally important roles in regulating our climate, increasing the natural ability of forests and oceans to absorb carbon dioxide can also help stop global warming.

The main ways to stop climate change are to pressure government and business to:

  • Keep fossil fuels in the ground . Fossil fuels include coal, oil and gas – and the more that are extracted and burned, the worse climate change will get. All countries need to move their economies away from fossil fuels as soon as possible.
  • Invest in renewable energy . Changing our main energy sources to clean and renewable energy is the best way to stop using fossil fuels. These include technologies like solar, wind, wave, tidal and geothermal power.
  • Switch to sustainable transport . Petrol and diesel vehicles, planes and ships use fossil fuels. Reducing car use, switching to electric vehicles and minimising plane travel will not only help stop climate change, it will reduce air pollution too.
  • Help us keep our homes cosy . Homes shouldn’t be draughty and cold – it’s a waste of money, and miserable in the winter. The government can help households heat our homes in a green way – such as by insulating walls and roofs and switching away from oil or gas boilers to heat pumps .
  • Improve farming and encourage vegan diets . One of the best ways for individuals to help stop climate change is by reducing their meat and dairy consumption, or by going fully vegan. Businesses and food retailers can improve farming practices and provide more plant-based products to help people make the shift.
  • Restore nature to absorb more carbon . The natural world is very good at cleaning up our emissions, but we need to look after it. Planting trees in the right places or giving land back to nature through ‘rewilding’ schemes is a good place to start. This is because photosynthesising plants draw down carbon dioxide as they grow, locking it away in soils.
  • Protect forests like the Amazon . Forests are crucial in the fight against climate change, and protecting them is an important climate solution. Cutting down forests on an industrial scale destroys giant trees which could be sucking up huge amounts of carbon. Yet companies destroy forests to make way for animal farming, soya or palm oil plantations. Governments can stop them by making better laws.
  • Protect the oceans . Oceans also absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which helps to keep our climate stable. But many are overfished , used for oil and gas drilling or threatened by deep sea mining. Protecting oceans and the life in them is ultimately a way to protect ourselves from climate change.
  • Reduce how much people consume . Our transport, fashion, food and other lifestyle choices all have different impacts on the climate. This is often by design – fashion and technology companies, for example, will release far more products than are realistically needed. But while reducing consumption of these products might be hard, it’s most certainly worth it. Reducing overall consumption in more wealthy countries can help put less strain on the planet.
  • Reduce plastic . Plastic is made from oil, and the process of extracting, refining and turning oil into plastic (or even polyester, for clothing) is surprisingly carbon-intense . It doesn’t break down quickly in nature so a lot of plastic is burned, which contributes to emissions. Demand for plastic is rising so quickly that creating and disposing of plastics will account for 17% of the global carbon budget by 2050 (this is the emissions count we need to stay within according to the Paris agreement ).

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, and to feel that climate change is too big to solve. But we already have the answers, now it’s a question of making them happen. To work, all of these solutions need strong international cooperation between governments and businesses, including the most polluting sectors.

Individuals can also play a part by making better choices about where they get their energy, how they travel, and what food they eat. But the best way for anyone to help stop climate change is to take collective action. This means pressuring governments and corporations to change their policies and business practices.

Governments want to be re-elected. And businesses can’t survive without customers. Demanding action from them is a powerful way to make change happen.

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The fossil fuel industry is blocking climate change action

Major oil and gas companies including BP, Exxon and Shell have spent hundreds of millions of pounds trying to delay or stop government policies that would have helped tackle the climate crisis.

Despite the effects of climate change becoming more and more obvious, big polluting corporations – the ones responsible for the majority of carbon emissions – continue to carry on drilling for and burning fossil fuels.

Industries including banks, car and energy companies also make profits from fossil fuels. These industries are knowingly putting money over the future of our planet and the safety of its people.

What are world leaders doing to stop climate change?

With such a huge crisis facing the entire planet, the international response should be swift and decisive. Yet progress by world governments has been achingly slow. Many commitments to reduce carbon emissions have been set, but few are binding and targets are often missed.

In Paris in 2015, world leaders from 197 countries pledged to put people first and reduce their countries’ greenhouse gas emissions. The Paris agreement has the aim of limiting global warming to well below 2ºC and ideally to 1.5°C.

If governments act swiftly on the promises they made in the Paris climate agreement, and implement the solutions now, there’s still hope of avoiding the worst consequences of climate change .

World leaders and climate negotiators meet at annual COPs – which stands for Conference of the Parties (the countries that signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC).

At COPs and other climate talks, nations take stock of their ability to meet their commitments to reduce emissions.

Recently, talks have focused on climate finance – money to help poorer countries adapt to climate change and reduce emissions. Rich countries have pledged $100 billion in annual funding to help developing countries reduce emissions and manage the impacts of climate change. This is yet to materialise, and much more money is needed.

As the impacts of climate change are increasing, important talks have also started on “loss and damage” funding. This is money needed by worst-impacted countries to deal with extreme weather and other climate change impacts.

Global climate change activism

Around the world, millions of us are taking steps to defend our climate. People of all ages and from all walks of life are desperately demanding solutions to the climate emergency.

Over the years, Greenpeace has challenged oil companies chasing new fossil fuels to extract and burn. We’ve also called out the governments for their failure to act fast enough on the climate emergency. Greenpeace activists are ordinary people taking extraordinary action, to push the solutions to climate change.

Indigenous Peoples are most severely affected by both the causes and effects of climate change . They are often on the front lines, facing down deforestation or kicking out fossil fuel industries polluting their water supplies.

Communities in the Pacific Islands are facing sea level rises and more extreme weather. But they are using their strength and resilience to demand world leaders take quicker climate action.

For many of these communities, the fight against climate change is a fight for life itself.

Even in the UK, climate change is impacting people more severely. As a country with the wealth and power to really tackle climate change, it’s never been more important to demand action.

Keep exploring

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What can I do to stop climate change?

Individuals can make changes to their lives to reduce their personal carbon footprint. But it’s more important to persuade decision-makers in governments and businesses to drive emissions reductions on a much larger scale. This is the best way to stop climate change getting worse.

A worker in a hard hat and harness crouches on top of an offshore wind turbine. Other turbines are visible in the background.

What is the UK doing about climate change?

All countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. So how’s the UK doing?

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Renewable energy: a beginner's guide

Clean renewable energy is a vital tool for tackling climate change. Discover how it works and understand the advantages of wind, solar and water power.

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Environmental justice, explained

The environmental crisis doesn't affect everyone equally. Often the worst impacts fall on those who are already most exploited by people in power. The fight for environmental justice is about addressing this unfairness, and making sure green solutions don't add to the problem.

How You Can Stop Global Warming

Healing the planet starts in your garage, in your kitchen, and at your dining room table.

A Black man is applying a role of weather tape to an exterior door of a home.

Weatherizing doors and windows by sealing drafts can make your home more energy efficient.

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Rising sea levels. Raging storms. Searing heat. Ferocious fires. Severe drought. Punishing floods. The effects of climate change are already threatening our health, our communities, our economy, our security, and our children’s future.

What can you do? A whole lot, as it turns out. Americans, on average, produce 21 tons of carbon a year, about four times the global average. Personal action is, of course, no substitute for meaningful government policies. We still must limit carbon pollution and aggressively move away from dirty fossil fuels toward cleaner power.

But it’s important to remember the equally vital contributions that can be made by private citizens—which is to say, by you. “Change only happens when individuals take action,” says clean energy advocate Aliya Haq. “There’s no other way, if it doesn’t start with people.”

Here are a dozen easy, effective ways each one of us can make a difference.

1. Speak up!

What’s the single biggest way you can make an impact on global climate change? “Talk to your friends and family, and make sure your representatives are making good decisions,” Haq says. By voicing your concerns—via social media or, better yet, directly to your elected officials —you send a message that you care about the warming world. Encourage Congress to enact new laws that limit carbon emissions and require polluters to pay for the emissions they produce. “The main reason elected officials do anything difficult is because their constituents make them,” Haq says. You can help protect public lands, stop offshore drilling, and more here .

2. Power your home with renewable energy.

Choose a utility company that generates at least half its power from wind or solar and has been certified by Green-e Energy , an organization that vets renewable energy options. If that isn’t possible for you, take a look at your electric bill; many utilities now list other ways to support renewable sources on their monthly statements and websites.

3. Weatherize, weatherize, weatherize.

“Building heating and cooling are among the biggest uses of energy,” Haq says. Indeed, heating and air-conditioning account for almost half of home energy use. You can make your space more energy efficient by sealing drafts and ensuring it’s adequately insulated. You can also claim federal tax credits for many energy efficiency home improvements. To help you figure out where to start, you could also get a home energy audit, which some utilities offer free of charge. (Alternatively, you can hire a professional to come to your home and perform one; the Inflation Reduction Act offers a partial tax credit for this.) The EPA’s Home Energy Yardstick gives you a simple assessment of your home’s annual energy use compared with similar homes.

4. Invest in energy-efficient appliances.

Since they were first implemented nationally in 1987, efficiency standards for dozens of appliances and products have kept 2.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the air. That’s about the same amount as the annual carbon pollution coughed up by nearly 440 million cars. “Energy efficiency is the lowest-cost way to reduce emissions,” Haq says. When shopping for refrigerators, washing machines, heat pump water heaters , and other appliances, look for the Energy Star label. It will tell you which are the most efficient. (There may also be rebates to earn from your purchase of Energy Star–certified products.)

And when you’re ready to swap out your old machines, don’t just put them on the curb: Recycling an old refrigerator through the EPA’s Responsible Appliance Disposal Program can prevent an additional 10,000 pounds of carbon pollution because the global-warming pollutants in the refrigerants and foam would be properly captured rather than vented to the air.

5. Reduce water waste.

Saving water reduces carbon pollution, too. That's because it takes a lot of energy to pump, heat, and treat your water. So take shorter showers, turn off the tap while brushing your teeth, and switch to WaterSense -labeled fixtures and appliances. The EPA estimates that if just one out of every 100 American homes were retrofitted with water-efficient fixtures, about 100 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year would be saved—avoiding 80,000 tons of global warming pollution .

6. Actually eat the food you buy—and compost what you can’t.

Approximately 10 percent of U.S. energy use goes into growing, processing, packaging, and shipping food—about 40 percent of which winds up in the landfill. “If you’re wasting less food, you’re likely cutting down on energy consumption,” Haq says. As for the scraps you can’t eat or the leftovers you don’t get to, collect them in a compost bin instead of sending them to the landfill where they release methane. Recycling food and other organic waste into compost provides a range of environmental benefits, including improving soil health, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, recycling nutrients, and mitigating the impact of droughts.

7. Buy better bulbs.

LED light bulbs use one-sixth the amount of energy to deliver the same amount of light as conventional incandescents and last at least 10 times longer. They’re also cheaper in the long run: A 10-watt LED that replaces your traditional 60-watt bulb will save you $125 over the light bulb’s life. And because the average American home has around 40 to 50 light bulbs, this is a simple swap that will reap huge rewards. If every household in the United States replaced just one incandescent with an Energy Star–labeled LED, we would prevent seven billion pounds of carbon pollution per year. That’s equivalent to the emissions of about 648,000 cars.

8. Pull the plug(s).

Taken together, the outlets in your home are likely powering about 65 devices—an average load for a home in the United States. Audio and video devices, cordless vacuums and power tools, and other electronics use energy even when they're not charging. This "idle load" across all U.S. households adds up to the output of 50 large power plants in the country . So don't leave fully charged devices plugged into your home's outlets, unplug rarely used devices or plug them into power strips and timers, and adjust your computers and monitors to automatically power down to the lowest power mode when not in use.

9. Drive a fuel-efficient vehicle.

Gas-smart cars, such as hybrids and fully electric vehicles, save fuel and money . And once all cars and light trucks meet 2025’s clean car standards, which means averaging 54.5 miles per gallon, they’ll be a mainstay. For good reason: Relative to a national fleet of vehicles that averaged only 28.3 miles per gallon in 2011, Americans will spend $80 billion less at the pump each year and cut their automotive emissions by half. Before you buy a new set of wheels, compare fuel-economy performance here .

10. Maintain your ride.

If all Americans kept their tires properly inflated, we could save 1.2 billion gallons of gas each year. A simple tune-up can boost miles per gallon anywhere from 4 percent to 40 percent, and a new air filter can get you a 10 percent boost. Also, remove unnecessary accessories from your car roof. Roof racks and clamshell storage containers can reduce fuel efficiency by as much as 5 percent.

11. Rethink planes, trains, and automobiles.

Choosing to live in walkable smart-growth cities and towns with quality public transportation leads to less driving, less money spent on fuel, and less pollution in the air . Less frequent flying can make a big difference, too. “Air transport is a major source of climate pollution,” Haq says. “If you can take a train instead, do that.” If you must fly, consider purchasing carbon offsets to counterbalance the hefty carbon pollution associated with flying. But not all carbon offset companies are alike. Do your homework to find the best supplier.

12. Reduce, reuse, and recycle.

In the United States, the average person generates 4.5 pounds of trash every day. Fortunately, not all the items we discard end up in landfills; we recycle or compost more than one-third of our trash. In 2014 this saved carbon emissions equivalent to the yearly output of 38 million passenger cars . But we could be doing so much more. “ Reduce should always be the number-one priority,” says NRDC senior resource specialist Darby Hoover . And to reap the environmental benefits of “recyclable” goods, you must recycle according to the rules of your municipality, since systems vary widely by location . Search your municipality’s sanitation department (or equivalent) webpage to learn exactly what you can place in the recycling bin, as counties and cities often differ in what they accept.

This story was originally published on April 20, 2022 and has been updated with new information and links.

This NRDC.org story is available for online republication by news media outlets or nonprofits under these conditions: The writer(s) must be credited with a byline; you must note prominently that the story was originally published by NRDC.org and link to the original; the story cannot be edited (beyond simple things such as grammar); you can’t resell the story in any form or grant republishing rights to other outlets; you can’t republish our material wholesale or automatically—you need to select stories individually; you can’t republish the photos or graphics on our site without specific permission; you should drop us a note to let us know when you’ve used one of our stories.

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  • Environment

Are there real ways to fight climate change? Yes.

Humans have the solutions to fight a global environmental crisis. Do we have the will?

The evidence that humans are causing climate change, with drastic consequences for life on the planet, is overwhelming .

Experts began raising the alarm about global warming in 1979 , a change now referred to under the broader term climate change , preferred by scientists to describe the complex shifts now affecting our planet’s weather and climate systems. Climate change encompasses not only rising average temperatures but also extreme weather events, shifting wildlife populations and habitats, rising seas , and a range of other impacts. 

Over 200 countries—193 countries plus the 27 members of the European Union—have signed the Paris Climate Agreement , a treaty created in 2015 to fight climate change on a global scale. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which synthesizes the scientific consensus on the issue, has set a goal of keeping warming under 2°C (3.6°F) and pursuing an even lower warming cap of 1.5 °C (2.7° F).

But no country has created policies that will keep the world below 1.5 °C, according to the Climate Action Tracker . Current emissions have the world on track to warm 2.8°C by the end of this century. 

Addressing climate change will require many solutions —there's no magic bullet. Yet nearly all of these solutions exist today. They range from worldwide changes to where we source our electricity to protecting forests from deforestation. 

The promise of new technology

Better technology will help reduce emissions from activities like manufacturing and driving. 

Scientists are working on ways to sustainably produce hydrogen, most of which is currently derived from natural gas, to feed zero-emission fuel cells for transportation and electricity. 

Renewable energy is growing, and in the U.S., a combination of wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable sources provide 20 percen t of the nation’s electricity. 

New technological developments promise to build better batteries to store that renewable energy, engineer a smarter electric grid, and capture carbon dioxide from power plants and store it underground or turn it into valuable products such as gasoline . Some argue that nuclear power—despite concerns over safety, water use, and toxic waste—should also be part of the solution, because nuclear plants don't contribute any direct air pollution while operating.

Should we turn to geoengineering?

While halting new greenhouse gas emissions is critical, scientists say we need to extract existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, effectively sucking it out of the sky. 

Pulling carbon out of the atmosphere is a type of geoengineering , a science that interferes with the Earth’s natural systems, and it’s a controversial approach to fighting climate change.

Other types of geoengineering involve spraying sunlight-reflecting aerosols into the air or blocking the sun with a giant space mirror. Studies suggest we don’t know enough about the potential dangers of geoengineering to deploy it.

An iceberg melts in the waters off Antarctica. Climate change has accelerated the rate of ice loss across the continent.

Restoring nature to protect the planet 

Planting trees, restoring seagrasses, and boosting the use of agricultural cover crops could help clean up significant amounts of carbon dioxide . 

The Amazon rainforest is an important reservoir of the Earth’s carbon, but a study published in 2021, showed deforestation was transforming this reservoir into a source of pollution. 

Restoring and protecting nature may provide as much as  37 percent of the climate mitigation needed to reach the Paris Agreement’s 203o targets. Protecting these ecosystems can also benefit biodiversity, providing a win-win for nature .

Adapt—or else

Communities around the world are already recognizing that adaptation must also be part of the response to climate change . From flood-prone coastal towns to regions facing increased droughts and fires, a new wave of initiatives focuses on boosting resilience . Those include managing or preventing land erosion, building microgrids and other energy systems built to withstand disruptions, and designing buildings with rising sea levels in mind.

Last year, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law and was a historic investment in fighting and adapting to climate change.

( Read more about how the bill will dramatically reduce emissions. )

Recent books such as Drawdown and Designing Climate Solutions have proposed bold yet simple plans for reversing our current course. The ideas vary, but the message is consistent: We already have many of the tools needed to address climate change. Some of the concepts are broad ones that governments and businesses must implement, but many other ideas involve changes that anyone can make— eating less  meat , for example, or rethinking your modes of transport .

"We have the technology today to rapidly move to a clean energy system," write the authors of Designing Climate Solutions . "And the price of that future, without counting environmental benefits, is about the same as that of a carbon-intensive future."

Sarah Gibbens contributed reporting to this article.

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  • Solving Climate Change

Humans have warmed the planet by approximately 1.0°C (1.8°F) in the past 150 years, which has increased the risk of wildfires, hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, and floods. Sea level is rising, and ice is melting. All of this is making life on Earth much more difficult.

We caused the problem by increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but we have the ability to keep the amount of warming low enough to be survivable. Communities and nations around the world are taking action to solve climate change. There’s much more that needs to be accomplished, so keep reading to learn what can be done to keep our planet as cool as possible.

Global Warming Targets

If we keep the amount of climate warming low enough, we can adapt, finding ways to live and even thrive. But what is low enough? The planet has already warmed 1°C. How much more can we handle?

Since the 1990s, scientists and policymakers around the world had considered the goal to be a limit of 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels (which was before we started burning fossil fuels). But in 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported on what we know about the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C (2.7°F) compared to 2°C.

They found that with a warming of 2°C, the impacts are more severe than 1.5°C. For example, heat waves would be hotter, rains would be heavier, and sea level would rise more. There are higher risks to health, the food supply, water, ecosystems, and economic growth with 2°C warming compared with 1.5°C. Overall, 1.5°C warming gives us a better chance of adapting to climate change, although there are impacts, like the loss of some ecosystems, which may be long-lasting or irreversible.

bike path in a city

Many communities are adding bike lanes and sidewalks to encourage residents to make transportation choices that help decrease emissions of greenhouse gases and other air pollutants. Credit:  Daniel Lobo

How Can We Tackle Climate Change?

There are several different strategies when it comes to dealing with climate change. Reducing greenhouse gases  is a direct way to help slow or stop climate change since excess greenhouse gases are what are causing the climate to warm. This can mean switching to power sources that don’t emit greenhouse gases and taking carbon dioxide out of the air by planting forests and conserving ecosystems. New research on ways to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere could potentially provide other solutions in the future. Researchers are also studying whether we could safely limit the amount of sunlight that gets to Earth in the future while we are reducing emissions.

Unfortunately, the planet is already warming and we are seeing the impacts of climate change. Even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases in the next decade or two, we will be facing more climate change this century, which is why finding ways to adapt to climate change is also important to keep our planet as livable as possible.  

How Can We Limit Warming to 1.5°C?

To keep the total warming limited to 1.5°C, we need to act quickly to change energy sources, how land is used, how industry operates, and our urban environments, including buildings and transportation. For example, industries can reduce emissions with new and existing technologies and practices, such as switching power sources, using sustainable materials like bioplastic, and capturing carbon emissions at factories so they don’t make it into the atmosphere.

There are many ways that we can do this. The IPCC 2018 report analyzed different scenarios that would help us meet the 1.5°C target. Below are descriptions of four scenarios that would meet the target, and a graph showing how much each could reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

  • The innovation scenario (P1): We develop innovations that lead to lower energy demand while living standards rise, especially in the Southern Hemisphere. Needing less energy helps us make the transition to renewable energy. More forests are planted to take carbon dioxide out of the air .
  • The sustainability scenario (P2): We use less energy to produce goods and provide services, there is more international cooperation, and there are shifts toward sustainable consumption patterns. A switch to mostly renewable energy helps us emit less carbon dioxide, and there is also some carbon capture and storage technology used at power plants to stop CO 2 from getting into the atmosphere. Land is well-managed and there are lower emissions from farms.
  • The middle-of-the-road scenario (P3): There is more energy demand in the future, but we increase renewable energy and nuclear power and decrease fossil fuel use so that we can decrease emissions. Where there are still fossil fuels burned at power plants, carbon capture and storage are used. Bioenergy power plants are also developed, which burn plants like switchgrass to create electricity, and then capture the CO 2 .
  • The energy-intensive scenario (P4): Economic growth and globalization cause more people to have a lifestyle that emits lots of greenhouse gases — for example, by driving cars, taking flights, and eating meat. In this scenario, energy comes from oil, gas, nuclear power, and renewables. We have a lot of emissions to reduce and some catching up to do because we have high emissions in the next couple of decades. We do this with carbon capture and storage and removing carbon from the air with bioenergy power plants that capture CO 2 .

the amount of carbon dioxide emissions per year through this century for the four scenarios all have the ability to stop emissions

The graph above shows the amount of carbon dioxide emissions per year through the 21st century for each scenario that limits global warming to 1.5°C (described above: P1 to P4). The shaded area shows the full range of options studied in the IPCC 2018 report. Credit: IPCC

  • Why Earth Is Warming
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  • Classroom Activity: Solving the Carbon Dioxide Problem

What can we do to slow or stop global warming?

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to stopping or slowing global warming, and each individual, business, municipal, state, tribal, and federal entity must weigh their options in light of their own unique set of circumstances.  Experts say  it is likely many strategies working together will be needed. Generally speaking, here are some examples of mitigation strategies we can use to slow or stop the human-caused global warming ( learn more ):

  • Where possible, we can switch to renewable sources of energy (such as solar and wind energy) to power our homes and buildings, thus emitting far less heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
  • Where feasible, we can drive electric vehicles instead of those that burn fossil fuels; or we can use mass transit instead of driving our own cars.
  • Where affordable, we can conserve energy by better insulating our homes and buildings, and by replacing old, failing appliances with more energy-efficient models.
  • Where practicable, we can counterbalance our annual carbon dioxide emissions by investing in commercial services that draw down an equal amount of carbon out of the atmosphere, such as through planting trees or  carbon capture and storage  techniques.
  • Where practical, we can support more local businesses that use and promote sustainable, climate-smart practices such as those listed above.
  • We can consider placing an upper limit on the amount of carbon dioxide we will allow ourselves to emit into the atmosphere within a given timeframe.

Note that NOAA doesn’t advocate for or against particular climate policies. Instead, NOAA’s role is to provide data and scientific information about climate, including how it has changed and is likely to change in the future depending on different climate policies or actions society may or may not take. More guidance on courses of action can be found in the National Academy of Sciences' 2010 report, titled  Informing an Effective Response to Climate Change . Also learn more  here,   here,  and  here .

Photo of Amtrak train sitting on tracks

Thanks to low friction between train wheels and tracks, and level train tracks with gradual turns, trains have high energy efficiency. Photo from National Park Service Amtrak Trails and Rails .

Stabilizing global temperature near its current level requires eliminating all emissions of heat-trapping gases or, equivalently, achieving a carbon-neutral society in which people remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as they emit. Achieving this goal will require substantial societal changes in energy technologies and infrastructure that go beyond the collective actions of individuals and households to reduce emissions.

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Science News

solve problem of climate change

Abdulhamid Hosbas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Century of Science: Theme

Our climate change crisis

The climate change emergency.

Even in a world increasingly battered by weather extremes, the summer 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest stood out. For several days in late June, cities such as Vancouver, Portland and Seattle baked in record temperatures that killed hundreds of people. On June 29 Lytton, a village in British Columbia, set an all-time heat record for Canada, at 121° Fahrenheit (49.6° Celsius); the next day, the village was incinerated by a wildfire.

Within a week, an international group of scientists had analyzed this extreme heat and concluded it would have been virtually impossible without climate change caused by humans. The planet’s average surface temperature has risen by at least 1.1 degree Celsius since preindustrial levels of 1850–1900 — because people are loading the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases produced during the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and gas, and from cutting down forests.

A little over 1 degree of warming may not sound like a lot. But it has already been enough to fundamentally transform how energy flows around the planet. The pace of change is accelerating, and the consequences are everywhere. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, raising sea levels and flooding low-lying island nations and coastal cities. Drought is parching farmlands and the rivers that feed them. Wildfires are raging. Rains are becoming more intense, and weather patterns are shifting .

Australian Wildfires. Research links the fires to human-caused climate change.

The roots of understanding this climate emergency trace back more than a century and a half. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists began the detailed measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide that would prove how much carbon is pouring from human activities. Beginning in the 1960s, researchers began developing comprehensive computer models that now illuminate the severity of the changes ahead.

Global average temperature change, 1850–2021

solve problem of climate change

Long-term climate datasets show that Earth’s average surface temperature (combined land and ocean) has increased by more than 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times. Temperature change is the difference from the 1850–1900 average.

Today we know that climate change and its consequences are real, and we are responsible. The emissions that people have been putting into the air for centuries — the emissions that made long-distance travel, economic growth and our material lives possible — have put us squarely on a warming trajectory . Only drastic cuts in carbon emissions, backed by collective global will, can make a significant difference.

“What’s happening to the planet is not routine,” says Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. “We’re in a planetary crisis.” — Alexandra Witze

Tracking a Greenland glacier

The calving front of Greenland’s Helheim Glacier, which flows toward the sea where it crumbles into icebergs, held roughly the same position from the 1970s until 2001 (left, the calving front is to the far right of the image). But by 2005 (right), it had retreated 7.5 kilometers toward its source. 

Helheim Glacier side by side

The first climate scientists

One day in the 1850s, Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur scientist and women’s rights activist living in upstate New York, put two glass jars in sunlight. One contained regular air — a mix of nitrogen, oxygen and other gases including carbon dioxide — while the other contained just CO 2 . Both had thermometers in them. As the sun’s rays beat down, Foote observed that the jar of CO 2 alone heated more quickly, and was slower to cool, than the one containing plain air.

Illustration of Eunice Newton Foote. Hers were some of the first studies of climate change.

The results prompted Foote to muse on the relationship between CO 2 , the planet and heat. “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” she wrote in an 1856 paper summarizing her findings .

Three years later, working independently and apparently unaware of Foote’s discovery, Irish physicist John Tyndall showed the same basic idea in more detail. With a set of pipes and devices to study the transmission of heat, he found that CO 2 gas, as well as water vapor, absorbed more heat than air alone. He argued that such gases would trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere, much as panes of glass trap heat in a greenhouse, and thus modulate climate. “As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth’s surface,” he wrote in 1862.

Tyndall contraption

Today Tyndall is widely credited with the discovery of how what are now called greenhouse gases heat the planet, earning him a prominent place in the history of climate science. Foote faded into relative obscurity — partly because of her gender, partly because her measurements were less sensitive. Yet their findings helped kick off broader scientific exploration of how the composition of gases in Earth’s atmosphere affects global temperatures.

Carbon floods in

Humans began substantially affecting the atmosphere around the turn of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution took off in Britain. Factories burned tons of coal; fueled by fossil fuels, the steam engine revolutionized transportation and other industries. In the decades since, fossil fuels including oil and natural gas have been harnessed to drive a global economy. All these activities belch gases into the air.

Yet Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist, wasn’t worried about the Industrial Revolution when he began thinking in the late 1800s about changes in atmospheric CO 2 levels. He was instead curious about ice ages — including whether a decrease in volcanic eruptions, which can put CO 2 into the atmosphere, would lead to a future ice age. Bored and lonely in the wake of a divorce, Arrhenius set himself to months of laborious calculations involving moisture and heat transport in the atmosphere at different zones of latitude. In 1896 he reported that halving the amount of CO 2 in the atmosphere could indeed bring about an ice age — and that doubling CO 2 would raise global temperatures by around 5 to 6 degrees C.

It was a remarkably prescient finding for work that, out of necessity, had simplified Earth’s complex climate system down to just a few variables. Today, estimates for how much the planet will warm through a doubling of CO 2 — a measure known as climate sensitivity — range between 1.5 degrees and 4.5 degrees Celsius. (The range remains broad in part because scientists now incorporate their understanding of many more planetary feedbacks than were recognized in Arrhenius’ day.)  

But Arrhenius’ findings didn’t gain much traction with other scientists at the time. The climate system seemed too large, complex and inert to change in any meaningful way on a timescale that would be relevant to human society. Geologic evidence showed, for instance, that ice ages took thousands of years to start and end. What was there to worry about? And other laboratory experiments — later shown to be flawed — appeared to indicate that changing levels of CO 2 would have little impact on heat absorption in the atmosphere. Most scientists aware of the work came to believe that Arrhenius had been proved wrong.

Guy Callendar chart

One researcher, though, thought the idea was worth pursuing. Guy Stewart Callendar, a British engineer and amateur meteorologist, had tallied weather records over time, obsessively enough to determine that average temperatures were increasing at 147 weather stations around the globe. In 1938, in a paper in a Royal Meteorological Society journal , he linked this temperature rise to the burning of fossil fuels. Callendar estimated that fossil fuel burning had put around 150 billion metric tons of CO 2 into the atmosphere since the late 19th century.

Antarctic traverse

Like many of his day, Callendar didn’t see global warming as a problem. Extra CO 2 would surely stimulate plants to grow and allow crops to be farmed in new regions. “In any case the return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely,” he wrote. But his work revived discussions tracing back to Tyndall and Arrhenius about how the planetary system responds to changing levels of gases in the atmosphere. And it began steering the conversation toward how human activities might drive those changes.

When World War II broke out the following year, the global conflict redrew the landscape for scientific research. Hugely important wartime technologies, such as radar and the atomic bomb, set the stage for “big science” studies that brought nations together to tackle high-stakes questions of global reach. And that allowed modern climate science to emerge.

The Keeling curve and climate change

One major postwar effort was the International Geophysical Year, an 18-month push in 1957–1958 that involved a wide array of scientific field campaigns including exploration in the Arctic and Antarctica. Climate change wasn’t a high research priority during the IGY, but some scientists in California, led by Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, used the funding influx to begin a project they’d long wanted to do. The goal was to measure CO 2 levels at different locations around the world, accurately and consistently.

Keeling portrait

The job fell to geochemist Charles David Keeling, who put ultraprecise CO 2 monitors in Antarctica and on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa. Funds soon ran out to maintain the Antarctic record, but the Mauna Loa measurements continued. Thus was born one of the most iconic datasets in all of science — the “Keeling curve,” which tracks the rise of atmospheric CO 2 . When Keeling began his measurements in 1958, CO 2 made up 315 parts per million of the global atmosphere. Within just a few years it became clear that the number was increasing year by year. Because plants take up CO 2 as they grow in spring and summer and release it as they decompose in fall and winter, CO 2 concentrations rose and fell each year in a sawtooth pattern — but superimposed on that pattern was a steady march upward.  

Monthly average CO 2 concentrations at Mauna Loa Observatory

Keeling and his curve side by side

Atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements collected continuously since 1958 at Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii show the rise due to human activities. The visible sawtooth pattern is due to seasonal plant growth: Plants take up CO 2 in the growing seasons, then release it as they decompose in fall and winter.

“The graph got flashed all over the place — it was just such a striking image,” says Ralph Keeling, who is Charles David Keeling’s son. Over the years, as the curve marched higher, “it had a really important role historically in waking people up to the problem of climate change.” The Keeling curve has been featured in countless earth science textbooks, congressional hearings and in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth . Each year the curve keeps going up: In 2016 it passed 400 ppm of CO 2 in the atmosphere, as measured during its typical annual minimum in September. In 2021, the annual minimum was 413 ppm. (Before the Industrial Revolution, CO 2 levels in the atmosphere had been stable for centuries at around 280 ppm.)

Around the time that Keeling’s measurements were kicking off, Revelle also helped develop an important argument that the CO 2 from human activities was building up in Earth’s atmosphere. In 1957 he and Hans Suess, also at Scripps at the time, published a paper that traced the flow of radioactive carbon through the oceans and the atmosphere. They showed that the oceans were not capable of taking up as much CO 2 as previously thought; the implication was that much of the gas must be going into the atmosphere instead. “Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future,” Revelle and Suess wrote in the paper. It’s one of the most famous sentences in earth science history.

Suess

“Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.”

Here was the insight underlying modern climate science: Atmosheric CO 2 is increasing, and humans are causing the buildup. Revelle and Suess became the final piece in a puzzle dating back to Svante Arrhenius and John Tyndall.

“I tell my students that to understand the basics of climate change, you need to have the cutting-edge science of the 1860s, the cutting-edge math of the 1890s and the cutting-edge chemistry of the 1950s,” says Joshua Howe, an environmental historian at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Environmental awareness grows

As this scientific picture began to emerge in the late 1950s, Science News was on the story. A March 1, 1958 article in Science News Letter , “Weather May Be Warming,” described a warm winter month in the Northern Hemisphere. It posits three theories, including that “carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere by a booming industrial civilization could have caused the increase. By burning up about 100 billion tons of coal and oil since 1900, man himself may be changing the climate.” By 1972, the magazine was reporting on efforts to expand global atmospheric greenhouse gas monitoring beyond Keeling’s work; two years later, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched its own CO 2 monitoring network, now the biggest in the world.

Science News coverage

Environmental awareness on other issues grew in the 1960s and 1970s. Rachel Carson catalyzed the modern U.S. environmental movement in 1962 when she published a magazine series and then a book, Silent Spring , condemning the pesticide DDT for its ecological impacts. 1970 saw the celebration of the first Earth Day , in the United States and elsewhere, and in India in 1973 a group of women led a series of widely publicized protests against deforestation. This Chipko movement explicitly linked environmental protection with protecting human communities, and helped seed other environmental movements.

The fragility of global energy supplies was also becoming more obvious through the 1970s. The United States, heavily dependent on other countries for oil imports, entered a gas shortage in 1973–74 when Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries cut off oil supplies because of U.S. government support for Israel. The shortage prompted more people to think about the finiteness of natural resources and the possibility of overtaxing the planet. — Alexandra Witze

Welland, Ontario environmental movement pic

Climate change evidence piles up

Observational data collected throughout the second half of the 20th century helped researchers gradually build their understanding of how human activities were transforming the planet. “It was a sort of slow accretion of evidence and concern,” says historian Joshua Howe of Reed College.

Environmental records from the past, such as tree rings and ice cores, established that the current changes in climate are unusual compared with the recent past. Yet such paleoclimatology data also showed that climate has changed quickly in the deep past — driven by triggers other than human activity, but with lessons for how abrupt planetary transformations can be.

Ice cores pulled from ice sheets, such as that atop Greenland, offer some of the most telling insights for understanding past climate change. Each year snow falls atop the ice and compresses into a fresh layer of ice representing climate conditions at the time it formed. The abundance of certain forms, or isotopes, of oxygen and hydrogen in the ice allows scientists to calculate the temperature at which it formed, and air bubbles trapped within the ice reveal how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were in the atmosphere at that time. So drilling down into an ice sheet is like reading the pages of a history book that go back in time the deeper you go.

Scientist with GRIP project

Scientists began reading these pages in the early 1960s, using ice cores drilled at a U.S. military base in northwest Greenland . Contrary to expectations that past climates were stable, the cores hinted that abrupt climate shifts had happened over the last 100,000 years. By 1979, an international group of researchers was pulling another deep ice core from a second location in Greenland — and it, too, showed that abrupt climate change had occurred in the past. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a pair of European- and U.S.-led drilling projects retrieved even deeper cores from near the top of the ice sheet, pushing the record of past temperatures back a quarter of a million years.

Antarctic drilling

Together with other sources of information, such as sediment cores drilled from the seafloor and molecules preserved in ancient rocks, the ice cores allowed scientists to reconstruct past temperature changes in extraordinary detail. Many of those changes happened alarmingly fast. For instance, the climate in Greenland warmed abruptly more than 20 times in the last 80,000 years, with the changes occurring in a matter of decades. More recently, a cold spell that set in around 13,000 years ago suddenly came to an end around 11,500 years ago — and temperatures in Greenland rose 10 degrees Celsius in a decade.

Evidence for such dramatic climate shifts laid to rest any lingering ideas that global climate change would be slow and unlikely to occur on a timescale that humans should worry about. “It’s an important reminder of how ‘tippy’ things can be,” says Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

More evidence of global change came from Earth-observing satellites, which brought a new planet-wide perspective on global warming beginning in the 1960s. From their viewpoint in the sky, satellites have measured the steady rise in global sea level — currently 3.4 millimeters per year and accelerating, as warming water expands and as ice sheets melt — as well as the rapid decline in ice left floating on the Arctic Ocean each summer at the end of the melt season. Gravity-sensing satellites have ‘weighed’ the Antarctic and Greenlandic ice sheets from above since 2002, reporting that more than 400 billion metric tons of ice are lost each year.

Temperature observations taken at weather stations around the world also confirm that we are living in the hottest years on record. The 10 warmest years since record keeping began in 1880 have all occurred since 2005. And nine of those 10 have come since 2010.

What’s more, extreme weather is hammering the planet more and more frequently. That 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, is just a harbinger of what’s to come. — Alexandra Witze

Worrisome predictions from climate models

By the 1960s, there was no denying that the planet was warming. But understanding the consequences of those changes — including the threat to human health and well-being — would require more than observational data. Looking to the future depended on computer simulations: complex calculations of how energy flows through the planetary system. Such models of the climate system have been crucial to developing projections for what we can expect from greenhouse warming.

Hurricane Laura

A first step in building climate models was to connect everyday observations of weather to the concept of forecasting future climate. During World War I, the British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson imagined tens of thousands of meteorologists working to forecast the weather, each calculating conditions for a small part of the atmosphere but collectively piecing together a global forecast. Richardson published his work in 1922, to reviews that called the idea “of almost quixotic boldness.”

Charney paper (first weather predictions with ENIAC)

But it wasn’t until after World War II that computational power turned Richardson’s dream into reality. In the wake of the Allied victory, which relied on accurate weather forecasts for everything from planning D-Day to figuring out when and where to drop the atomic bombs, leading U.S. mathematicians acquired funding from the federal government to improve predictions. In 1950 a team led by Jule Charney, a meteorologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., used the ENIAC, the first general-purpose, programmable electronic computer, to produce the first computer-driven regional weather forecast . The forecasting was slow and rudimentary, but it built on Richardson’s ideas of dividing the atmosphere into squares, or cells, and computing the weather for each of those. With the obscure title “Numerical integration of the barotropic vorticity equation,” the paper reporting the results set the stage for decades of climate modeling to follow.

By 1956 Norman Phillips, a member of Charney’s team, had produced the world’s first general circulation model, which captured how energy flows between the oceans, atmosphere and land. Phillips ran the calculations on a computer with just 5 kilobytes of memory, yet it was able to reproduce monthly and seasonal patterns in the lower atmosphere. That meant scientists could begin developing more realistic models of how the planet responds to factors such as increasing levels of greenhouse gases. The field of climate modeling was born.

The work was basic at first, because early computers simply didn’t have much computational power to simulate all aspects of the planetary system. “People thought that it was stupid to try to study this greenhouse-warming issue by three-dimensional model[s], because it cost so much computer time,” meteorologist Syukuro Manabe told physics historian Spencer Weart in a 1989 oral history .

Climate models have predicted how much ice the Ilulissat region of the Greenland ice sheet might lose by 2300 based on different scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions. The models are compared to 2008 (first image). In a best-case scenario, in which emissions peak by mid-century, the speed at which the glacier is sending ice out into the ocean is much lower (second image) than with a worst-case scenario, in which emissions rise at a high rate (third image).

solve problem of climate change

An important breakthrough came in 1967, when Manabe and Richard Wetherald — both at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, a lab born from Charney’s group — published a paper in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences that modeled connections between Earth’s surface and atmosphere and calculated how changes in carbon dioxide would affect the planet’s temperature. Manabe and Wetherald were the first to build a computer model that captured the relevant processes that drive climate , and to accurately simulate how the Earth responds to those processes. (Manabe shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on climate modeling; Wetherald died in 2011.)

The rise of climate modeling allowed scientists to more accurately envision the impacts of global warming. In 1979, Charney and other experts met in Woods Hole, Mass., to try to put together a scientific consensus on what increasing levels of CO 2 would mean for the planet. They analyzed climate models from Manabe and from James Hansen of NASA. The resulting “Charney report” concluded that rising CO 2 in the atmosphere would lead to additional and significant climate change. The ocean might take up much of that heat, the scientists wrote — but “it appears that the warming will eventually occur, and the associated regional climatic changes so important to the assessment of socioeconomic consequence may well be significant.”

In the decades since, climate modeling has gotten increasingly sophisticated . Scientists have drawn up a variety of scenarios for how carbon emissions might change in the future, depending on the stringency of emissions cuts. Modelers use those scenarios to project how climate and weather will change around the globe, from hotter croplands in China to melting glaciers in the Himalayas. Climate simulations have also allowed researchers to identify the fingerprints of human impacts on extreme weather that is already happening, by comparing scenarios that include the influence of human activities with those that do not.

And as climate science firmed up and the most dramatic consequences became clear, the political battles raged. — Alexandra Witze

Climate science meets politics

With the development of climate science tracing back to the early Cold War, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the science of global warming became enmeshed in broader societal and political battles. A complex stew of political, national and business interests mired society in debates about the reality of climate change, and what to do about it, decades after the science became clear that humans are fundamentally altering the planet’s atmosphere.

Climate activists

Society has pulled itself together before to deal with global environmental problems, such as the Antarctic ozone hole. In 1974 chemists Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, both of the University of California, Irvine, reported that chlorofluorocarbon chemicals, used in products such as spray cans and refrigerants, caused a chain of reactions that gnawed away at the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer . The resulting ozone hole, which forms over Antarctica every spring, allows more ultraviolet radiation from the sun to make it through Earth’s atmosphere and reach the surface, where it can cause skin cancer and eye damage.

Governments ultimately worked under the auspices of the United Nations to craft the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which strictly limited the manufacture of chlorofluorocarbons . In the years following, the ozone hole began to heal. But fighting climate change would prove to be far more challenging. Chlorofluorocarbons were a suite of chemicals with relatively limited use and for which replacements could be found without too much trouble. But the greenhouse gases that cause global warming stem from a wide variety of human activities, from energy development to deforestation. And transforming entire energy sectors to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions is much more difficult than replacing a set of industrial chemicals.

Rio Earth Summit

In 1980, though, researchers took an important step toward banding together to synthesize the scientific understanding of climate change and bring it to the attention of international policy makers. It started at a small scientific conference in Villach, Austria. There, experts met under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization, the International Council of Scientific Unions and the United Nations Environment Program to discuss the seriousness of climate change. On the train ride home from the meeting, Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin talked with other participants about how a broader, deeper and more international analysis was needed. In 1985, a second conference was held at Villach to highlight the urgency, and in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, was born. Bolin was its first chairperson.

The IPCC became a highly influential and unique body. It performs no original scientific research; instead, it synthesizes and summarizes the vast literature of climate science for policy makers to consider — primarily through massive reports issued every couple of years. The first IPCC report , in 1990, predicted that the planet’s global mean temperature would rise more quickly in the following century than at any point in the last 10,000 years, due to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Successive IPCC reports showed more and more confidence in the link between greenhouse emissions and rising global temperatures — and explored how society might mitigate and adapt to coming changes.

IPCC reports have played a key role in providing scientific information for nations discussing how to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations. This process started with the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 , which resulted in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Annual U.N. meetings to tackle climate change led to the first international commitments to reduce emissions, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Under it, developed countries committed to reduce emissions of CO 2 and other greenhouse gases. By 2007 the IPCC declared that the reality of climate warming is “unequivocal ”; the group received the Nobel Peace Prize that year along with Al Gore for their work on climate change.

Tuvalu press conference

The IPCC process ensured that policy makers had the best science at hand when they came to the table to discuss cutting emissions. “If you go back and look at the original U.N. framework on climate change, already you see the core of the science represented there,” says Rachel Cleetus, a climate policy expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. Of course, nations did not have to abide by that science — and they often didn’t.

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, international climate meetings discussed less hard-core science and more issues of equity. Countries such as China and India pointed out that they needed energy to develop their economies, and that nations responsible for the bulk of emissions through history, such as the United States, needed to lead the way in cutting greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, residents of some of the most vulnerable nations, such as low-lying islands that are threatened by sea level rise, gained visibility and clout at international negotiating forums. “The issues around equity have always been very uniquely challenging in this collective action problem,” says Cleetus.

By 2015, the world’s nations had made some progress on the emissions cuts laid out in the Kyoto Protocol, but it was still not enough to achieve substantial global reductions. That year, a key U.N. climate conference in Paris produced an international agreement to try to limit global warming to 2 degrees C , and preferably 1.5 degrees C, above preindustrial levels.

Somalia drought and famine

Every country has its own approach to the challenge of addressing climate change. In the United States, which gets approximately 80 percent of its energy from fossil fuels, sophisticated efforts to downplay and critique the science led to major delays in climate action. For decades U.S. fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil worked to influence politicians to take as little action on emissions reductions as possible. Working with a small group of influential scientists, this well-funded, well-orchestrated campaign took many of its tactics from earlier tobacco-industry efforts to cast doubt on the links between smoking and cancer, as historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented in their book Merchants of Doubt.

Perhaps the peak of U.S. climate denialism came in the late 1980s and into the 1990s — roughly a century after Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius laid out the consequences of putting too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In 1988 NASA scientist James Hansen testified to lawmakers about the consequences of global warming. “It is already happening now,” Hansen said, summarizing what scientists had long known.

The high-profile nature of Hansen’s testimony, combined with his NASA expertise, vaulted global warming into the public eye in the United States like never before. “It really hit home with a public who could understand that there are reasons that Venus is hot and Mars is cold,” says Joshua Howe, a historian at Reed College. “And that if you use that same reasoning, we have some concerns about what is happening here on Earth.” But Hansen also kicked off a series of bitter public battles about the reality of human-caused climate change that raged for years.        

One common approach of climate skeptics was to attack the environmental data and models that underlie climate science. In 1998, scientist Michael Mann, then at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, and colleagues published a detailed temperature record that formed the basis of what came to be known as the “hockey stick” graph, so named because the chart showed a sharp rise in temperatures (the hockey blade) at the end of a long, much flatter period (the hockey stick). Skeptics soon demanded the data and software processing tools Mann used to create the graph. Bloggers and self-proclaimed citizen scientists created a cottage industry of questioning new climate science papers under the guise of “audits.” In 2009 hackers broke into a server at the University of East Anglia, a leading climate-research hub in Norwich, England, and released more than 1,000 e-mails between climate scientists. This “Climategate” scandal purported to reveal misconduct on the part of the researchers, but several reviews largely exonerated the scientists.  

The graph that launched climate skeptic attacks

This famous graph, produced by scientist Michael Mann and colleagues, and then reproduced in a 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, dramatically captures temperature change over time. Climate change skeptics made it the center of an all-out attack on climate science.

image of the "hockey stick" graph showing the increase in temperature from 1961 to 1990

Such tactics undoubtedly succeeded in feeding politicians’ delay on climate action in the United States, most of it from Republicans. President George W. Bush withdrew the country from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 ; Donald Trump similarly rejected the Paris accord in 2017 . As late as 2015, the chair of the Senate’s environment committee, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, brought a snowball into Congress on a cold winter’s day in order to continue his argument that human-caused global warming is a “hoax.” In Australia, a similar mix of right-wing denialism and fossil fuel interests has kept climate change commitments in flux, as prime ministers are voted in and out over fierce debates about how the nation should act on climate.

Yet other nations have moved forward. Some European countries such as Germany aggressively pursued renewable energies, such as wind and solar, while activists such as the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg — the vanguard of a youth-action movement — pressured their governments for more.

In recent years the developing economies of China and India have taken center stage in discussions about climate action. Both nations argue that they must be allowed extra time to wean themselves off fossil fuels in order to continue economic growth. They note that historically speaking, the United States is the largest total emitter of carbon by far.

Total carbon dioxide emissions by country, 1850–2021

solve problem of climate change

These 20 nations have emitted the largest cumulative amounts of carbon dioxide since 1850. Emissions are shown in in billions of metric tons and are broken down into subtotals from fossil fuel use and cement manufacturing (blue) as well as from land use and forestry (green).

China, whose annual CO 2 emissions surpassed those of the United States in 2006, declared several moderate steps in 2021 to reduce emissions, including that it would stop building coal-burning power plants overseas. India announced it would aim for net-zero emissions by 2070, the first time it has set a date for this goal.

Yet such pledges continue to be criticized. At the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, India was globally criticized for not committing to a complete phaseout of coal — although the two top emitters, China and the United States, have not themselves committed to phasing out coal. “There is no equity in this,” says Aayushi Awasthy, an energy economist at the University of East Anglia. — Alexandra Witze

Facing a warmer future

Climate change creeps up gradually on society, except when it doesn’t. The slow increase in sea level, for instance, causes waters to lap incrementally higher at shorelines year after year. But when a big storm comes along — which may be happening more frequently due to climate change — the consequences become much more obvious. Storm surge rapidly swamps communities and wreaks disproportionate havoc. That’s why New York City installed floodgates in its subway and tunnel system in the wake of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy , and why the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu has asked Australia and New Zealand to be prepared to take in refugees fleeing from rising sea levels.

NYC floodgates

The list of climate impacts goes on and on — and in many cases, changes are coming faster than scientists had envisioned a few decades ago. The oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb carbon dioxide, harming tiny marine organisms that build protective calcium carbonate shells and are the base of the marine food web. Warmer waters are bleaching coral reefs. Higher temperatures are driving animal and plant species into areas in which they previously did not live, increasing the risk of extinction for many. “It’s no longer about impacts in the future,” says Rachel Cleetus, a climate policy expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s about what’s happening in the U.S. here and now, and around the world.”

No place on the planet is unaffected. In many areas, higher temperatures have led to major droughts, which dry out vegetation and provide additional fuel for wildfires such as those that have devastated Australia , the Mediterranean and western North America in recent years. The Colorado River , the source of water for tens of millions of people in the western United States , came under a water-shortage alert in 2021 for the first time in history.

Then there’s the Arctic, where temperatures are rising at more than twice the global average and communities are at the forefront of change. Permafrost is thawing, destabilizing buildings, pipelines and roads. Caribou and reindeer herders worry about the increased risk of parasites to the health of their animals. With less sea ice available to buffer the coast from storm erosion, the Inupiat village of Shishmaref, Alaska, risks crumbling into the sea. It will need to move from its sand-barrier island to the mainland .

“We know these changes are happening and that the Titanic is sinking,” says Louise Farquharson, a geomorphologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who monitors permafrost and coastal change around Alaska. Like many Arctic scientists, she is working with Indigenous communities to understand the shifts they’re experiencing and what can be done when buildings start to slump and water supplies start to drain away. “A big part is just listening to community members and understanding what they’re seeing change,” she says.

Alaska home destroyed

All around the planet, those who depend on intact ecosystems for their survival face the greatest threat from climate change. And those with the least resources to adapt to climate change are the ones who feel it first .

“We are going to warm,” says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “There is no question about it. The only thing that we can hope to do is to warm a little more slowly.”

That’s one reason why the IPCC report released in 2021 focuses on anticipated levels of global warming. There is a big difference between the planet warming 1.5 degrees versus 2 degrees or 2.5 degrees. Consider that we are now at least 1.1 degrees above preindustrial levels of CO 2 and are already seeing dramatic shifts in climate. Given that, keeping further global temperature increases as low as possible will make a big difference in the climate impacts the planet faces. “With every fraction of a degree of warming, everything gets a little more intense,” says paleoclimatologist Jessica Tierney. “There’s no more time to beat around the bush.”

Historical and projected global temperature change

solve problem of climate change

Various scenarios for how greenhouse gas emissions might change going forward help scientists predict future climate change. This graph shows the simulated historical temperature trend along with future projections of global surface temperature based on five scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Temperature change is the difference from the 1850–1900 average.

The future rests on how much nations are willing to commit to cutting emissions and whether they will stick to those commitments. It’s a geopolitical balancing act the likes of which the world has never seen.

Science can and must play a role going forward. Improved climate models will illuminate what changes are expected at the regional scale, helping officials prepare. Governments and industry have crucial parts to play as well. They can invest in technologies, such as carbon sequestration, to help decarbonize the economy and shift society toward more renewable sources of energy. “We can solve these problems — most of the tools are already there,” says Cascade Tuholske, a geographer at Columbia University. “We just have to do it.”

Huge questions remain. Do voters have the will to demand significant energy transitions from their governments? How can business and military leaders play a bigger role in driving climate action? What should be the role of low-carbon energy sources that come with downsides, such as nuclear energy ? How can developing nations achieve a better standard of living for their people while not becoming big greenhouse gas emitters? How can we keep the most vulnerable from being disproportionately harmed during extreme events, and incorporate environmental and social justice into our future?

These questions become more pressing each year, as CO 2 accumulates in our atmosphere. The planet is now at higher levels of CO 2 than at any time in the last 3 million years. Yet Ralph Keeling, keeper of the iconic Mauna Loa record tracking the rise in atmospheric CO 2 , is already optimistically thinking about how scientists would be able to detect a slowdown, should the world actually start cutting emissions by a few percent per year. “That’s what the policy makers want to see — that there’s been some large-scale impact of what they did,” he says.

West Bengal floods

At the 2021 U.N. climate meeting in Glasgow diplomats from around the world agreed to work more urgently to shift away from using fossil fuels. They did not, however, adopt targets strict enough to keep the world below a warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s been well over a century since Svante Arrhenius recognized the consequences of putting extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and yet world leaders have yet to pull together to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change.

Time is running out. — Alexandra Witze

Climate change facts

We know that climate change and its consequences are real, and we are responsible. Here’s what the science tells us.

How much has the planet warmed over the past century?

The planet’s average surface temperature has risen by at least 1.1 degree Celsius since preindustrial levels of 1850–1900.

What is causing climate change?

People are loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases produced during the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and gas, and cutting down forests.

What are some of the effects of climate change?

Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, raising sea levels and flooding low-lying island nations and coastal cities. Drought is parching farmlands and the rivers that feed them. Wildfires are raging. Rains are becoming more intense, and weather patterns are shifting.

What is the greenhouse effect?

In the 19th century, Irish physicist John Tyndall found that carbon dioxide gas, as well as water vapor, absorbed more heat than air alone. He argued that such gases would trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere, much as panes of glass trap heat in a greenhouse, and thus modulate climate.

What is the Keeling curve?

line graph showing increasing monthly average CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa Observatory from 1958 to 2022

One of the most iconic datasets in all of science, the Keeling curve tracks the rise of atmospheric CO 2 . When geochemist Charles David Keeling began his measurements in 1958 on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa, CO 2 made up 315 parts per million of the global atmosphere. Each year the curve keeps going up: In 2016 it passed 400 ppm of CO 2 in the atmosphere, as measured during its typical annual minimum in September. In 2021, the annual minimum was 413 ppm.

Does it get hotter every year?

Average global temperatures fluctuate from year to year, but temperature observations taken at weather stations around the world confirm that we are living in the hottest years on record. The 10 warmest years since record keeping began in 1880 have all occurred since 2005. And nine of those 10 have come since 2010.

What countries emit the most carbon dioxide?

The United States has been the largest total emitter of carbon dioxide by far, followed by China and Russia. China’s annual CO 2 emissions surpassed those of the United States in 2006.

What places are impacted by climate change?

No place on the planet is unaffected. Higher temperatures have led to major droughts, providing fuel for wildfires such as those that have devastated Australia , the Mediterranean and western North America in recent years. The Colorado River came under a water-shortage alert in 2021 for the first time in history. In the Arctic, where temperatures are rising at more than twice the global average, permafrost is thawing, destabilizing buildings, pipelines and roads. With less sea ice available to buffer the coast from storm erosion, the Inupiat village of Shishmaref, Alaska, risks crumbling into the sea. All around the planet, those who depend on intact ecosystems for their survival face the greatest threat from climate change. And those with the least resources to adapt to climate change are the ones who feel it first .

Editor’s note: This story was published March 10, 2022.

Richardson in a classroom

British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson (shown at center) proposes forecasting the weather by piecing together the calculations of tens of thousands of meteorologists working on small parts of the atmosphere.

Keeling portrait

Geochemist Charles David Keeling (shown in 1988) begins tracking the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. The record, which continues through today, has become one of the most iconic datasets in all of science.

Carson

Rachel Carson (shown) publishes the book Silent Spring , raising alarm over the ecological impacts of the pesticide DDT. The book helps catalyze the modern U.S. environmental movement.

Earth Day sign

The first Earth Day, organized by U.S. senator Gaylord Nelson and graduate student Denis Hayes, is celebrated.

Image of rocket on the base set to launch Landsat

The first Landsat satellite launched (shown), opening the door to continuous monitoring of Earth and its features from above.

Mount Pinatubo erupting

A powerful eruption from the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo (shown) ejects millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, temporarily cooling the planet.  

Rio Earth Summit

World leaders gathered (shown) at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro to address how to pursue economic development while also protecting the Earth. The meeting resulted in an international convention on climate change.

Youth activists at COP26

Activist Greta Thunberg initiates the “School Strike for Climate” movement by protesting outside the Swedish parliament. Soon, students around the world join a growing movement demanding action on climate change . (Activists at the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference are shown.)

From the archive

Climate change foreseen.

In an early mention of climate change in Science News-Letter , the predecessor of Science News , British meteorologist C.E.P. Brooks warns that present warming trends could lead to “important economic and political effects.”

IGY Brings Many Discoveries

Science News Letter lists the Top 8 accomplishments of the International Geophysical Year.

Chilling possibilities

Science News explores the tentative idea that global temperatures are cooling and that a new ice age could be imminent, which is later shown to be inaccurate.

Long Hot Future: Warmer Earth Appears Inevitable

“The planet earth will be a warmer place in the 21st century, and there is no realistic strategy that can prevent the change,” Science News reports.

Ozone and Global Warming: What to Do?

Policy makers discuss how to solve the dual problems of ozone depletion and global warming.

Looking for Mr. Greenhouse

Science writer Richard Monastersky reports on scientists’ efforts to evaluate how to connect increasing greenhouse gases and a warming climate.

World Climate Panel Charts Path for Action

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that “the fingerprint of man in the past temperature record” is now apparent.

Animals on the Move

A warming climate means shifting ranges and ecosystem disruptions for a lot of species, Nancy Ross-Flanigan reports.

Changing climate: 10 years after ‘An Inconvenient Truth’

A decade after former vice president Al Gore releases the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth , Science News looks back at how climate science has advanced.

With nowhere to hide from rising seas, Boston prepares for a wetter future

Mary Caperton Morton reports for Science News on how Boston is taking action to prepare for rising seas.

The new UN climate change report shows there’s no time for denial or delay

Earth & climate writer Carolyn Gramling covers the sixth assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which documents how climate change is already affecting every region on Earth.

Climate change disinformation is evolving. So are efforts to fight back

Researchers are testing games and other ways to help people recognize climate change denial.

photo of cars backed up on a freeway with a sign above that reads, "EXTREME HEAT SAVE POWER 4-9PM STAY COOL"

Extreme weather in 2022 showed the global impact of climate change

Heat waves, floods, wildfires and drought around the world were exacerbated by Earth’s changing climate.

Science News is published by Society for Science

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Climate change: Seven technology solutions that could help solve crisis

Tuesday 12 October 2021 17:26, UK

Technological advances, particularly the discovery and use of fossil fuels, have contributed to climate change - but they have also allowed humanity to become aware of our impact on the planet and develop techniques to address global warming.

Ahead of Climate After Covid: A Green Recovery? on Sky News on Thursday night, we look at seven innovations which could help humanity avoid the catastrophic damage which a continued increase in global temperatures could cause:

1. Carbon capture

Net Zero Teesside

The rising average temperature of the Earth is primarily blamed by scientists on man-made emissions of greenhouse gases that trap radiation in the atmosphere which would otherwise escape into space.

Among the most significant greenhouse gases is carbon dioxide (CO2), concentrations of which have increased by almost 50% since the industrial revolution began.

Innovations being used to reduce CO2 emissions include carbon capture, utilisation, and storage technologies - with the Net Zero Teesside (NZT) project being an interesting example.

Net Zero Teeside

NZT aims to capture CO2 produced in industrial processes and power plants and transport these emissions by pipeline to offshore storage sites several kilometres beneath the North Sea.

Sequestered in secure areas deep beneath the sea, this carbon would no longer contribute to the greenhouse effect - and it could even be synthesised into new fuels for transportation systems in the future.

The aim, as the NZT project's name suggests, will be to reduce carbon emissions in a number of carbon-intensive industries in the North East to zero by as early as 2030.

But the scale of the Earth's problem is far more significant than can be solved by the selective decarbonisation of a low number of businesses.

2. Feeding cows seaweed

solve problem of climate change

Another significant greenhouse gas is methane, emissions of which are reaching record levels due to cattle farming.

Agriculture accounted for roughly two-thirds of all methane emissions related to human activities between 2000 and 2017 according to one recent study, with fossil fuels contributing most of the remaining third.

This methane primarily comes from burping cattle, due to how cows digest food - fermenting it in their stomachs where the sugars are converted into simpler molecules that can be absorbed by the body.

solve problem of climate change

Scientists have discovered that a red seaweed which grows in the tropics can reduce methane emissions by 80% in cows when it is added as a supplement to cattle feed.

However, with nearly 1.5 billion head of cattle globally, there is simply not enough of this seaweed currently available to suppress these burps - although perhaps some scientists might be able to reproduce the crucial ingredient which will help keep them down.

3. Delicious insects

A cook grills grasshopper burgers June 4, 2014 during a global Pestaurant event sponsored by Ehrlich Pest Control, held at the Occidental Restaurant in Washington, DC. For one day only, pop-up Pestaurants will appear in cities across the globe to offer sweet and savoury edible insects, grasshopper burgers and much more. Ehrlich Pest Control will be donating $5 USD to DC Central Kitchen for every person who eats something at the event. AFP PHOTO / Karen BLEIER (Photo credit should read KAREN BLEI

While individuals' dietary decisions don't come within the purview of potential technological solutions to climate change, innovative food creation definitely does.

Another interesting way to reduce the methane pollution from cattle farming would be to replace the beef with a substitute made from insects - and this is already taking off in places.

Protein-rich insects such as mealworms can be farmed without the demands on land or water that cattle farming requires - but even if the insects are high in protein there are a number of other crucial nutrients which humans generally only find in meat - including iron.

Some scientific research suggests that a range of insects could provide all of the mineral nutrients which humans need - but of course, even this isn't a quick fix - insect burgers largely remain a novelty item rather than something which can be mass produced and consumed.

4. Climate repair

A glacier near Ny Alesund, a research base on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, 800 miles from the North Pole

The Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge is investigating a number of ideas which would repair the damage being done by human pollution.

Among their ideas are refreezing the poles by brightening the clouds above them, essentially by spraying tiny drops of salt into the sky to assist the clouds in reflecting radiation back into space.

Another suggestion has been "greening" the oceans, essentially fertilising them to encourage the growth of plant matter and algae which could absorb more CO2.

However some research warns that this could cause enormous disruption to the oceans' ecosystems, and potentially wouldn't even then be able to capture enough CO2 to offset emissions.

5. Remote working

Remote working from home.

As the coronavirus pandemic has shown, many office jobs can be successfully fulfilled from home - potentially offering a route to reduce emissions from transport and office buildings.

Driving to and from work is the largest source of carbon emissions in the developed world.

The technology to support remote working has been rapidly adopted as businesses attempted to manage the impact of COVID-19 on their workers, and governments rushed to lock down their countries and prevent mass deaths.

However remote working may only be an effective method of reducing emissions during the summer.

It turns out that when buildings need to be heated during the winter it is much more efficient to have numerous people in a single building rather than distributed across their own homes, and some research suggests this might even offset the emissions from transportation.

6. Greater use of data centres

solve problem of climate change

A similar logic regarding the heating of individual homes versus office buildings can be applied when it comes to computation.

The advent of computers has increased electricity consumption considerably, but modern data centres are often far more energy efficient than personal computers.

Rather than performing energy-intensive applications on local machines - from crunching complicated numbers through to playing video games - people could begin to offset a considerable amount of energy expenditure by having these applications performed in the cloud.

The big technology companies which specialise in providing cloud computing services - Amazon, Google and Microsoft - are large consumers of renewable energy.

Google and Microsoft have both launched cloud gaming platforms too which don't require gamers to purchase consoles (the production of which also cause emissions) to play them.

But data centres are dependent upon quality internet connections, which themselves can produce emissions, and for many people across the world those connections simply aren't available.

7. Household energy efficiency

solve problem of climate change

The single-most effective technological solution to climate change is going to be reducing energy consumption overall, and nothing is going to do that more than making homes more energy efficient.

The technology to achieve this is already there, with many of the newest products on the market capable of shaving hundreds of pounds off of household bills annually.

The European Union has established an energy labelling scheme that labels appliances for how energy efficient they are, informing consumers about how much it will cost them to run refrigerators and washing machines, as well as other products from light bulbs to televisions.

Energy savings made through design innovations for these household goods might be small individually, but they have the potential to scale and significantly impact energy consumption across the course of a year for a household, and even more significantly across all households in a country.

Across the EU, buildings consume 40% of overall energy and are responsible for 35% of CO2 emissions - although energy consumption per household has dropped over the past 50 years due to efficiency measures.

But according to the independent, statutory body the Committee on Climate Change, homes in the UK are "unfit" at the moment to meet the challenges posed by warming global temperatures and the need to reduce energy consumption. Newer, greener, electronic goods could be a good place to start.

climate after covid

Coronavirus is the greatest global challenge many of us will experience in our lifetimes. But before the pandemic hit, it was climate change that loomed over us as the planet's biggest problem.

So what happens now? How do we deal with both of them at the same time?

Watch our special live show - Climate After Covid: A Green Recovery? - from 8-9pm on Sky News, and from 8-9.30pm on the Sky News website and app this Thursday as we look for the answers.

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Climate change: science and solutions

19 May 2021

Earth

A net zero climate-resilient future: science, technology and the solutions for change

PDF, 52.6KB

Contributors and peer reviewers

PDF, 81.5KB

Science-led solutions play a critical role in delivering rapid decarbonisation and helping communities to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Drawing on the expertise of over 120 scientists from more than 20 countries ( see the full list of contributors and peer reviewers PDF ), the Royal Society has produced a series of briefings for policymakers on 12 science and technology areas that are key for accelerating progress towards ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions and increased resilience to climate change. 

The briefings are introduced by the President of the Royal Society (PDF) , together with a statement issued by some of the world’s leading scientific academies (PDF) , setting out the need to accelerate action on climate change.

Policy briefings

Ahead of the UN Climate Summit COP26 in Glasgow last year, the Royal Society sought wide-ranging input from the global scientific community to produce the Climate change: science and solutions briefings. These briefings highlight the significant potential that research, development and deployment in 12 critical areas hold for climate action.

Watch Peter Bruce FRS, Physical Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society, introduce the briefings.

Climate science, adaptation and resilience

Even if warming is limited to 1.5°C, livelihoods and infrastructure will be increasingly affected by climate change and extreme weather. The following briefings highlight the key research priorities for advancing our understanding of future climate change and developing mitigation and adaptation measures compatible with the twin goals of achieving net zero and enhancing global climate resilience.

Next generation climate models (PDF)

Carbon dioxide visualisation of earth

The carbon cycle (PDF)

Trees in mist

Weathering the storm: climate resilience and adaptation (PDF)

Flooded urban landscape

Land, food and health

Investing in land-based mitigation options and a sustainable global food system reduces greenhouse gas emissions while offering co-benefits to human health. These briefings explore the relationship between society and the natural world, and how they can together tackle and adapt to climate change. 

Climate change and land (PDF)

canola fields

Nourishing ten billion sustainably (PDF)

wheat

Healthy planet, healthy people (PDF)

smog over Los Angeles

Energy transitions

We can reach much of the 50% – or greater – cut that is needed in carbon emissions required by 2030 with existing technologies; but to go beyond and reach net zero by 2050 requires research, development and deployment of novel technologies. The following briefings outline priorities for research, development and deployment of technologies that will be critical to achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

Next generation batteries (PDF)

futuristic car in workshop

The role of hydrogen and ammonia in meeting the net zero challenge (PDF)

container ship

Carbon dioxide capture and storage (PDF)

industrial emissions

Low-carbon heating and cooling (PDF)

air conditioner units

Transforming economic systems

Coordination of action between all involved, from governments and businesses to communities and individuals, will be critical to achieve the rapid and transformational change required in economic systems. Computing can play an important role, creating ‘digital twins’ of industries, cities – and ultimately the planet – that support a systems approach and help understand and reduce emissions. Meanwhile, economics research shows how policy levers can be used to secure ‘win-win’ outcomes and minimise emissions at national and global levels. These briefings discuss some of the available solutions to accompany such transformational change in economic systems.

Computing for net zero (PDF)

satellite

Policy options and economic perspectives (PDF)

stock numbers on a screen

#2050challenge

To help highlight the range of solutions and ideas that scientists are creating and researching, the Royal Society has launched a campaign, the #2050challenge, for people to share stories of their work, research and actions to help countries of the world tackle climate change, biodiversity loss and achieve ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050. Find out how to get involved .

Find out more

Climate change: evidence and causes

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Reversing biodiversity loss

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A healthy future

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Four Ways the United States Can Still Fight Climate Change

With the president’s most potent tools to fight climate change stripped by Congress and the courts, the administration will now have to rely on smaller, less powerful actions.

President Biden, in a dark suit, climbing a staircase to board Air Force One. The sky is overcast and gray.

By Coral Davenport

WASHINGTON — With the largest and most powerful tools that President Biden had hoped to use to fight climate change now stripped away , the White House is assembling smaller, less potent policies that could still help the nation reduce its planet-warming pollution, though not at the levels that Mr. Biden once promised.

The evident death in the Senate of Democrats’ climate change legislation , which was to have been the centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions, comes just weeks after the Supreme Court handed down a decision that sharply limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, the nation’s second-largest source of greenhouse gases.

Legal scholars say that the justices’ decision will, in turn, set a precedent that could limit the federal government’s authority to enact future climate regulations on other major sources of heat-trapping emissions, including cars and trucks.

Experts say that the gutting of those policies now makes it all but impossible for the United States to meet Mr. Biden’s target of cutting the nation’s emissions 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. That is the amount that scientists say the United States must reduce its emissions in order to do its part to avoid the most catastrophic near-term impacts of climate change.

And if the world’s largest economy fails to keep its word on reducing emissions, analysts say, it will lose any leverage to compel other nations to reduce theirs.

“Manchin’s decision and the Supreme Court decision smashed the building that the Biden administration was constructing to meet this very ambitious climate target,” said Michael Wara, a climate policy expert at Stanford University.

“And they’re left with just a few pieces and now they’re trying to put together a structure with these few, smaller, less coherent pieces,” Mr. Wara added. “It’s a lot harder. The 50 percent target was incredibly ambitious even with all the tools that Biden had. But with what they have left, they can still achieve a significant fraction of that.”

Here are a few of the ways that federal and state leaders might still reduce greenhouse gas emissions:

Regulate cars and trucks

Vehicles are the nation’s largest source of planet-warming pollution, and experts say that rapidly ending the use of gasoline-powered cars is crucial to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. Mr. Biden has directed the Environmental Protection Agency and Transportation Department to write a transformative new regulation to rein in tailpipe pollution and accelerate the nation’s transition to electric vehicles.

In its most ambitious form, the new regulation, which would most likely not be completed until 2023 or 2024, would compel automakers to double down on selling enough electric vehicles to meet Mr. Biden’s target that half of all vehicles sold in the United States would be all-electric by 2030. But after the Supreme Court decision limiting the E.P.A’s authority to regulate greenhouse emissions, the agency may scale back its ambitions out of fear that such a bold new move could also be struck down by the courts.

Control pollution from power plants

Coal and gas-fired power plants are the nation’s second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. While the Environmental Protection Agency has been blocked by the Supreme Court from issuing a sweeping, ambitious rule that would shut down power plants fueled by coal and gas, the agency still plans to issue a more modest rule that would compel electric utilities to slightly lower their greenhouse emissions, and possibly to install technology to capture and sequester carbon dioxide pollution, although that pricey technology is not yet widely available.

The agency is also planning stricter limits on other types of pollution from power plants — like mercury, smog and soot — that are not greenhouse gases. The idea is that cracking down on those pollutants could force electric utilities to clean up or shut down the dirtiest facilities, such as coal-burning power plants, which produce more carbon dioxide than gas-fired plants.

Focus on methane

Carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels is the planet’s most abundant and dangerous greenhouse gas, but methane, which is emitted into the atmosphere through leaks from oil and gas drilling sites, is a close second. It lingers in the atmosphere for a shorter period of time than carbon dioxide, but packs a bigger punch while it lasts. By some estimates, methane has 80 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide in its first 20 years in the atmosphere.

In the coming months, the E.P.A. plans to issue tougher new regulations to curb leaks of methane from oil and gas wells, a move that could take a significant slice out of the nation’s overall greenhouse gas pollution. Legal experts say that, unlike the rules on power plants and autos, the methane rule has a good chance of withstanding legal challenges.

Rally action at the state level

Absent federal action on climate change, state-level climate policies will play a more important role. Just under half the states have already enacted significant climate policies. The leader is California, which in the coming weeks is expected to finalize a first-in-the-nation regulation requiring that all new cars sold in the state must be electric or zero-emission by 2035. Seventeen other states are in line to adopt the same rule when it passes in Sacramento.

California also requires that 100 percent of its electricity be generated from zero-carbon sources by 2045. Twenty-one other states have some version of that clean electricity standard, and several are advancing legislation for even more stringent versions.

Experts say that if enough states continue to move forward with aggressive carbon-cutting plans, it could help the United States lower its emissions, though not at levels close to what could be achieved by federal action.

Coral Davenport covers energy and environmental policy for the climate desk from Washington. She was part of a Times team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished public service journalism in 2020, and part of a Times team that received Columbia University’s John B. Oakes award for distinguished environmental journalism in 2018. More about Coral Davenport

9 ways AI is helping tackle climate change

Artificial intelligence can help to tackle climate change.

Artificial intelligence can help to tackle climate change. Image:  Unsplash/anniespratt

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Stay up to date:, artificial intelligence.

This article was originally published in January 2024 and updated in February 2024.

  • The use of artificial intelligence (AI) can contribute to the fight against climate change.
  • Existing AI systems include tools that predict weather, track icebergs and identify pollution.
  • AI can also be used to improve agriculture and reduce its environmental impact, the World Economic Forum says.

The power of artificial intelligence (AI) to process huge amounts of data and help humans make decisions is transforming industries.

As one of the world’s toughest challenges, combating climate change is another area where AI has transformational potential.

Almost 4 billion people already live in areas highly vulnerable to climate change , according to the World Health Organization.

And this is expected to lead to around 250,000 extra deaths a year between 2030 and 2050, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone.

Here are nine ways AI is already helping to tackle climate change.

1. Icebergs are melting – AI knows where and how fast

AI has been trained to measure changes in icebergs 10,000 times faster than a human could do it.

This will help scientists understand how much meltwater icebergs release into the ocean – a process accelerating as climate change warms the atmosphere .

Scientists at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom say their AI can map large Antarctic icebergs in satellite images in just one-hundredth of a second, reports the European Space Agency.

For humans, this task is lengthy and time-consuming, and it’s hard to identify icebergs amid the white of clouds and sea ice.

2. Mapping deforestation with AI

AI, satellite images and ecology expertise are also being used to map the impact of deforestation on the climate crisis.

Space Intelligence , a company based in Edinburgh, Scotland, says it is working in more than 30 countries and has mapped more than 1 million hectares of land from space using satellite data.

The company’s technology remotely measures metrics, such as deforestation rates and how much carbon is stored in a forest.

3. AI is helping communities facing climate risks in Africa

In Africa, AI is being used in a United Nations project to help communities vulnerable to climate change in Burundi, Chad and Sudan.

The IKI Project uses AI technology to help predict weather patterns, so communities and authorities can better plan how to adapt to climate change and mitigate its impact.

This includes improving access to clean energy, implementing proper waste management systems and encouraging reforestation.

4. Using AI to recycle more waste

Another AI system is helping to tackle climate change by making waste management more efficient.

Waste is a big producer of methane and is responsible for 16% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Greyparrot , a software startup based in London, United Kingdom, has developed an AI system that analyzes waste processing and recycling facilities to help them recover and recycle more waste material.

The company tracked 32 billion waste items across 67 waste categories in 2022, and says it identifies 86 tonnes of material on average that could be recovered but is being sent to landfill.

AI is helping to fight climate change in systems, including those that identify plastic pollution in the ocean.

5. AI is cleaning up the ocean

In the Netherlands, an environmental organization called The Ocean Cleanup is using AI and other technologies to help clear plastic pollution from the ocean.

AI that detects objects is helping the organization create detailed maps of ocean litter in remote locations. The ocean waste can then be gathered and removed , which is more efficient than previous cleanup methods using trawlers and aeroplanes.

Plastic pollution contributes to climate change by emitting GHGs and harming nature.

6. AI helps predict climate disasters

In São Paulo, Brazil, a company called Sipremo is using AI to predict where and when climate disasters will occur, and what type of climate disasters they will be.

The aim is to help businesses and governments better prepare for climate change and the growing challenges for communities that come with it.

The company works in industries including insurance, energy, logistics and sport, where its analysis of disaster conditions and factors such as air quality can inform decisions on whether to delay or suspend events.

7. A wish list of AI climate tools

Google DeepMind, Google’s AI research laboratory, says it is applying AI to help fight climate change in a number of areas.

This includes building a complete wish list of datasets that would advance global AI solutions for climate change. Google DeepMind is working on this with Climate Change AI , a non-profit organization set up by volunteers from academia and industry who see a key role for machine learning in combating climate change.

Other Google AI tools are focused on improving weather forecasting and increasing the value of wind energy by better predicting the output from a wind farm.

8. How AI can help industry decarbonize

AI is being used to help companies in the metal and mining, oil, and gas industries to decarbonize their operations.

Eugenie.ai , based in California, United States, has developed an emissions-tracking platform that combines satellite imagery with data from machines and processes.

AI then analyzes this data to help companies track, trace and reduce their emissions by 20-30%.

Industrial sectors generate around 30% of greenhouse gas emissions globally.

In response to the uncertainties surrounding generative AI and the need for robust AI governance frameworks to ensure responsible and beneficial outcomes for all, the Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) has launched the AI Governance Alliance .

The Alliance will unite industry leaders, governments, academic institutions, and civil society organizations to champion responsible global design and release of transparent and inclusive AI systems.

9. Reforesting hills in Brazil using drones

AI-powered computers are pairing up with drones in Brazil to reforest the hills around the coastal city of Rio de Janeiro, Reuters reports. The computers define the targets and number of seeds to be dropped.

The initiative, which launched in January 2024, is a partnership between Rio's city hall and start-up Morfo, and aims to grow seeds in hard-to-reach areas.

A single drone can disperse 180 seed capsules per minute, which is 100 times faster than using human hands for traditional reforestation, according to the local government.

The potential of AI in the future

AI is one of the key emerging technologies explored in the World Economic Forum’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2023 report.

The report specifically looks at generative AI – a type of AI that creates content including text, images and computer programming.

In the future, generative AI could be used in contexts such as drug design, architecture and engineering, the Forum says.

AI can also be used to improve agriculture and reduce its environmental impact by processing data from sensors placed on crops.

The technologies listed in the report, including sustainable aviation fuel, can be used to help tackle global challenges like the climate crisis – but more innovation is needed, the authors point out.

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The 5 greatest challenges to fighting climate change

Kara Baskin

Dec 27, 2019

Climate change: Most of the world agrees it’s a danger, but how do we conquer it? What’s holding us back? Christopher Knittel, professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, laid out five of the biggest challenges in a recent interview.

CO2 is a global pollutant that can’t be locally contained

“The first key feature of climate change that puts it at odds with past environmental issues is that it’s a global pollutant, rather than a local pollutant. [Whether] I release a ton of CO2 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or in London, it does the same damage to the globe,” Knittel said. “Contrast that with local pollutants, where if I release a ton of sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxide in Cambridge, the majority of the damage stays near Cambridge.”

Thus, CO2 is far harder to manage and regulate.

For now, climate change is still hypothetical

The damage caused by most climate change pollutants will happen in the future. Which means most of us won’t truly be affected by climate change — it’s a hypothetical scenario conveyed in charts and graphs. While we’d like politicians and voters to be moved by altruism, this isn’t always the case. In general, policymakers have little incentive to act.

“People [who stand to be] most harmed by climate change aren’t even born yet. Going back to the policymaker’s perspective, she has much less of an incentive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because those reductions are going to benefit voters in the future and not her current voters,” Knittel said.

There’s no direct link to a smoking gun

Despite the global threat from climate-altering pollutants, it’s hard for scientists to link them to a specific environmental disaster, Knittel said. Without a definitive culprit, it’s easier for skeptics to ignore or explain away climate change effects.

Developing countries contribute to a large share of pollution

Simply put, this isn’t their top priority.

“We’re asking very poor countries that are worried about where their next meal is coming from, or whether they can send their kids to school, to incur costs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to benefit the world. And that’s a tough ask for a policymaker inside of a developing country,” he said.

Modern living is part of the problem

It’s a tough pill to swallow, but modern conveniences like electricity, transportation, and air conditioning contribute to climate change, and remedies potentially involve significant sacrifice and lifestyle change.

“Although we’ve seen great strides in reductions in solar costs and batteries for electric vehicles, these are still expensive alternatives. There is no free lunch when it comes to overcoming climate change,” Knittel warned.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times  recently, Knittel said, “If an evil genius had set out to design the perfect environmental crisis … those five factors would have made climate change a brilliant choice. But we didn’t need an evil genius. We stumbled into it on our own.”

Read next — Climate experts: Clean tech is here, now we need people power

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Four ways AI could help us respond to climate change – despite how much energy it uses

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Director of Computing Informatics and Applications Research Group, Anglia Ruskin University

Disclosure statement

Lakshmi Babu Saheer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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Advanced AI systems are coming under increasing critcism for how much energy they use. But it’s important to remember that AI could also contribute in various ways to our response to climate change .

Climate change can be broken down into several smaller problems that must be addressed as part of an overarching strategy for adapting to and mitigating it. These include identifying sources of emissions, enhancing the production and use of renewable energy and predicting calamities like floods and fires.

My own research looks at how AI can be harnessed for predicting greenhouse gas emissions from cities and farms or to understand changes in vegetation, biodiversity and terrain from satellite images.

Here are four different areas where AI has already managed to master some of the smaller tasks necessary for a wider confrontation with the climate crisis.

1. Electricity

AI could help reduce energy-related emissions by more accurately forecasting energy supply and demand.

AI can learn patterns in how and when people use energy. It can also accurately forecast how much energy will be generated from sources like wind and solar depending on the weather and so help to maximise the use of clean energy.

For example, by estimating the amount of solar power generated from panels (based on sunlight duration or weather conditions), AI can help plan the timing of laundry or charging of electric vehicles to help consumers make the most of this renewable energy . On a grander scale, it could help grid operators pre-empt and mitigate gaps in supply.

A woman hanging out white clothes on a laundry line.

Researchers in Iran used AI to predict the energy consumption of a research centre by taking account of its occupancy, structure, materials and local weather conditions. The system also used algorithms to optimise the building’s energy use by proposing appropriate insulation measures and heating controls and how much lighting and power was necessary based on the number of people present, ultimately reducing it by 35%.

Read more: AI is supposed to make us more efficient – but it could mean we waste more energy

2. Transport

Transport accounts for roughly one-fifth of global CO₂ emissions . AI models can encourage green travel options by suggesting the most efficient routes for drivers, with fewer hills, less traffic and constant speeds, and so minimise emissions.

An AI-based system suggested routes for electric vehicles in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. The system used features like vehicle speed and the location of charging points to find optimal routes that minimised energy use.

3. Agriculture

Studies have shown that better farming practices can reduce emissions. AI can ensure that space and fertilisers (which contribute to climate change) are used sparingly.

By predicting how much of a crop people will buy in a particular market, AI can help producers and distributors minimise waste. A 2017 study conducted by Stanford University in the US even showed that advanced AI models can predict county-level soybean yields.

This was possible using images from satellites to analyse and track the growth of crops. Researchers compared multiple models to accurately predict crop yields and the best performing one could predict a crop’s yield based on images of growing plants and other features, including the climate.

Knowing a crop’s probable yield weeks in advance can help governments and agencies plan alternative means of procuring food in advance of a bad harvest.

Wicker baskets filled with purple acai fruit.

4. Disaster management

The prediction and management of disasters is a field where AI has made major contributions. AI models have studied images from drones to predict flood damage in the Indus basin in Pakistan.

The system is also useful for detecting the onset of a flood, helping with real-time rescue operation planning. The system could be used by government authorities to plan prompt relief measures.

These potential uses don’t erase the problem of AI’s energy consumption, however, To ensure AI can be a force for good in the fight against climate change, something will still have to be done about this.

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Reduce, reuse, redirect outrage: How plastic makers used recycling as a fig leaf

Michael Copley

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A registered scavenger, who mainly collects plastic waste to sell, walking in a landfill in Indonesia. Yasuyoshi Chiba /AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A registered scavenger, who mainly collects plastic waste to sell, walking in a landfill in Indonesia.

The plastics industry has worked for decades to convince people and policymakers that recycling would keep waste out of landfills and the environment. Consumers sort their trash so plastic packaging can be repurposed, and local governments use taxpayer money to gather and process the material. Yet from the early days of recycling, plastic makers, including oil and gas companies, knew that it wasn't a viable solution to deal with increasing amounts of waste, according to documents uncovered by the Center for Climate Integrity .

Around the time the plastics industry launched its recycling campaign, the head of a trade group called the Vinyl Institute acknowledged at a 1989 conference that "recycling cannot go on indefinitely, and does not solve the solid waste problem."

One of the biggest challenges is that making new plastic is relatively cheap. But recycling generally costs as much as or more than the material is worth, a director of environmental solutions at B.F. Goodrich explained at another industry meeting in 1992 . The "basic issue," he said, "is economics."

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

Investigations

How big oil misled the public into believing plastic would be recycled.

But the industry appears to have championed recycling mainly for its public relations value, rather than as a tool for avoiding environmental damage, the documents suggest. "We are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results," a vice president at Exxon Chemical said during a meeting in 1994 with staff for the American Plastics Council, a trade group.

Ross Eisenberg, president of an industry group called America's Plastic Makers, said in a statement that the report from the Center for Climate Integrity "cites outdated, decades-old technologies, and works against our goals to be more sustainable by mischaracterizing the industry and the state of today's recycling technologies. This undermines the essential benefits of plastics and the important work underway to improve the way plastics are used and reused to meet society's needs."

America's Plastic Makers has set a goal for all plastic packaging in the U.S. to be "reused, recycled, recovered by 2040," Eisenberg said.

The Center for Climate Integrity compiled the documents in a report titled " The Fraud of Plastic Recycling: How Big Oil and the plastics industry deceived the public for decades and caused the plastic waste crisis ." It builds on earlier investigations, including by NPR , that have shown the plastics industry promoted recycling even though its officials have long known that the activity would probably never be effective on a large scale.

The world is awash in plastic. Oil producers want a say in how it's cleaned up

The world is awash in plastic. Oil producers want a say in how it's cleaned up

Former industry officials have said the goal was to avoid regulations and ensure that demand for plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, kept growing. Despite years of recycling campaigns, less than 10% of plastic waste gets recycled globally , and the amount of plastic waste that's dumped in the environment continues to soar .

The idea that recycling can solve the problem of plastic waste "has always been a fraud, and it's always been a way for the industry to sell more plastic," says Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, which says it is working to hold oil and gas companies accountable for their role in fueling climate change.

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A pile of plastic waste and other garbage next to children playing on a bridge in the Philippines. George Calvelo /AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A pile of plastic waste and other garbage next to children playing on a bridge in the Philippines.

The U.N. is leading negotiations for a global plastics treaty

The Center for Climate Integrity published its report two months before the next round of United Nations talks is held in Canada for a legally binding global agreement on plastic waste. Negotiators from around 150 countries are expected to attend, as well as public health advocates, human rights activists, environmentalists and the oil and gas industry.

There's recently been growing concern among those who want deep cuts in plastic waste that plastic producers — corporations as well as countries such as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia — could weaken a global treaty by prioritizing recycling and other forms of waste management, rather than substantial cuts in new plastic production.

Global talks to cut plastic waste stall as industry and environmental groups clash

Global talks to cut plastic waste stall as industry and environmental groups clash

For fossil fuel producers, the petrochemical sector, which includes plastics, is crucial to business. As technologies like electric vehicles grow more popular, demand for products such as gasoline and diesel fuel is expected to decline . But oil and gas demand for petrochemicals is projected to continue rising for years . That's why the fossil fuel industry has a big stake in the outcome of the U.N. talks. If countries agree to reduce plastic manufacturing, it could hurt the industry's future profits.

Some experts say that creates a conflict of interest. Reducing how much new plastic gets made in the first place is a "prerequisite" to getting pollution under control, Carsten Wachholz, who works at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and co-leads the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, said late last year. But "if your businesses depend on extracting more oil and gas, and plastics is the fastest growing market for fossil fuels, it's hard to imagine that you would be a credible voice to say we need to limit plastic production," he said.

Global shift to clean energy means fossil fuel demand will peak soon, IEA says

Global shift to clean energy means fossil fuel demand will peak soon, IEA says

After the last round of negotiations ended in Kenya in November 2023, environmental groups complained that oil and gas producers blocked a final decision on how to advance the deliberations.

An industry advocacy group called American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers has said that restricting fossil fuel production and plastic manufacturing are not good solutions. Instead, it said the goals of the treaty can be achieved "if waste is recyclable, properly managed and kept out of the environment."

An ExxonMobil spokesperson said in a statement in November 2023 that the company is "launching real solutions to address plastic waste and improve recycling rates." The company has previously said the problem of plastic waste can be solved without cutting how much plastic society uses.

Exxon is among a group of companies that have been investing in what the industry calls "advanced recycling" plants. The facilities are designed to turn plastic waste, including material that can't be processed through traditional mechanical recycling, into liquids and gasses that can then be used to make new plastics and other chemical products.

"Advanced recycling is a real, proven solution that can help address plastic waste and improve recycling rates," Exxon said in a statement to NPR.

However, critics say the technology is ineffective and harmful to the environment and human health.

The economics of plastic recycling "haven't changed at all. Not at all. And if virgin [plastic] was always cheaper and of higher quality, that's still the case today," says Wiles of the Center for Climate Integrity.

He says the plastics industry continues to mislead the public and needs to be held responsible for it.

"And from there, you can begin to have a conversation about how we're going to solve the problem," Wiles says. "But without accountability, you just can't get to solutions."

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  • NEWS FEATURE
  • 21 February 2024

Scientists under arrest: the researchers taking action over climate change

  • Daniel Grossman 0

Daniel Grossman is a freelance reporter in Watertown, Massachusetts.

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Members of the Scientist Rebellion group march in Brussels to protest against the lack of political action on the climate crisis. Credit: Ana Fernandez/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty

You have full access to this article via your institution.

Climate scientist Peter Kalmus is freaked out. And he thinks everyone should be just as alarmed as he is over the state of the planet.

When he was a graduate student in 2006, Kalmus was studying astrophysics and says he was “blissfully ignorant” about the dangers of climate change. But then he learnt how the greenhouse effect worked — how carbon dioxide pollution from the use of fossil fuels is effectively trapping heat in the atmosphere and warming the planet at an accelerating pace .

Over time, Kalmus was plagued by the increasing certainty that, “if we continue burning fossil fuels at this pace, that will render large parts of the planet uninhabitable”. By 2012, he had abandoned his budding career in astrophysics to pursue work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on the impact of intensifying temperatures on humans and other species.

Kalmus became worried that the accumulation of evidence was not leading the world to necessary action. “Policymakers in general are not responding appropriately to the science that we’ve been giving them.” Hence the freak out. (Kalmus stresses that his views are his own, not NASA’s.)

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How effective are climate protests at swaying policy — and what could make a difference?

He decided he needed to do more to confront the problem. On 6 April 2022, Kalmus, two other scientists and an engineer blockaded a Los Angeles branch of JP Morgan Chase, an investment banking firm that invests heavily in fossil-fuel extraction. “I’m willing to take a risk for this gorgeous planet and my son,” he said to a small crowd and in a video posted on Facebook, earning himself some 700,000 page views. He was arrested for trespassing. The protest was part of a global effort that day by members of the international environmentalist group Scientist Rebellion, which claims the event was “the largest civil disobedience campaign by scientists in history”.

Researchers are noticing a rising tide of anger and action by climate scientists such as Kalmus, who are frustrated that ever-more dire forecasts and extreme events related to climate change aren’t provoking an effective response. They are “increasingly becoming aware that while science is necessary for moving towards policy-making, it is insufficient to get to policy-making on its own, and science cannot create political will”, said Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University in Washington DC. Her book, Saving Ourselves : From Climate Shocks to Climate Action , which was published earlier this month, argues that this evergrowing group has become a ‘radical flank’ of concerned climate scientists who are doing things such as vandalizing art work, blocking entrances to buildings and interrupting traffic.

These scientists are, she says, “getting blue in the face trying to use the normal channels through which we usually express how our science has relevance to the world”.

Eighty hours on a train

Early last December, a train pulled slowly out of Boston’s South Station. In the dining car, earth scientist Rose Abramoff was starting an 80-hour cross-country train ride to the 2023 conference of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, California. Out of concern for her carbon footprint, Abramoff no longer flies even if, as with this trip, the ground journey takes ten times as long and costs more. I joined her for the first leg of the trip.

The lengthy journey gave her a lot of time to think about what happened a year before at the previous AGU annual meeting. At the very start of the conference, in a giant lecture hall, she and Kalmus leapt onto the stage and unfurled a banner for Scientist Rebellion. Kalmus yelled, “As scientists we have tremendous leverage, but we need to use it.” Abramoff pleaded, “Please. Please. Find a way to take action.”

As they had anticipated, an official escorted them out of the hall. Their protest lasted all of 30 seconds. The AGU also confiscated their conference badges and officially expelled them from the rest of the meeting — a reaction that Abramoff says felt extreme. “Being asked to leave the session would have been a reasonable response,” Abramoff said during the train ride, sounding bitter. More than 2,000 researchers urged the AGU to reverse its sanctions on Abramoff and Kalmus .

Peter Kalmus holding a protest board looks on as Virginia State Police take down his information

Climate scientist Peter Kalmus looks on as Virginia state police officers enter his information on a computer. Credit: William Dickson

That wasn’t the only consequence for Abramoff, who was then an associate scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Alerted of the event, Oak Ridge fired her. In her termination letter, she was accused of the “misuse of government resources” and of violating the “Code of Business Ethics and Conduct”. She says, in her defence, that her government work at the conference that week was finished by the time she took to the stage, and so the protest was done in her free time. (Kalmus did not lose his position, although Jet Propulsion Laboratory officials issued him a warning.)

A year later, in 2023, Abramoff, who now continues her research as an independent researcher in Maine, and Kalmus were again at the AGU conference (Kalmus joined remotely). But this time, the AGU ran four official sessions on climate activism and grief over climate change. In an e-mail to Nature , an AGU press officer said that removing Abramoff and Kalmus from the 2022 meeting was appropriate, citing the organization’s code of conduct. After the incident, the “AGU doubled down on making members aware of new opportunities”, such as activism. The AGU also stressed the need for civility, which rules out disrupting meeting sessions.

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Young people’s climate anxiety revealed in landmark survey

Abramoff studied biology and dance for her undergraduate degree and then earned a PhD in ecology. Her political awakening occurred in 2019, while peer-reviewing several chapters of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She had never before focused so intently on the effects that the climate crisis has had on the planet and its inhabitants. “In every single system is evidence of fundamental major breakdown that has implications for human health, for ecosystem services.” The document’s style, she says, betrayed no sense of existential urgency of the dangers at hand. “My job can’t just be to calmly document the end of the world.”

While talking about that experience on the train, Abramoff welled up and wiped away a tear. It’s the third time in eight months that a climate scientist or climate negotiator has choked up during an interview with me, something I haven’t witnessed before in my 25 years of climate reporting.

After working on the IPCC report, Abramoff decided that she needed to take more concrete action. On 6 April 2022, she chained herself to the White House fences during a climate protest. She was arrested on the same day that Kalmus was arrested on the other side of the continent. There were news stories, with pictures of her dressed in a white lab coat. She draws on her background as a performer during protests. “The types of things that get media attention are a little theatrical and visually interesting.”

Since her arrest two years ago, Abramoff has blockaded banks and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, glued herself to a fence at a private jet terminal, occupied a state Capitol building and tried to shut down the construction of a natural-gas pipeline. Seven of her 14 actions have led to arrests.

Political awakening

Although Abramoff’s activist rap sheet is an outlier among scientists, many researchers agree with her that the climate crisis needs an urgent response. A survey conducted last year of 9,220 researchers around the world, from a range of scientific and academic disciplines, found that more than 90% agree that “fundamental changes to social, political, and economic systems” are needed 1 . Fabian Dablander, one of three postdoctoral researchers at University of Amsterdam and Maastricht University in the Netherlands who led the research, says its the largest of only three global surveys that he is aware of regarding scientists’ attitudes on climate.

The study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, surveyed researchers in 115 countries who had authored papers in 545 leading peer-reviewed journals between 2020 and 2022. Dablander cautions that the results are probably biased in favour of the concerned scientists, because they would be the most motivated to fill out the survey, which was sent to almost 250,000 authors. “I’m not sure how big this bias is exactly,” he says.

Rose Abramoff speaks into a megaphone while chained to a fence

Earth scientist Rose Abramoff chained to a White House fence during a climate protest. Credit: William Dickson

Overall, 78% of the respondents had discussed climate change with someone other than a colleague; 29% had engaged in climate advocacy, 23% had joined legal protests and 10% — nearly 900 scientists — had engaged in civil disobedience.

Political engagement varied by discipline and country. Scientists in Oceania were more likely to take civic actions (such as joining a climate protest). Europe and North America are virtually tied for second place. Scientists in Asia were least likely to engage in most of the civic actions included in the survey, Dablander found.

A follow-up analysis of the survey data shows that scientists who were involved ‘a great deal’ in climate research were about 2.5 times more likely (37% of participants) to have joined protests, and at least 4 times more likely (18% of participants) to have engaged in civil disobedience than were non-climate researchers 2 .

Another survey also found high levels of engagement among climate researchers. In a 2021 study of 1,100 climate scientists, 90% had participated in at least one form of public engagement on climate issues, including doing press interviews, briefing policymakers and being active on social media over the past year 3 .

Viktoria Cologna, the lead author of the survey, says that long-held taboos against political participation by scientists on climate issues are waning. Cologna, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, has previously been a member of Scientists for Future, the scientists’ wing of Fridays for the Future, which is a global student movement inspired by environmental activist Greta Thunberg. “I definitely see — also in my own circles, both within social science and natural science circles — that scientists are becoming more vocal; they are joining more protests,” she says.

In the past, many scientists worried that they would lose credibility by taking political stances. But Cologna didn’t find that to be true in her study, which also surveyed 884 members of the public in the United States and Germany. She and her co-authors reported that 70% of Germans and 74% of Americans approve of scientists advocating for climate-related policies.

The survey of researchers also uncovered hints that people who engage in advocacy do not lose the respect of their colleagues. It found that 73% of German climate scientists and 59% of US climate scientists agree that people in their field should “actively advocate for specific climate-related policies”.

A similar finding emerged from a 2020 survey about political engagement of 2,208 members of the US Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Less than 6% of respondents thought that scientists should ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ be politically active. Fernando Tormos-Aponte, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania who led the team that conducted the study, says that a cohort of scientists became politicized by policies widely seen as anti-scientific during the administration of former US president Donald Trump. These scientists continued their activism even when Trump left office. “The thing that persists is climate. There’s a sense of urgency around that, that’s almost unparallel to any other issue.”

Greta Dargie, a geographer at the University of Leeds, UK, is one of many climate researchers who have ramped up their activism in the past few years. Last year she was arrested, for the first time in her life, for deliberately blocking traffic in London at an event organized by the British environmental activist group Just Stop Oil. Then, in the same week, she was arrested again, for the same offence.

Some researchers worry that the more extreme forms of activism can have negative consequences. Jörg Geldmacher, a geochemist at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany, says he doesn’t take part in more aggressive actions, such as vandalizing buildings, because they could be counterproductive. “If the masses are against it, because of these extreme activities, then I don’t know if that is very helpful for the movement,” he says.

Instead, he is an active member of the German branch of Scientists for Future. Geldmacher joins legal demonstrations frequently, attends monthly meetings that send ideas to local politicians for conserving energy and often speaks at schools and to the general public about the climate crisis.

Climate grief

Halfway through the 2023 AGU gathering in San Francisco, I saw Abramoff again, this time in a crowd at the Chieftain Irish Pub. She had just come from the ‘climate grief circle’, an officially approved event that she and Kalmus had organized. A few dozen researchers sat in several intimate groups and discussed their feelings about confronting the deterioration of Earth’s systems each day and, for some, the fears they couldn’t share with their children. On the train, Abramoff had said that these circles serve both as group therapy and as motivation. “It’s extremely calming and fortifying,” she says.

At the pub, a couple of dozen activists traded their stories and tips for organizing protests. Noah Liguori-Bills, a first-year atmospheric-science PhD student at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, received a short pep talk from Abramoff. Afterwards he said that this was his first scientific conference, and that he hadn’t expected to meet any radicals. But then he stumbled on an unsanctioned guerrilla-theatre performance on the pavement right outside the conference. It promoted one of the official activist events. The mixer at the pub is “definitely one of the most exciting things I’ve done here”, he says. “I’m really impressed with how committed everyone is.”

Liguori-Bills says he expects to join a branch of Scientist Rebellion when he goes home. He says that it’s unlikely that he’ll face serious consequences, such as what happened to Abramoff. But he’s willing to take the risk. “I think it’s worth it. The whole world’s at stake.”

Nature 626 , 710-712 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00480-3

Dablander, F. et al. Preprint at PsyArXiv https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/73w4s (2023).

Dablander, F., Sachisthal, M. & Haslbeck, J. Preprint at PsyArXiv https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5fqtr (2024).

Cologna, V., Knutti, R., Oreskes, N. & Siegrist, M. Environ. Res. Lett. 16 , 024011 (2021).

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Cities, Climate Change, and Disease: How Can Science Help Humanity Solve Big Problems?

Quantifying interactions between social systems and the physical environment we live within has long been a major scientific challenge. A better empirical understanding of dynamic interactions between the physical or natural context and urban social structure is necessary to support predictions of how people and cities might respond to climate change, disease, and other emergent threats, ensure energy and water security for their residents, and to facilitate urban sustainability and resilience. In her lecture, Dr. Brelsford will describe research focusing on predictions of the urban built environment, Diphtheria cases in the early 1900s, and causal inference in human-Natural systems. These projects use different datasets, methods, and theoretical backgrounds, but are all aimed at developing empirical strategies to increase our understanding of how social and physical systems are coupled.  

Christa Brelsford is a Research Scientist in the Information Systems and Modeling group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  Her research uses data science tools from economics, geography, network science and spatial statistics to describe the co-evolutionary processes between human systems and the built and natural environment.   These analyses have been particularly focused on urban contexts; exploring themes of urban water management, infrastructure provisioning and resilience, and human behavioral responses to surprising events.  Dr. Brelsford was previously the Liane Russell Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. She obtained her Ph.D. from the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University in 2014 for research on the determinants of residential water demand. Dr. Brelsford is currently leading efforts to use novel data sources such as digital trace data to generate real-time measures of community structure and behavior change and to describe the drivers and consequences of those outcomes from a national security perspective. 

Phys.org

Evolution might stop humans from solving climate change, researchers say

C entral features of human evolution may stop our species from resolving global environmental problems like climate change, says a recent study led by the University of Maine.

Humans have come to dominate the planet with tools and systems to exploit natural resources that were refined over thousands of years through the process of cultural adaptation to the environment. University of Maine evolutionary biologist Tim Waring wanted to know how this process of cultural adaptation to the environment might influence the goal of solving global environmental problems. What he found was counterintuitive.

The project sought to understand three core questions: how human evolution has operated in the context of environmental resources, how human evolution has contributed to the multiple global environmental crises, and how global environmental limits might change the outcomes of human evolution in the future.

Waring's team outlined their findings in a new paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B . Other authors of the study include Zach Wood, UMaine alumni, and Eörs Szathmáry, a professor at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary.

Human expansion

The study explored how human societies' use of the environment changed over our evolutionary history. The research team investigated changes in the ecological niche of human populations, including factors such as the natural resources they used, how intensively they were used, what systems and methods emerged to use those resources and the environmental impacts that resulted from their usage.

This effort revealed a set of common patterns. Over the last 100,000 years, human groups have progressively used more types of resources, with more intensity, at greater scales and with greater environmental impacts. Those groups often then spread to new environments with new resources.

The global human expansion was facilitated by the process of cultural adaptation to the environment. This leads to the accumulation of adaptive cultural traits—social systems and technology to help exploit and control environmental resources such as agricultural practices, fishing methods, irrigation infrastructure, energy technology and social systems for managing each of these.

"Human evolution is mostly driven by cultural change, which is faster than genetic evolution. That greater speed of adaptation has made it possible for humans to colonize all habitable land worldwide," says Waring, associate professor with the UMaine Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions and the School of Economics.

Moreover, this process accelerates because of a positive feedback process: as groups get larger, they accumulate adaptive cultural traits more rapidly, which provides more resources and enables faster growth.

"For the last 100,000 years, this has been good news for our species as a whole." Waring says, "but this expansion has depended on large amounts of available resources and space."

Today, humans have also run out of space. We have reached the physical limits of the biosphere and laid claim to most of the resources it has to offer. Our expansion also is catching up with us. Our cultural adaptations, particularly the industrial use of fossil fuels, have created dangerous global environmental problems that jeopardize our safety and access to future resources.

Global limits

To see what these findings mean for solving global challenges like climate change, the research team looked at when and how sustainable human systems emerged in the past. Waring and his colleagues found two general patterns. First, sustainable systems tend to grow and spread only after groups have struggled or failed to maintain their resources in the first place.

For example, the U.S. regulated industrial sulfur and nitrogen dioxide emissions in 1990, but only after we had determined that they caused acid rain and acidified many water bodies in the Northeast. This delayed action presents a major problem today as we threaten other global limits. For climate change, humans need to solve the problem before we cause a crash.

Second, researchers also found evidence that strong systems of environmental protection tend to address problems within existing societies, not between them. For example, managing regional water systems requires regional cooperation, regional infrastructure and technology, and these arise through regional cultural evolution. The presence of societies of the right scale is therefore a critical limiting factor.

Tackling the climate crisis effectively will probably require new worldwide regulatory, economic and social systems—ones that generate greater cooperation and authority than existing systems like the Paris Agreement. To establish and operate those systems, humans need a functional social system for the planet, which we don't have.

"One problem is that we don't have a coordinated global society which could implement these systems," says Waring, "We only have sub-global groups, which probably won't suffice. But you can imagine cooperative treaties to address these shared challenges. So, that's the easy problem."

The other problem is much worse, Waring says. In a world filled with sub-global groups, cultural evolution among these groups will tend to solve the wrong problems, benefiting the interests of nations and corporations and delaying action on shared priorities. Cultural evolution among groups would tend to exacerbate resource competition and could lead to direct conflict between groups and even global human dieback.

"This means global challenges like climate change are much harder to solve than previously considered," says Waring. "It's not just that they are the hardest thing our species has ever done. They absolutely are. The bigger problem is that central features in human evolution are likely working against our ability to solve them. To solve global collective challenges we have to swim upstream."

Looking forward

Waring and his colleagues think that their analysis can help navigate the future of human evolution on a limited Earth. Their paper is the first to propose that human evolution may oppose the emergence of collective global problems and further research is needed to develop and test this theory.

Waring's team proposes several applied research efforts to better understand the drivers of cultural evolution and search for ways to reduce global environmental competition, given how human evolution works. For example, research is needed to document the patterns and strength of human cultural evolution in the past and present. Studies could focus on the past processes that lead to the human domination of the biosphere, and on the ways cultural adaptation to the environment is occurring today.

But if the general outline proves to be correct, and human evolution tends to oppose collective solutions to global environmental problems, as the authors suggest, then some very pressing questions need to be answered. This includes whether we can use this knowledge to improve the global response to climate change.

"There is hope, of course, that humans may solve climate change. We have built cooperative governance before, although never like this: in a rush at a global scale," Waring says.

The growth of international environmental policy provides some hope. Successful examples include the Montreal Protocol to limit ozone-depleting gases and the global moratorium on commercial whaling.

New efforts should include fostering more intentional, peaceful and ethical systems of mutual self-limitation, particularly through market regulations and enforceable treaties, that bind human groups across the planet together ever more tightly into a functional unit.

But that model may not work for climate change.

"Our paper explains why and how building cooperative governance at the global scale is different, and helps researchers and policymakers be more clear-headed about how to work toward global solutions," says Waring.

This new research could lead to a novel policy mechanism to address the climate crisis: Modifying the process of adaptive change among corporations and nations may be a powerful way to address global environmental risks.

As for whether humans can continue to survive on a limited planet, Waring says, "We don't have any solutions for this idea of a long-term evolutionary trap, as we barely understand the problem. If our conclusions are even close to being correct, we need to study this much more carefully."

More information: Timothy M. Waring et al, Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2022.0259

Provided by University of Maine

Dimensions of environmental management create an attractor landscape for long-term human evolution. Environmental sustainability challenges (curved frontiers) require a minimum level of cooperation in a society of a certain minimum spatial size. Alternative potential paths move humanity toward different long-term evolutionary outcomes. In path B, competition between societies over common environmental resources creates cultural selection between groups for increasingly direct competition and conflict. Path A, growing cooperation between societies facilitates the emergence of global cultural traits to preserve shared environmental benefits. Credit: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2022.0259

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