El último artículo de Bernie Sanders publicado en The Guardian nos recuerda un grito que líderes de todo el mundo hacen desesperadamente: el cambio climático es una crisis de justicia y liderazgo.
Sanders, conocido por ser un izquierdista radical democrático, sugiere una idea radical: Estados Unidos y China deben recortar mutuamente sus presupuestos militares y utilizarlos para intensificar sus esfuerzos por mejorar la eficiencia energética, acelerar la transición al desarrollo sostenible y poner fin a la dependencia de los combustibles fósiles.
Los fondos adicionales deberían ayudar a los países de bajos ingresos afectados por el cambio climático.
Déjame darte el número detrás de la idea de Sanders:
Está demostrado que una transición justa y equitativa hacia el desarrollo sostenible es posible con una inversión mínima, a comparación con los grandes daños que causarán las catástrofes del cambio climático. El mundo necesitará 175 USD trillones de dólares (escala en inglés).
Sin embargo, se cree que el coste se puede reducir en aproximadamente un 40% con tecnología, especialmente Clean Tech y Green Technologies.
Por lo tanto, el monto total para proporcionar energía limpia y erradicar la pobreza nos costaría 87,5 USD trillones de dólares.
Estados Unidos tiene uno de los presupuestos militares más altos del mundo: alrededor de 750 billones de dólares anuales. China, con el segundo mayor presupuesto militar, gasta aproximadamente 250 billones de dólares al año (aparentemente). Para un total de 1 trillón de dólares americanos al año.
Climate Change and The World War III
Las Naciones Unidas han estimado que se necesitarían 10 billones de dólares adicionales por año en gasto público y privado para que todas las naciones desarrolladas y en desarrollo alcancen los 17 Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible para 2030.
SUPONIENDO que China y Estados Unidos renunciaran a sus presupuestos militares, el mundo debería esperar un recorte del presupuesto militar por parte de todos los países desarrollados para cubrir los 10 billones de dólares adicionales faltantes al año, y llegar a los 87.5 trillones necesarios para 2030.
Una simple asignación presupuestaria nunca resolvería la mayor amenaza de la humanidad. Por eso siempre lo repetiremos: el cambio climático es una crisis de justicia y liderazgo.
El cambio climático requiere urgentemente cooperación internacional y NO guerras geopolíticas.
El mundo pide a gritos que la guerra entre Estados Unidos y China sea contra el cambio climático, y no entre ellos.
En los últimos años, ha existido avances alentadores en la transición de los combustibles fósiles a fuentes de energía renovables.
Varios países, incluidos Estados Unidos, China y la Unión Europea, han realizado inversiones sustanciales en energía limpia y eficiencia energética.
La energía solar ya está atrayendo más capital que el petróleo por primera vez y se predice que para 2025, las energías renovables superarán al carbón como principal fuente de electricidad mundial.
The War of China and USA must be against climate change Transition Energy Solar
A pesar de estos avances, los esfuerzos actuales no son suficientes para evitar daños significativos e irreversibles a la Tierra.
Si los países no invierten más y operan con mayor urgencia para reducir las emisiones de carbono, el mundo podría cruzar el umbral crítico de temperatura a principios de la década de 2030.
Más alla de pensar si es posible dejar las armas y empezar a invertir más en páneles solares y turbinas, líderes de todo el mundo deben de unirse a la llamada que hace Sanders y RADICALIZAR el grito: Necesitamos una guerra contra el cambio climático, y NO una guerra armamentista entre Estados Unidos y China.
Nature-based solutions harness the power of nature to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and also help us adapt to the impacts of climate change. They are win-win solutions that involve protecting, restoring and sustainably managing ecosystems to address society’s challenges and promote human well-being.
Forests are probably the most well-known nature-based solution for climate change, but there are many more – including peatlands, mangroves, wetlands, savannahs, coral reefs and other landscapes.
More and more NGOs, Activists and Educational Institutions are advocating for this concept, as a viable and powerful solution to tackle climate change and ecosystem collapse. This is the case of The Biomimicry Institute, a non-profit organization that equips people with a process to create nature-inspired solutions for a healthy planet.
In a 9 chapters series, the Biomimicry Institute showcases how innovators from around the world are learning from nature to solve global challenges. At The Global School for Social Leaders, we love these amazing NGOs bringing great solutions with powerful messages:
1. How marine habitats are informing new concrete designs.
ECOncrete offers products that facilitate the growth and regeneration of local marine species and strengthen structures over time through a process known as bio-protection. Inspired by beach rock formations, coral polyps, oyster shells, mangrove roots, and other marine habitats and life forms, ECOncrete embodies biomimicry’s design intention: to learn from and mimic forms and processes found in nature to create regenerative solutions. Nature-Based Solutions:
2. How butterflies inspired a new type of paint.
Cypris Materials has developed a tunable structural colour coating that can be applied directly to surfaces as a paint. Their technology can improve the building and automobile energy efficiency by reflecting UV, visible, and infrared light, and it expands the available colour pallet while eliminating the use of toxic pigments and colourants. Nature-Based Solutions:
3. How trees inspired a new way to dispose of human waste.
change:WATER Labs (cWL) has developed a new way to dispose of human waste – by evaporating out the water! This technology emerged from work done for NASA on wastewater recycling on the International Space Station and is now being deployed in off-grid rural communities and refugee communities. Nature-Based Solutions:
Subscribe to the Biomimicry Institute Youtube Channel to know more about Nature-Based Solutions, or Join our Facebook Group where we will be sharing more of these inspiring histories: https://www.facebook.com/groups/purpose.people.planet
This week looking for interesting readings, we find this piece that has motivated us to publish in our blog, the author Christiana Figueres, Former Executive Secretary of the Convention on Climate Change of the United Nations, Founding Partner of Global Optimism, Co-host of Outrage And Optimism podcast and Co-author of «The Future We Choose». In this post Christiana, gives an interesting analysis about the situation of climate change and the effects it will have for the year 2050.
We are heading for a world that will be more than 3C warmer by 2100.
It is 2050. Beyond the emissions reductions registered in 2015, no further efforts were made to control emissions.
The first thing that hits you is the air. In many places around the world, the air is hot, heavy and, depending on the day, clogged with particulate pollution. Your eyes often water. Your cough never seems to disappear. You think about some countries in Asia, where, out of consideration, sick people used to wear white masks to protect others from airborne infection. Now you often wear a mask to protect yourself from air pollution.
You can no longer simply walk out your front door and breathe fresh air: there might not be any. Instead, before opening doors or windows in the morning, you check your phone to see what the air quality will be.
Fewer people work outdoors and even indoors the air can taste slightly acidic, sometimes making you feel nauseated. The last coal furnaces closed 10 years ago, but that hasn’t made much difference in air quality around the world because you are still breathing dangerous exhaust fumes from millions of cars and buses everywhere. Our world is getting hotter. Over the next two decades, projections tell us that temperatures in some areas of the globe will rise even higher, an irreversible development now utterly beyond our control.
Oceans, forests, plants, trees and soil had for many years absorbed half the carbon dioxide we spewed out. Now there are few forests left, most of them either logged or consumed by wildfire, and the permafrost is belching greenhouse gases into an already overburdened atmosphere.
The increasing heat of the Earth is suffocating us and in five to 10 years, vast swaths of the planet will be increasingly inhospitable to humans. We don’t know how hospitable the arid regions of Australia, South Africa and the western United States will be by 2100.
No one knows what the future holds for their children and grandchildren: tipping point after the tipping point is being reached, casting doubt on the form of future civilization.
Some say that humans will be cast to the winds again, gathering in small tribes, hunkered down and living on whatever patch of land might sustain them.
More moisture in the air and higher sea surface temperatures have caused a surge in extreme hurricanes and tropical storms.
Recently, coastal cities in Bangladesh, Mexico, the United States and elsewhere have suffered brutal infrastructure destruction and extreme flooding, killing many thousands and displacing millions.
This happens with increasing frequency now. Every day, because of rising water levels, some part of the world must evacuate to higher ground.
Every day, the news shows images of mothers with babies strapped to their backs, wading through floodwaters and homes ripped apart by vicious currents that resemble mountain rivers.
News stories tell of people living in houses with water up to their ankles because they have nowhere else to go, their children coughing and wheezing because of the mould growing in their beds, insurance companies declaring bankruptcy, leaving survivors without resources to rebuild their lives.
Contaminated water supplies, sea salt intrusions and agricultural runoff are the order of the day. Because multiple disasters are often happening simultaneously, it can take weeks or even months for basic food and water relief to reach areas pummelled by extreme floods.
Diseases such as malaria, dengue, cholera, respiratory illnesses and malnutrition are rampant.
You try not to think about the 2 billion people who live in the hottest parts of the world, where, for upwards of 45 days per year, temperatures skyrocket to 60C (140F), a point at which the human body cannot be outside for longer than about six hours because it loses the ability to cool itself down.
Places such as central India are becoming increasingly challenging to inhabit. Mass migrations to less hot rural areas are beset by a host of refugee problems, civil unrest and bloodshed over diminished water availability.
Food production swings wildly from month to month, season to season, depending on where you live. More people are starving than ever before. Climate zones have shifted, so some new areas have become available for agriculture (Alaska, the Arctic), while others have dried up (Mexico, California).
Still, others are unstable because of the extreme heat, never mind flooding, wildfire and tornadoes. This makes the food supply in general highly unpredictable. Global trade has slowed as countries seek to hold on to their own resources.
Countries with enough food are resolute about holding on to it. As a result, food riots, coups and civil wars are throwing the world’s most vulnerable from the frying pan into the fire. As developed countries seek to seal their borders from mass migration, they too feel the consequences.
Most countries’ armies are now just highly militarised border patrols. Some countries are letting people in, but only under conditions approaching indentured servitude.
Those living within stable countries may be physically safe, yes, but the psychological toll is mounting. With each new tipping point passed, they feel hope slipping away. There is no chance of stopping the runaway warming of our planet and no doubt we are slowly but surely heading towards some kind of collapse. And not just because it’s too hot.
Melting permafrost is also releasing ancient microbes that today’s humans have never been exposed to and, as a result, have no resistance to.
Diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks are rampant as these species flourish in the changed climate, spreading to previously safe parts of the planet, increasingly overwhelming us. Worse still, the public health crisis of antibiotic resistance has only intensified as the population has grown denser in inhabitable areas and temperatures continue to rise.
The demise of the human species is being discussed more and more. For many, the only uncertainty is how long we’ll last, how many more generations will see the light of day. Suicides are the most obvious manifestation of the prevailing despair, but there are other indications: a sense of bottomless loss, unbearable guilt and fierce resentment at previous generations who didn’t do what was necessary to ward off this unstoppable calamity.
This is an edited extract from The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, published by Manilla Press (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptRejectRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.