We’re Thinking About The Climate Crisis Wrong
It's not just all about carbon
When you picture solving the climate crisis, you’re probably imaging a chart like this, where emissions peak by 2025, halve by 2030, and reach net zero by 2050 through an assortment of various interventions.
One Earth’s net zero pathway is one of my favorites, for its more realistic assumptions on the adoption and price of various climate technologies (*cough* IEA’s World Energy Outlook *cough*). But that’s a post for another time.
This is an incorrect approach because it’s incomplete; the climate crisis is more than just an emissions crisis. It is a polycrisis, with three crises woven into one: radiative forcing, biodiversity, resilience.
Radiative forcing is the difference in energy that is entering and leaving Earth (measured in W/m2), which is increasing due to anthropogenic greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere (some exceptions like aviation contrails). There is a limit to the amount of warming before we risk extreme destabilization (e.g., crop failure, tipping points, etc.) so we must follow a net zero pathway like the one detailed above if we want to have a chance of keeping warming to 1.5°C (we’re at 1.1°C now). We know roughly where these emissions come from (see CAIT’s Climate Watch) and currently have the tools and technology to address almost if not all of these emissions without significant losses to quality of life - we just need to take dramatic action.
The biodiversity crisis is often mentioned but less studied – on our current trajectory, up to 29% of terrestrial and freshwater species are at risk of extinction. This is a problem for many reasons, but perhaps most notably is that with every species that goes extinct, we increase the risk of ecosystem collapse. The classic example is bees - if we lose bees, we will likely lose most plants that rely on pollination (because bees are such skilled pollinators and have few replacements), and the animals that rely on those plants, etc. One of the key challenges here is that we do not have great measures of redundancy – keystone species vary by local ecosystem and we don’t know enough to know which species we need where to prevent collapse. When ecosystems collapse, they degrade, emitting vast amounts of carbon (estimates on magnitude vary, but it’s way more than annual emissions) and reducing the ecosystem services they provide (e.g., local cooling, storm reduction, food, etc.). As a result, surviving people and animals are forced to migrate, leading to increased chances of pandemics. The three key causes of the biodiversity crisis are changes from global warming (e.g., drought, heat, extreme weather), ecosystem destruction (e.g., deforestation, bottom trawl netting, agricultural conversion), and pollutants (pesticides, fertilizer runoff, trash). Even if we reach net zero, we need to address the other causes to avoid both global warming and the Sixth Extinction.
The resilience crisis is deeply intertwined with the other two. Our infrastructure, both physical and communal, is unprepared to face a warmer and more fragile world. Our world was not built to withstand sea level rise, powerful storms, extreme heatwaves, droughts, and dwindling nature. Communities are fractured and ill-equipped to face the current challenges of climate change, let alone the future ones that will occur even if we achieve net zero by 2050. Localization, decentralization, infrastructure, redundancy, community building, restorative justice, reparations, and place-based interventions are required to ensure we can adapt to and endure the challenges ahead.
It is against these three crises, and all three, that solutions must be measured. Let’s take some examples:
Direct Air Capture (DAC): DAC is an almost magical technology – using energy and chemistry, we can sort through a million molecules and capture the ~400 that are carbon dioxide, converting them into a physical or liquid form to be stored or repurposed. From an emissions perspective, DAC is very promising – we can use renewable energy (particularly any energy that would have been curtailed) to pull carbon out of the air. From a biodiversity and resiliency perspective, however, it has an almost negligible effect (maybe perhaps avoided land use but the counterfactuals are tricky).
Degraded Land Restoration: Compare DAC with degraded land restoration. Planting native species (or heat-adjusted alternatives) to restore degraded ecosystems sequesters carbon (plant growth; building soil), improves biodiversity (more space for life), and increases resilience (erosion reduction, storm protection, local cooling, food). While it’s not as strong as DAC when measured on carbon sequestered per unit of land, it is one of the best solutions for biodiversity and greatly improves local resilience.
This is not to say DAC is inherently less valuable – resolving the climate crisis requires an all-hands approach and a portfolio of options – and DAC, with some breakthroughs, could be a critical element of the path to net zero emissions. However, we must also consider the other two crises, and act accordingly.
So what does this mean from a strategic perspective? It means challenging yourself, the organizations you work for, and the providers of the products and services you consume to develop strategies, metrics, and methodologies to consider your impact on all three crises. It means taking risks, acting fast, learning quickly, and adjusting appropriately. It means dramatic action now to ensure economic growth, and not $178 trillion in damages. We have 2.5 years left to bend the curve of emissions, and likely an even smaller runway for the other two crises. Let’s make them count.
The views expressed in these writings are my own and not those of my employer. I am not responsible for third-party links nor the contents thereof.