Global warming and an unequal world: A glimpse into the future
January 1, 2016 marks the day when 191 member countries of the United Nations embarked on the task to achieve the 2030 agenda. The idea is to achieve the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in order to establish a sustainable future by the year 2030.
However, our current estimates and climate models portend a future undergoing some serious challenges and crises, the kind of which the world has never witnessed before. Given the slow advancement towards the 2030 agenda, the world is not on track to achieving these goals by 2030.
To begin with, water remains to be the most consumed substance on Earth, and while demand for water is exponentially increasing, its supply is steadily decreasing. Freshwater makes up just 3% of all water present on Earth, of which 70% is locked up in the glaciers and the remainder makes up groundwater and water present on land.
Water crisis is something that will be experienced by countries across the world, developed or not. Presently, 2.2 billion people have no access to safe drinking water, and should the present trends continue, the numbers are expected to double by the year 2050.
In a nutshell, water cycle is the process of movement of water from land to the atmosphere and back to the land; however, global warming is speeding up this process, due to which some parts of the world will be prone to scarcity of water, while others could go underwater. Actually, global warming is causing the wind currents to shift towards the poles, thereby altering rain patterns. As a result, rains are getting more and more intensified, resulting in flooding of areas.
This floodwater does not replenish groundwater, rather the contrary: floodwater abounds in sewage, debris and other harmful materials which go on to pollute freshwater sources such as rivers, dams, and lakes, making them unfit for drinking purposes. Generally, the underground water gets recharged so much that it gets polluted too.
Intensification of rain actually leaves us with more water scarcity than it was before. Thus, what was believed to replenish the lands actually depletes it, leaving behind a trail of destruction. As a matter of fact, flooding alone has affected more people than any other natural disaster has in the last two decades. Floods destroy buildings, agricultural fields, and cause water-borne diseases that affect millions of people worldwide.
Moreover, dry places are likely to experience even less rain events, ultimately leading to droughts. It goes without saying that droughts result in wildfires and other fire accidents. A study suggests that fires accidents globally can increase by 19% compared to 2015 by the year 2050. This is also evident from the fact that the intensities and frequencies of heatwaves have significantly increased across the world since after 2000.
A situation this problematic impedes the progress of agriculture sector, resulting in reduction of crop yields by 10% already. And, because 70% of the freshwater is utilized for agriculture, due to water scarcity, the agriculture sector will face challenges in producing adequate food to feed the growing population. Chances are production of staple crops such as wheat, rice, and maize will decrease as they require more water compared to other crops. The shortage of these crops which are most consumed worldwide will lead to hunger crisis, especially in low-income countries.
Global warming does not just stop here. It goes on to cross the barriers of the Tropics, affecting the polar regions equally. The massive sheets of ice and glaciers we see today took hundreds — if not thousands — of years to become what they are now, but this ice is melting because of the rising global mean temperatures. In fact, the Artic is warming two times faster than the rest of the world because when ice melts, the darker surface — the rocks — are left exposed which absorb more sunlight and further warms up the area. If this melting remains unchecked, all of the polar bears will go extinct by the end of 21st century.
While it is true that species go extinct over the course of time, global warming is escalating this process. We have somewhere around 8.7 million species on Earth today, which is only 1% of what we had had when life first began on Earth. As a matter of fact, our planet has faced five natural extinctions already in the last 540 million years or so, but what our planet and the 8.7 million species are not ready for is yet another extinction. Not all species can adapt to changing climatic conditions this rapid. Humans’ activities have increased the extinction process 1000 times faster which means it’s not just polar bears, but around 1 million species of plants and animals are under the threat of extinction.
To put it another way, Earth was supposed to be in the cooling phase right now after undergoing all those extinctions, and scientists assert that we were supposed to head towards an ice age which was to happen in 1.5 thousand years from now. Nevertheless, since after the 19th century, that is the Industrial Revolution, Earth has been warming instead of cooling, and this can be easily attributed to greenhouse gases which we are continuously emitting.
Another reason why melting glaciers are of concern to us is because glaciers alone are responsible for around 21% of global sea level rise from 1993 to 2018. Moreover, water absorbs more sunlight in the absence of ice because ice reflects more sunlight than water and hence, oceans get warmer. What this means for us is that as oceans get warmer, evaporation will be faster and this will, in turn, result in more severe rainfall. Additionally, when water gets heated up, it expands and the sea level consequently rises.
The sea level is rising approximately 3.6 millimeter every year, and this rate is accelerating due to climate change. The rise of sea levels is largely because of the melting of the two ice sheets, namely Greenland and Antarctica. The Greenland ice sheet is believed to have or will soon cross what is known as the tipping point, which is the level beyond which one cannot stop the rest of the ice from melting.
This melted ice increases the level of sea water, and it is actually freshwater getting mixed with saltwater, so water crisis will get only worse. In fact, the entire Greenland ice sheet is capable of increasing the ocean water level by seven meters. Sinking cities such as Mumbai in India and Venice in Italy are believed to go underwater in the future because of rising sea levels. This means many parts of the world, particularly places close to the oceans, are on the verge of extinction.
It all comes down to one thing: greenhouse gases.
Greenhouse gases are not something we need to get rid of entirely, because some amounts of must be present in the atmosphere to sustain life on Earth: during night, in the absence of Sun, these greenhouse gases prevent the Earth from freezing by trapping heat from the Sun and keeping the Earth warm at night. However, increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has led to the warming of Earth at a much faster rate than it has ever in the past. To cite an example, in 2019 alone we released 59 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
As astonishing as it sounds, generating electricity contributes to 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is because 84% of electricity is still generated using fossil fuels such as coal. Since coal-fired power plants largely contribute to air pollution, they indirectly cause more deaths than other renewable sources of producing electricity do (1 in 8 deaths are due to air pollution).
On top of this, fossil fuels take millions of years to form from the remains of plants and animals, but they are non-conventional sources of energy and will get exhausted in the near future. Since we still haven’t switched to renewables completely for generating electricity (which is because coals are relatively cheaper than wind mills and other renewables), this means an energy crisis in the future is imminent; there will be no more coal left but the carbon dioxide released from combustion of coals will continue to warm the atmosphere for several more years. In 2020 alone, about 10% of global population had no access to electricity, and that is when we had coal. Thus, it is about time we switched to renewables for generating electricity.
Additionally, although the most developed nations exploit fossil fuels the most, they will be least impacted by poverty, unemployment, migration, and disasters — the ultimate consequences of climate change. Put simply, the least developed countries emit the least greenhouse gases, but global warming strikes these countries harder than the rest, and thus, it will be what is termed to be an ‘unequal world’. To put this into picture, 64% of people living in extreme poverty are found just in the Sub-Saharan Africa despite the fact that every African produces just 0.1 tonne of carbon dioxide annually.
This is where climate change and the concept of an ‘unequal world’ comes into play. Climate change is going to aggravate this situation by increasing the occurrences of natural disasters in these countries. Therefore, some parts of the world will be more affected by climate change than the rest even though their contribution to global warming was little.
Actually, developed nations are prepared for climate-related disasters, but the developing ones aren’t, which is why they suffer maximum loss. Even the location of countries determine how severely they get impacted from climate change: countries like Norway are less vulnerable to the effects of climate change but a country such as Bangladesh, which finds itself located in a region where climate change is a potential threat, will be faced with the most damage.
All in all, according to the 2015 Paris Agreement, we must limit the increase in global mean temperature by 1.5℃. A temperature rise of more than 1.5℃ means we will lose 70-90% of the coral reefs. Right now, we are experiencing a 1.2℃ temperature rise. If we are to limit this by 1.5℃, we must act now.
Mexico, for instance, has done pioneering work in this field. Back in 1992, Mexico was designated as the world’s most polluted city; it is because of the tremendous efforts put in by the government and other private organizations that today Mexico has fallen from 1st to 917th place in the world’s most polluted cities rankings. Mexico took audacious steps from banning its most pollution-causing factories to banning cars for a day every week in metropolitan areas — an inspiration to middle-income and low-income countries.
Moreover, our stringent policies have resulted in us succeeding to recover the ozone hole in Antarctica. In the year 1989, right after scientists reported the ozone hole, Montreal Protocol was brought in, according to which every country must limit the usage of ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons which are 10,000 times more efficient at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
The idea was to prevent the depletion of ozone layer, a layer found in the Stratosphere that protects the Earth from harmful UV rays. Thus, it is because of this protocol that the usage of ozone-depleting substances has decreased by 98% over the past two decades. The low-income countries actually received financial assistance from developed countries which made this protocol successful. Therefore, it is essential that countries must be willing to invest to save our world from collapsing.
Global warming is, thus, not merely about protecting the environment, it’s about protecting our future. Global warming directly affects the socio-economic conditions of the world, and combating it is the only way for us to attain the SDGs mentioned above.
Saving trees, for example, is one of the SDGs because trees sequester carbon naturally. A single tree can store as much as 7.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, but when it is cut, all of the carbon returns back to the atmosphere — an example of how we indirectly release greenhouse gases. Humans’ activities have resulted in the destruction of coastal habitats including mangroves which prevent floods and is home to diverse marine species. Restoration of coastal habitats, reforestation, cleaning the oceans (oceans have absorbed over 90% of heat energy and 25% of carbon dioxide generated by humans, a natural process known as Buffering), and switching to renewables are some ways we can contribute to the cause.
In essence, 21st century saw massive technological developments from quantum computing to self-driving cars, but global warming can bring all our progress to sheer downfall. It can leave even the most developed nations crippled for several years because of its catastrophic consequences. Global warming is not a problem for the future generations to solve, because we can see it happening right now. The time is now to act. We do have the resources and know the science required to combat this challenge. We just need more people to be aware and do their part while the world leaders implement the much-needed environmental policies, for Earth is our home and there is no planet like Earth.
By: Srishti Suman Gupta
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