It's the holidays and I've been procrastinating. Every time I sit down to write, the pull of season 6 of Peaky Blinders or another piece of Mum's Christmas biscotti distracts.
It's a pretty good analogy for how many of us go in our sustainability goals. Great intentions easily foiled.
I aimed to have a fully-fledged carbon baseline ready to go by now, but it's still a work in progress. What I have done though is set the target. Aiming to reduce our carbon emissions by 2.5 tCO2e (that is two and a half tonnes of CO2 or equivalent greenhouse gas emissions) this year and so on until we can get down to 6tCO2e for the household (or 2tCO2e per person) by 2030 and hopefully, much, much earlier. We will also pay to offset our remaining carbon consumption as we journey towards our netzero goal.
I've learnt we need to reduce our individual carbon footprint to about 2tCO2e per person per year to avoid the two degrees Celsius rise in temperature. You will have heard of the 'two degrees' rallying point from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) often quoted in the news and the expected tipping point after which scientists and economists have predicted we experience globally devastating impacts to our environment such as... (rewritten from Climate Change Connection)
Melting of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which between them could raise global sea levels by up to 7 meters,
drying of many parts of Africa,
inundation by salt water of the aquifers used by cities such as Shanghai, Manila, Jakarta, Bangkok, Kolkata, Mumbai, Karachi, Lagos, Buenos Aires and Lima,
risk of water shortages for between 2.3 and 3 billion people. The melting of glaciers will imperil people who depend on their meltwater, such as -
people from Pakistan, western China, south-east and central Asia (the Himalayas)
people in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia (the Andes)
people in British Columbia and Canada’s prairie provinces (the Rockies)
bleaching of 95% of the world’s coral. This bleaching would result in the death of almost all of the world’s coral and the destruction of those ecosystems.
Much more than 2 degrees and we reach a point where the impact of greenhouse gases doesn't rise slowly like the boiling frog of recent decades but escalates as the melting permafrost releases methane and the amazon rainforest dies off, turning trees back to carbon dioxide.
Permafrost - is rocks, sand and soil held together by ice that is frozen all year long and contains large quantities of organic carbon (from dead plants and materials trapped in the frozen ground). Much of the North and South pole, and a quarter of the land area of the Northern Hemisphere is permafrost. If it thaws, that's a big problem as it will release the trapped carbon and methane, escalating greenhouse gas quantities and potentially destabilize vast tracks of land in the northern hemisphere that animals and people live on.
Most of the risk to people comes from the effects of climate variability - actual devastation from climate events, such as droughts, bushfires, rising sea levels, melting permafrost, and from the impact of these on food production. The impact will be uneven to people and nations, effecting some locations more. As always, impacts will be disproportionate to those who may not have the economic or other means to overcome food shortages or basics such as shelter, heating and cooling.
I've roughly estimated my household carbon footprint using an online calculator, to be about 16 tonnes. Thats just an estimate, so key to this year will be measuring more completely as we go along, in categories of shelter (our home energy consumption), food, goods & clothing (stuff we buy or wear), and transport.
Next post I'll give a more detailed breakdown and some goals for each category. Goodbye hamburger, I'm going to miss you!
Current state: ¬16tCO2e
Target by end 2023: ¬13.5tCO2e
Target by 2030: 6tCO2e (that's 2tCO2e per person)
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