Climate repair: three things we must do now to stabilise the planet

Source: David King and Jane Lichtenstein, Business Maverick (This story was first published in The Conversation.), 5 September 2021, photo credit: Conscious Life Events

“Nowhere is safe.” As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in a recent report that climate change and its consequences are here to stay, is there still an opportunity to mitigate some of the dangers and to get back to a place of relative safety for humanity?

The challenge of surviving the next 50 years is now seen as a planet-wide existential crisis; we need to work together urgently, just to secure a short-term future for human civilisation. Global weather patterns are violently disrupted: Greece burns; the south of England floods; Texas has had its coldest weather ever, while California and Australia suffer apocalyptic wild fires.

All of these violent, record-breaking events are a direct result of rapid heating in the Arctic – occurring faster than in the rest of the world. A warm Arctic triggers new ocean and air currents that change the weather for everyone.

The only way to reverse some of these catastrophic patterns, and to regain a kind of stability in climate and weather systems, is “climate repair” – a strategy we call “reduce, remove, repair” – which demands that we make very rapid progress to net zero global emissions; that there is massive, active removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere; and, in the first instance, that we refreeze the Earth’s poles and glaciers to correct the wild weather patterns, slow down ice-melt, stabilise sea level, and break the feedback loops that relentlessly accelerate global warming. There are no either/or options.
Read more

The South African Pork Producers’ Organisation (SAPPO) coordinates industry interventions and collaboratively manages risks in the value chain to enable the sustainability and profitability of pork producers in South Africa.