Looking backwards and forwards

Abstract

Looking back over 2019 through a planetary health lens, the key themes of the year might be emerging public awareness and advocacy, and inadequate practical action. The rhetoric around climate change has notably changed with “climate emergency” and “climate breakdown” and “public health emergency” being increasingly used to describe the various climate challenges we are inflicting upon ourselves. In Iceland, a plaque commemorating the former Okjökull glacier—the first officially lost to the climate crisis—displays text that perfectly captures the climate zeitgeist: “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.” The value and potential for youth leadership has also emerged as a key theme over the last year, while the IPBES global assessment report also brought home the true severity of the biodiversity crisis that we are facing. Meanwhile, many of the sustainable development goals are looking increasingly far from being achievable by 2030, with some even worsening. These are not disparate unconnected problems, but are all maladies of our current socioeconomic system; the net effect is far from what we could reasonably describe as a state of planetary health. In the last 70 years we have radically changed both our lives and the world around us. This has benefited many people, but the environmental cost has been enormous, such that our current course is simply unsustainable even if it were ideal. And clearly for many, indeed most people, it is far from ideal. The health implications of unchecked climate heating are also becoming increasingly clear as laid out in the latest Lancet Countdown report. “A business as usual trajectory will result in a fundamentally altered world… the life of every child born today will be profoundly affected.” At the time of writing, political leaders and climate diplomats are meeting in Madrid for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25). It is hoped that countries will ramp up their decarbonisation pledges during 2020 prior to the critical meeting next year in Glasgow. So far, the negotiations in Madrid have been dominated by conflict over the “Article 6” rules, for international cooperation, especially carbon markets, and how to support countries that have been irreversibly harmed by climate change—known as loss and damage. These are important components of the Paris Agreement that need to be nailed down, but given that emissions are still rising it's hard not to wonder if this is going to be enough. So, what's the block? Why is so little actually happening to change anything? This is the question so many young people are angrily asking. The Paris Agreement introduced a system of voluntary mitigation pledges over the old top-down approach of strict emissions limits, although these limits do still exist aspirationally. It has been argued that this voluntary approach resulted in a process that no longer focussed on what is environmentally desirable, but rather on what is politically feasible. Such an approach seems to have been largely effective in overcoming diplomatic gridlock, but it is vulnerable to a growing inconsistency between talk, policy, and action. Perhaps because of the need for politically expedience, policies to date have focused on enabling rapid deployment of renewable energy, with some notable success, but with few parallel policies designed to actively phase out fossil fuel technologies. Arguably, without a much stronger focus on directly cutting the use, or at least emissions from, fossil fuels, carbon emissions are likely to continue to grow in parallel with clean energy capacity. It's easy to see that policies designed to directly limit or reduce fossil fuel use will be politically contested far more than those designed to promote relatively clean technologies, so perhaps we haven't really sidestepped the tough negotiations but simply kicked them down the road once more. We have focused primarily on the climate emergency here given the ongoing COP25 conference and the importance of climate stability to all other endeavours, but issues of human development and protection of nature are no less important or crosscutting. As we move increasingly from only providing evidence of the nature of the problems we face to also prioritising and implementing solutions, we need to embrace the inherently political nature of those choices. As has been identified in climate change adaptation, these choices need to be understood as sociopolitical processes rather than politically neutral managerial decisions. If we cannot take that step, then the gap between talk and action is likely to continue to confound us.