By Thomson Reuters Foundation
The hottest month on record. Wildfires in the Arctic. Deadly heatwaves. Melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. “Hurricanes of hell” in the Bahamas. The news is grim and the warning from Nature is loud and clear: the storm is in our front yard.
Make no mistake: we are in the grip of an existential global environmental emergency. Thankfully, we know precisely what to do to about it. The age of fossil fuels must end, replaced by a new era of clean, renewable energy. As things stand today, even our most ambitious targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions fail to match the severity of the crisis by a factor of five. We are careering towards the moment in time when we can no longer keep climate change in check. And as Secretary-General António Guterres noted at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York yesterday, “we fool ourselves if we think we can fool nature.”
In order to arrest this emergency, and as we decarbonize our economies, we must bring one of our most powerful allies into the fight now – nature. Nature-based solutions address major societal challenges, from food and water security, climate change, human health, to resilience. Read more>>
