2019 was the second hottest year of all time and the past decade, from 2010 to 2019, has been the hottest in history. July 2022 has also been very hot and has left half of Spain in flames.
Meanwhile, levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have also been at record highs in 2019.
It is something we may not notice much in our daily lives, but climate change is affecting absolutely every country in the world. Little by little, temperatures are changing, sea levels are rising and weather phenomena are becoming more extreme.
At the beginning of the pandemic, there was much optimism in this regard. Confinements by most countries, the temporary closure of factories and industries, the promotion of teleworking and restrictions on movement made it appear that by 2020 the levels of CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere would be considerably reduced. Emissions were estimated to fall by around 6%. However, this had only a temporary effect. Already in the second quarter of 2020, we saw emissions rising again, reaching even higher figures in 2021 than in 2019.
This showed us that climate change does not stand still and that our industries are far from being able to slow it down, as we have witnessed that as the economy has started to recover from these years of pandemic, emissions have reached higher levels.
The world is experiencing an unprecedented climate crisis.
The Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping the global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. To give you an idea, if the temperature rises above 2 degrees Celsius, corals around the world would die, which would be a large-scale, global catastrophe, since corals are food and shelter for millions of species, which in turn are food for many others, and so on until humans.
The agreement also aims to strengthen the capacity of countries to deal with the effects of climate change through appropriate financial flows and a new technology framework.
This means that to avoid the worst effects of climate change, as set out in the Paris Agreement, global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025 and then decline by 43% by 2030, falling to net zero by 2050. However, expert estimations are far from these figures. They estimate that these emissions will grow by almost 14% in the next decade, something that truly compromises us as a species.
SDG 13 aims to work towards this, but for change to be real, lasting and sustainable, industries and factories need to adapt. Production chains and long-established working methods need to be approached differently.
In addition, many of the large companies we all know appear on various lists of multinationals committed to climate change, because they are working to increase the use of sustainable energy sources. Many of them already have high percentages of their consumption coming from renewable energy. That's all well and good, and that's a start, but they will not be sustainable until their entire production chain and the products they use to manufacture their goods and provide their services are sustainable. It has no sense if 100% of the energy used by a food company, for example, comes from renewable sources if they then use palm oil to manufacture all their products, thus contributing to the deforestation of forests, loss of biodiversity and rising global temperatures.
It is about working together, all industries working in the same direction, that of preserving planet Earth.
Filter by category
Filter by tag