04. The Syllabus: A. Understanding Sustainability and Climate Change
Fields Of Change: A Sustainability Handbook
Tipping points are also known as critical thresholds - it is the idea that systems can go past points of no return, resulting in sudden, irreversible change. They can be triggered by positive feedback loops, whereby small changes are amplified because the effects of a disturbance reinforce the change. Imagine you’re kicking a ball towards a hill, and as you kick it up the slope, it rolls back towards you. But, if you kick it far enough up the hill, it goes over the peak and rapidly picks up momentum, out of control, rolling quickly into the next valley. Many of the Earth’s natural systems behave in a similar way - changing gradually and being able to rebound until they reach a threshold, after which change is rapid and irreversible. One classic example is melting sea ice…
The rise of sustainability and the climate movement Caring about nature and the planet is not a new thing - in fact, indigenous peoples around the world have long demonstrated a spiritual connection and deep care for their environments. In the Western context, caring about the planet was often associated with hippy culture or the peace movement throughout the 20th century. Around the turn of the millennium, caring about the planet became more strongly associated with organisations like Greenpeace or the WWF . The most recent chapter was defined by non-violent activism and ‘civil disobedience’. This era of the environmental movement is still very young - it was only in 2018 that Greta Thunberg skipped school to protest outside the Swedish parliament due to her government’s inaction on climate. Around the same time, Extinction Rebellion and the Fridays for Future rose simultaneously to create a huge upsurge in activity and awareness through 2019.
In the last five years, awareness has continued to grow. ‘Sustainability’ has become a key term, with businesses and organisations setting their own
targets for reducing their environmental impacts.
The question is - what’s next? As climate change is set to get worse, it, along with sustainability more broadly, will increasingly become a central consideration for decisions across personal, political and business lives.
Albedo Feedback Cycle A major factor in rapid warming of
icy places like the Arctic is sea ice albedo feedback, a cycle that makes warming more severe where ice is lost. A surface’s “albedo” is how reflective it is of sunlight.
FEEDBACK
As the Arctic warms, ice cover melts, exposing more of the less-reflective water’s surface. ICE RETREAT
LOCAL WARMING
Exposed surface waters absorb more sunlight. They and the air above grow even warmer.
Enhanced warming causes further ice melt and retreat. The cycle continues.
Source: www.ioes.ucla.edu/climate
For example, the Amazon rainforest is resilient to environmental change, but scientists believe that it may be approaching a tipping point, past which we could see a mass dying of trees which cannot recover 23 . In fact, essentially all climate targets have been put in place to avoid us going past tipping points, because they are the most dangerous impacts associated with climate change. If we are to keep below the 1.5°C target, we need to cut our GHG emissions in half by 2030, and by 2050 the global economy needs to be carbon neutral 24 . Worryingly, at the moment, we are on track to miss all intergovernmental targets. However, civil society is stepping up - and this takes the form of the climate movement.
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