REPORTING on the doomsday beat, which is how I often think about climate change, is fascinating, but can also be deeply depressing. This year, scientists predicted even higher future sea level rises, carbon emissions marched upwards and the Amazon was on fire. Donald Trump recently started the formal process of taking the US out of the Paris climate deal.
Despite this backdrop, there are signs 2019 may have been the year the world woke up to the need for fast and serious action on climate change. A year ago, the names of Greta Thunberg, the protest group Extinction Rebellion and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were unfamiliar to many.
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The impact of Thunberg, and the Fridays for the Future movement she kick-started with her school climate strike, has been extraordinary. She was nominated for the Nobel peace prize, dominated a UN climate summit in September and was the catalyst for a global climate protest that month, which appears to have been the biggest yet. Many schoolchildren who took part told me she inspired them to take to the streets.
Nick Nuttall at the Earth Day 2020 environmental campaign, who was a spokesperson at the UN at the time of the 2015 Paris climate summit, says: “The strikers have certainly changed the debate and fired up the level of conversation among citizens and governments.”
Elsewhere on the streets, whether you love or hate it, there is no denying that Extinction Rebellion (XR) has moved the dial. Adam Corner at communications group Climate Outreach says XR deserves credit for changing how the debate is framed. When the UK government was passing its law for net-zero emissions by 2050, many questioned if that was fast enough, something XR had pushed hard on.
Shortly after the group’s Easter protests, polling showed public concern in the UK on the environment spiking to levels not seen in the past decade. Although it is hard to pin this on a single factor, says Chris Curtis at polling organisation YouGov, the timing was closely aligned to XR activity and the sustained rise in concern is significant. “It is pretty incredible the way the environment has risen up our issues tracker,” he says.
Science has played a role. Reports on land and oceans by the UN climate science panel this year may not have made the same splash as last year’s on holding temperature rises to 1.5°C. But I have been repeatedly struck by how many protesters this year have cited the “carbon budget” in that 1.5°C report, which has led people to suggest there are now 11 years to avoid climate catastrophe.
All this has spilled over into the political mainstream. “Thanks to action outside [the UK] parliament, it’s now impossible for politicians to ignore it,” says Rebecca Willis at Lancaster University, UK. “Everyone, including [prime minister] Boris Johnson, is falling over themselves to say we want to get to net zero. That shift is amazing.”
US congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez may have seen her vision for a Green New Deal, a massive infrastructure programme to cut carbon emissions and tackle inequality, defeated in the US senate, but it still put climate change at the centre of US politics.
Dave Reay, a climate scientist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says 2019 has been the “most positive year I can remember on climate change”.
Whether it all translates into bold action remains to be seen. The litmus test, says Nuttall, will come next year, when we find out how ambitious new carbon-cutting plans are from the countries signed up to the Paris deal. Maybe 2020 will be the year I start on the optimism beat.
