The climate and ecological crisis has arrived

We need immediate action to avoid unspeakable human suffering and irreversible damage to the natural world.

Governments worldwide are failing to act, consistently refusing to acknowledge the serious and imminent threat posed by this twin crisis.

Without leadership, citizens, corporations and institutions lack direction and purpose in the fight against this climatic and ecological nightmare that worsens with every passing day. This leaves all of us - and the planet we call home - in a desperate and dangerous position.

We demand that governments everywhere tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with the public, businesses and other institutions to communicate this urgent need for change.

What does the science say?

There is widespread consensus across the scientific community that rapidly changing climates and ecological collapse are not tomorrow’s problems: we are living them today.

In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that urgent action must be taken to keep the rise in global temperatures below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

The panel outlined how a failure to achieve this benchmark will lead to catastrophic consequences for the global economy, and have a devastating impact on communities and ecosystems across the world.

They also confirmed that increasingly extreme weather patterns, rising sea levels and melting arctic ice are the direct consequence of the 1°C of global warming created by humans since the start of the industrial age.

In April 2020, the IPCC found that global temperatures are already on course to reach 1.5°C of warming between 2030 and 2052: a reality that would bring with it “dramatic damage”. This would rapidly accelerate the crisis as melting arctic ice releases trillions of tons of harmful gases into the atmosphere, further accelerating warming and its deadly consequences. More alarmingly still, our current rate of global emissions put us on the path to 3-4C of warming in just 80 years time.

Not only this, but global heating, along with habitat destruction, overconsumption and pollution are already feeding into the second harbinger of planetary disaster: a crash in global biodiversity.

In fact, several studies have suggested that we are now entering the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction event. The earth has experienced five of these events in the past 540 million years or so, and in each more than three-quarters of all species became extinct in a geological blink-of-an-eye.

This time, the rate of extinction is unprecedented: occurring at a rate 100 to 1,000 times faster than has occurred in the past.

Written by: Alison Lowe, read more here: rebellion.global