Why Climate Change matters to your security, health & wealth

We are in the midst of many serious challenges today: COVID-19, inequality, geopolitical unrest, economic crisis, and climate change which on its own and interacting with the others poses both immediate and long-term threats to our security, health, and wealth. Contributing editors Charles Norchi and Paul Mayewski, together with Alexander More of the Climate Change Institute, have prepared this highly useful and illustrative insight to what is happening to our planet - and why. Global Geneva recommends that this be used in schools and universities. It also serves as a pertinent quick read for general audiences.

The Editors

27 October 2020

1630

Forest fires around the world NASA — Forest fires, many aggravated if not caused by climate change, across the globe on Tuesday, 27 October, 2020. (Photo: NASA)

Written by Paul Mayewski, Charles Norchi and Alexander More

Far too many governments, businesses, political factions or local interest groups ranging from the United States to Tanzania are ignoring, or downplaying the increasingly dire impact of climate change on our planet. Climate change, however, is no longer some distant, long-term factor. Nor is it ‘fake news’. It is very much affecting our lives, our jobs and and our futures. Not tomorrow. But today.

And yet, far too many politicians or science deniers prefer to focus on their own short-term interests rather than confront the more pressing, threatening aspects of climate change fallout that are undermining our existence. What we are dealing with is a harsh new reality that requires action now. (See Global Geneva article by Paul Mayewski and Charles Norch on Covid-19 and climate change)

Not unlike A Blueprint for Survival published by The Ecologist in 1972 with considerable impact at the time, this to-the-point article offers the insight to do the same. Produced by Paul Mayewski, director of the Climage Change Insitute at the University of Maine in the United States, Alexander More, a specialist on environmental health at Harvard University/LIU and also with the Institute, and Charles Norchi of the University of Maine Law School, it specifically explores 10 key areas of how climate change is impacting our lives. It also highlights why we can simply no longer ignore what is happening. (See article in Global Geneva by Charles Norchi on Iceland)

Kinshasa. Water shortages aggravated by climate change across the globe present a growing threat to security, notably a source for new wars. (Photo: ICRC)

More specifically, the 10 points explore climate change’s growing impact on global security; how humans are contributing to a “new climate reality”; the key role of local knowledge to understand – and counter – its impact; the severe health consequences it is causing; what we can do to mitigate and adapt; the need for strict new air laws; the emerged of water as the “new oil” as Earth’s most precious resource; why governments need to support renewable energies and, finally, why geoengineering solutions will not replace mitigation, adaptation and conservation.