Why Should Everyone Take Climate Change Seriously And Plan For It
The global warming that’s changing our climate is already having dire consequences.
In just the past few decades:
- Rising temperatures have worsened extreme weather events.
- Chunks of ice in the Antarctic have broken apart.
- Wildfire seasons are months longer.
- Coral reefs have been bleached of their colors.
- Mosquitoes are expanding their territory, able to spread disease.
What’s causing these harmful changes?
It’s mainly us.
We humans are the ones who burn fossil fuels and chop down forests, causing average temperatures to rise worldwide. That global warming trend is increasingly disrupting our climate — the average weather over many years.
Earth has already warmed by about 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, before industry started to boom.
While we experience the effects, we’re on our way toward 1.5 degrees C (2.7 F) by as early as 2030.
Why a half-degree more is such a big deal
A warmer world — even by a half-degree Celsius — has more evaporation, leading to more water in the atmosphere. Such changing conditions put our agriculture, health, water supply and more at risk.
Picture a North Carolina cotton farm that’s been around since 1960, with global average temperatures rising by roughly half a degree since it grew its first crop.
The increased evaporation and additional moisture to the atmosphere has led to 30% more intense rain during heavy downpours in that part of the U.S.
Then a hurricane like 2018’s Florence — already strengthened by warmer oceans and higher seas — dumps this excess rainfall on the farm. The crops get more flooded and damaged than they did half a century ago.
It's how you go from half-degree of warming to economic hardship.
There’s still time to act
Whether it’s a shift of 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees, these warming levels aren’t magic thresholds. Every rise in warming is worse for the planet than the last.
But they're not inevitable.
It's not too late to slow the pace of climate change as long as we act today. With your help, we can attack this challenge.
Why Is It Important To Plan For Climate Change
Preparing for climate change — also known as climate change adaptation — is about reducing the risk of climate change impacts to people, places and resources. We know that climate change is already occurring, and that additional warming is unavoidable. If we hope to limit the negative impacts of climate change, we must prepare by identifying vulnerabilities and by planning accordingly.
Climate change affects every aspect of the natural environment. What’s more, each of these impacts often cause changes that affect other aspects of the environment, essentially producing a chain-reaction of changes within the ecosystem. For example, climate change causes temperatures to increase in many parts of the world.
This results in milder winters in many regions. These milder winters sometimes allow insect pests to survive in greater numbers, and emerge earlier in the spring. This results in additional pressure on trees and other plants, and may actually lead to die-offs in some areas.
This scenario isn’t simply hypothetical. Some scientists believe that warmer winters are already allowing more mountain pine beetles to overwinter in the Rockies, which may be contributing to the dramatic die-off of lodgepole pines in Colorado and elsewhere.
We Cannot Stop Climate Change in the Near-Term
The science of climate change is clear. The climate is already changing, and additional changes are unavoidable. This is because greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide and methane, for example — persist for a long time in the atmosphere, which allows the gases to accumulate over time.
This also means we will experience a lag between when we reduce emissions and when we actually feel the benefits of that emissions reduction. Even if we halted all climate changing emissions tomorrow, the world would continue to experience accelerating climate change for years to come.
Planning for Climate Change Will Not Be Easy, But It Is Necessary
Since we cannot stop climate change, we must embrace climate change adaptation as a new and permanent element of conservation and land trust management plans.
This means that some land trusts may even need to revisit their mission statement, conservation goals and selection criteria in order to maximize their positive impact in a climate changing world.
Balancing climate change with other threats to conservation priorities will prove challenging. However, many of the conservation strategies that land trusts have used over the past several decades to support the health of natural, agricultural and cultural resources are still relevant and useful when planning for climate change.
In fact, since we cannot stop all the impacts of climate change, sometimes the best action may be to reduce other stressors in the ecosystem. For example, we cannot prevent sea level rise from flooding coastal marshes, but we may be able to increase the resilience of those marshes by reducing water pollution or protecting nearby natural areas from development.
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