From crisis to action
Fromcrisistoaction
What can be done?
American scientist John Holdren says there are three things we can do about the climate crisis: mitigate, adapt, and suffer. Two of these are within our control. Mitigate means cutting greenhouse gas emissions. This is what the world is trying to do with the Paris Agreement, the international treaty that sets the rules for the economic transition from a world driven by fossil fuels and deforestation to a decarbonized one. Adapt means acting at a local, regional, or national level to protect people and ecosystems from the impact of a climate that has already changed. When the Brazilian government adopts anti-deforestation policies, it is reducing emissions, or mitigating. When a city government plants trees around a dam to mitigate the effects of drought on the water supply, or when Embrapa develops a drought-resistant bean seed, they are adapting. Here you will learn about steps towards mitigation and adaptation that have been taken by public authorities and civil society.
The IPCC: Science Strikes Back
In 1988, UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) and the WMO (World Meteorological Organization) created the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The body's mission was to prepare an overview of the state of the art of scientific knowledge on climate change.
The IPCC brings together hundreds of scientists from around the world, divided into three working groups: one assesses the physical basis of climate change; a second, the impacts and vulnerabilities of societies and ecosystems; and the third addresses so-called mitigation, or how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. These groups are dedicated to compiling, every five or six years, the entire body of evidence available in the literature and producing major assessment reports.
In total, the IPCC has published six reports. The first (called FAR), in 1990, provided the scientific basis for the establishment of the United Nations Climate Change Convention in 1992. The second (SAR), in 1995, shook the world by detecting "discernible evidence" of human impact on the climate for the first time—leading to a wave of disinformation campaigns from the fossil fuel industry. The fourth (AR4) declared that the warming of the climate system is "unequivocal" and earned the IPCC the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.