Thank you Umair, If there is a way out it is by embracing the larger consciousness of the planet, of nature. The Earth is a complex living system which evolved its own gentle climate supportive of life over many million years of evolution. Living systems are designed to absorb a lot of stress and still keep a balance, but if the stress gets too much, a tipping point is passed and a system collapses into chaos and decay. Humanity now has done so much damage to the biosphere that we are at the edge of systemic global environmental collapse, which includes economic collapse.
The evidence is all around us as everything seems to get weirder. Think of a patient in an IC ward nearing multi-organ failure. All the monitoring systems start to bliep and flicker red at the same time as the interconnected life-support systems of the body are no longer able to keep an equilibrium with often lethal consequences, while the patient is having crazy fever dreams.
On our planet, floods, record heat waves, droughts, fires, more destructive storms, possibly pandemics, failed harvests, food price inflation, migration, biodiversity destruction, are all alarm-bells going off that the Earth’s living system is flirting with that tipping point. We are indeed in a Global Code Red.
Still the global leadership and the media thinks we have time to go to net zero by 2050. This is because the Earth as a whole is not seen as a complex living system passing an irreversible tipping point but as a mechanical system heating up slightly with every decade a bit more damage which we can keep under control. Greenhouse gas emissions are up again worldwide in 2021 despite big promises for carbon-cutting and a transition to renewables. Twentysix COPs have only resulted in a road leading to hell paved with good intentions.
We can forget that someone else will solve the problem for you. They won’t, it is up to us, the whole climate movement to no longer demand change, but to take over the reins from failing leadership and organize that change ourselves. It is up to us to secure the future. We need to act now to avoid regretting one day that we waited too long for others to do what - with hindsight - had to be done.
And here comes the good part of the story. We may still have a window of opportunity to stop the world from sliding into the tipping point of irreversible climate catastrophe. How? Through the cooling power of forests. Recent scientific research is showing what we actually all know when visiting a healthy forest: forests cool and refresh. They regulate the oxygen, carbon, nutrient cycles and above all the water cycle of the planet. They do so in interaction with the atmosphere and the soils and cool in several ways, not just through carbon sequestration, but also by triggering rain, which transports heat to the outer atmosphere, though the sponge function of its fertile soils and through the creation of clouds, which increases the reflectivity or albedo of the planet. Restoring the forests to pre-industrial levels is likely to have the potential to cool the planet by up to one degree centigrade in one generation.
I propose a Marshall plan* to bring together a global alliance of young people, finance and technology to start reforesting large parts of the tropical zones of our planet in this decade with the aim to cool our planet. Of course the decarbonization and the energy transition need to be accelerated, of course our production and consumption loops need to become circular and much more localized. But all of this will not go fast enough to avoid crossing the tipping point. For that we additionally need this global reforestation plan, by paying hundreds of millions of people in the Global South to do so, to regenerate their own landscapes and switch to complex forms of agroforestry food production, away from the monocultures aimed at fattening the cows and pigs of the Global North. This will cool the climate, slow biodiversity destruction, alleviate a lot of poverty, return the respect to the Global South that was stolen from those lands and people and create a new regenerative economy. What’s not to like? I have a plan how it can be done.
