Coexisting is bigger than climate change

Over the past few days there has been a heavy focus on climate change, fossil fuels, and greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is the environmental issue that gets the most attention because it is an existential crisis for our own species - if we aren’t able to get greenhouse gas emissions under control and stop global temperatures rising then we risk making the planet uninhabitable.

So while we’ll spend a lot of time talking about climate change on this page, I wanted to pause and add some thoughts about some of the other environmental issues we face before embarking on a series of posts about what we as individuals can do to try and make things better. Ultimately climate change can only be addressed by a full-scale transformation of our energy system and that needs to be led by governments and multinational corporations (and personally I think Big Oil bears most of the responsibility given it was warned about climate change way back in 1959, and definitely knew it was a problem by 1977, yet has spent decades sowing doubt about the science and continued to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere).

Coexistence is about much more than reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it is about living in harmony with the natural world. That’s how the suggestions that follow will be framed, not through the narrow prism of reducing our carbon footprint, but with the goal of living more sustainably, wasting less, and reducing our impact on the planet and the species we share it with.

I’ve previously set out the big challenges we face - deforestation, climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and plastic waste. I also set out some of the key statistics that show how the natural world has changed as we have industrialised.

Fortunately, you don’t just have to take my word for it. People far smarter than me have created models categorising the impacts we are having on the planet and proposed boundaries for those impacts we shouldn’t exceed - take a look at Johan Rockström et al and their safe operating space for humanity and the updated safe and just Earth system boundaries (we are failing in seven out of eight of them). Economist Kate Raworth overlaid these boundaries with social foundations to create The Doughnut - “an environmentally safe and socially just space in which humanity can thrive”.

Scientists have also argued that climate change and biodiversity loss must be tackled together, and that sustainable development and climate action are inseparable.

All of which we will revisit in more detail in the future, but the above is my justification for advocating coexistence and a holistic approach to addressing the key environmental issues, rather than simply focusing on tackling climate change.