COMMUNITY by affected community, the true nature of the climate emergency bears down on more and more people every year. Unprecedented wildfires and previously unthinkable floods, in what some glibly refer to as the new normal, prefigures a world of unpredictable, increasingly traumatic abnormality.

As yet, however, neither extreme weather nor stronger warnings in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports has triggered a proper emergency response from politicians. As we head towards COP26, the big climate conference in Glasgow, UK, in November, incremental decarbonisation best sums up the name of their particular game: gradually reducing greenhouse gas emissions, investing a little bit more every year in low-carbon innovation and new technology.

As with the pandemic, scientists are now exhorting politicians to level with their voters, to tell them how it really is – to explain why halving emissions of greenhouse gases over the next decade is an out-and-out imperative (as the science now tells us) if we are to avoid the horror story of runaway climate change.

In essence, this means preventing those gases getting into the atmosphere in the first place by stopping the burning of all fossil fuels as fast as possible – not just in generating electricity, but in transport, heating buildings and manufacturing. We need to electrify pretty much everything and ensure the extra electricity we will need to power all the heat pumps and battery cars that ensue is 100 per cent renewable.

However, this is only half the story. We have put so many billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air over the past 30 years (much of which will hang around adding to the warming for many decades to come) that we are going to have to remove billions of tonnes of it to avoid that cumulative, long-term warming.

This idea of carbon removal is still highly controversial. It seems completely illogical to be contemplating billions of dollars of investment to remove billions of tonnes of CO₂ – even as we continue to pump huge amounts of this gas into the atmosphere. But we don’t have any choice: we now know that a stable climate (and therefore the future of humankind) depends both on accelerated decarbonisation and on getting very good indeed at accelerating carbon removal from the atmosphere.

Happily, there is a big upside in the shape of recarbonising the natural world – letting it draw down excess carbon, for example by promoting tree growth. We need as much as possible of that removed CO₂ to be taken up by regenerating the life support systems on which our economy still entirely depends – including soils, forests, wetlands, peat bogs, mangroves, seagrasses and so on.

The past 70 years of industrial development and intensive agriculture have badly degraded natural systems. There is now a belated, but welcome, recognition that we can’t go on producing the food we need by continuing to wage war on nature, and a growing interest in recarbonisation through regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, organic farming and even rewilding.

In essence, recarbonisation opens up an extraordinary prospect of rebuilding soil fertility, restoring forests and woodlands, transforming the marine environment and protecting precious habitats and biodiversity. This all has to happen anyway: it just happens to be an equally powerful way of addressing the climate emergency.

It has taken politicians the best part of 30 years (since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992) to get going on decarbonisation. They now need to get up to speed on this approach in just a few years, and COP26 has to be the place to make that happen.

Schemes like the Sahara Forest Project would help green the planet (Image: Manufacturing Reborn/Sahara Forest Project)

Environmentalist Jonathon Porritt‘s antidote to enviro-gloom shows the way to a sustainable low-carbon future, in The World We Made: Alex McKay’s story from 2050

You’ve warned for years about the state of the planet. What’s new?
I’ve written many books starting from where we are, but I find it increasingly difficult. You have to acknowledge the massive problems before you can get to the positive bit. This time I created a story, the diary of a 50-year-old teacher, Alex McKay, living in 2050. It’s got mocked-up photos, handwritten graphics, and it’s an antidote to those who say sustainability is doom and gloom.

I also want to remind us that we have pretty much all the tech firepower we need to move from being inherently and hopelessly unsustainable now, to a more or less sustainable world by 2050.

Can we change in just 37 years?
The realisation of the speed with which we need to move dawns very soon. One big wake-up call is that there are so many climate shocks that insurance companies say there is no way we can insure a world with such problems. The years things go badly wrong force politicians to accelerate our use of low-carbon technology. When I talk to sceptics, my analogy is Pearl Harbor. Until Japan attacked the US, consumer goods piled out of factories. Within nine months, production was committed to war. Not one private car was built.

“The years things go badly wrong force politicians to accelerate our use of low-carbon technology”

Are there other wake-up calls?
Yes. We are living a lie if we think we can feed 9 billion by 2050 on business-as-usual production. So my second big wake-up call is a world famine in 2025, caused by many factors, including crop-attacking “black rust” virus in the Middle East, China and India.

What kind of changes help people get past these crises?
A big change is that 90 per cent of energy in 2050 comes from renewable sources. We’re going to have a Moore’s law with solar power. That’s been going on for the past 10 years. We only need another 10 years of costs reducing by 5 to 7 per cent a year, and efficiencies increasing by 2 to 3 per cent a year for solar power to compete with all energy sources.

How else will 2050 be different?
One of the projections underlying the book I care passionately about is that the super-rich have largely disappeared. They see that it’s not much good being super-rich as the rest of the world falls to pieces. They wake up to the fact that it would be much better to live in a world that worked, so they use quite large percentages of their wealth to make that happen.

Then there’s China. There’s a very real chance it will use existing knowledge to start showing how 1.3 billion people can live in a sustainable way.

What of the power of technology? You’ve always been sceptical…
Yes, because those who enthused most refused to talk about the distribution of wealth, about democracy – they wanted us to technologise our way out of the problems. In writing this book, I spent two years doing more on technology than in the preceding 20 years. With nanotech, for example, I got to see where people should be nervous, where they could relax and where the real potential for sustainability was, such as for water purification or waste management.

How will our cities look in 2050?
Not that radically different – not least because 80 per cent of the buildings are already built. I had to persuade the book designers to stop thinking science fiction and think about the familiar. It’s quite homely, not Starship Enterprise.

Will books still exist in 2050?
One of the designers said that it was crazy to do a physical book. That upset the publishers. I said books will survive come what may. I was, however, concerned that this book should be as sustainable as possible. And it is.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Sustainable living”