Following a year in which the UK parliament declared an environment and climate emergency, a leading climate expert says that we are at the tipping point of being able to take the action needed in order to prevent irreversible damage to the planet.
“We’re teetering on the edge of actually getting to grips with it or it running away with us and we risk facing climate breakdown,” says Gareth Redmond-King, WWF’s head of climate change. “One of the most crucial things at the moment is making that clear to as many people as possible, helping people to understand the scale of the threat and the risk and also that we know how to tackle it.”
Redmond-King explains that the Paris Agreement – signed in 2015 by 195 leading countries in a bid to avoid dangerous levels of climate change – stipulates that there be a global action plan in order to limit global heating to well below 2C, with efforts being made to keep within 1.5C. If this isn’t achieved – if countries don’t commit to enough ambition in their plans for delivering on the Paris Agreement – it could lead to lasting damage to the planet.
“Beyond 2C [temperature rise] some of the impacts like the loss of species, the loss of sea ice, the loss of corals and the impact of rising sea levels start to become irreversible,” he says. Noting that currently we are heading for an increase of more than 3C, Redmond-King says this could lead to “even more extreme weather across the globe, as well as an actual mass extinction of species and areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable. However, we do have the solutions to stop a climate breakdown, and must act now – from making our energy system greener, to restoring nature around the world and ensuring the food we eat isn’t driving deforestation.”
The conversations around these changes are evolving, he says. “We’re finally moving away from a heatwave being greeted with, ‘phew what a scorcher’ headlines and pictures of people dancing in fountains to actual headlines about the damage this is causing, the threat this is indicating and what the climate and nature crisis actually means.
“What’s hugely encouraging, is that in many countries, people are getting it. There are lots of things that divide us here in the UK at the moment but action on climate and nature is not one of them,” he says. “There’s an overwhelming majority for action on climate – two-thirds of people believe this is a genuine crisis and want to see governments take action.”
But in order to be effective, change must be seeded out across the government, businesses and individuals, says Redmond-King: “One of the biggest impacts that we have in our day-to-day lives is how we travel, using petrol and diesel cars where we could use other transport, or even using any form of motorised transport where we could walk or cycle,” he says, adding: “Flying is very high impact and the people who fly a lot need to think about flying less. We’re not talking about people who have one holiday every year or every couple of years; we’re talking about the people who fly several times a month.
“The energy that heats and powers our homes is another very powerful way in which we can make change. It’s easy and can often save you a lot of money as well.” Redmond-King says that installing a smart meter can also help in the overall fight to lower emissions. “The benefit of everyone in the UK having a smart meter is to the system itself,” he says. “We’re part-way to decarbonising our electricity grid in the UK – that’s where we’ve had the most success in cutting emissions over recent years – but as we electrify more of our power system then we need to keep on decarbonising our power and doing it in a much smarter way.
“It’s not just about it all being generated from low-carbon sources,” he says, “it’s also about when and how we use our power. Smart systems help to determine when and how we charge electric cars, and when and how we turn appliances on and off in our homes and – a much bigger impact – when and how we turn appliances on and off in businesses. All of those things become much more manageable and reliable and have much bigger scope when the system is entirely smart.”
Part of Britain’s commitment to creating a more sustainable, low-carbon future includes making our energy network “smarter” – implementing digital tech to make our energy system more responsive to increased demand and variable wind speed. By collecting data on our energy use through smart meters, our network can better understand, plan for and balance out peaks and troughs in demand, making it easier to integrate renewable energy sources.
This article was paid for by Smart Energy GB, a government-backed organisation tasked with informing Great Britain about the smart meter rollout.
