Climate change, the future, and higher education: two warnings from fall 2024

What might the climate crisis mean for the world?  What impacts could it have on higher education, and how might academics respond?

As part of my continued exploration of these questions, today I’d like to draw your attention to two major reports from this month.  They are each packed with scholarship. Both call for action from the world – right now.

The first is “The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth” (Ripple and Wolf et al, BioScience, 08 October 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biae087). As the title indicates, this paper offers a top level summation of where the climate crisis now stands, backed up by research at every point.

(Research: note that this is largely scholarship produced by university faculty.  The author’s bios include home institutions such as Oregon State University, University of Potsdam, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, University of Exeter, University of Sydney, Nanjing University, Aarhus University, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.  As I keep saying, academia’s research function is one major way we contribute to learning about and responding to the crisis.)

How do things stand in the climate crisis, then?

Despite six IPCC reports, 28 COP meetings, hundreds of other reports, and tens of thousands of scientific papers, the world has made only very minor headway on climate change, in part because of stiff resistance from those benefiting financially from the current fossil-fuel based system. We are currently going in the wrong direction, and our increasing fossil fuel consumption and rising greenhouse gas emissions are driving us toward a climate catastrophe. We fear the danger of climate breakdown…

This worsening occurs on many dimensions: storms, surface temperatures, ocean acidification, unjust impact on marginalized populations, degradation of natural features, etc.  Above all humanity keeps emitting greenhouse gases, more than ever.

Worse, there are all kinds of feedback loops which are progressing dangerously, such as decreasing albedo due to ice loss which increases warming which then melts more ice… And a set of major tipping points loom ever closer, from the decay of the Thwaites glacier to the possible slowdown of the vast AMOC system.

What should be done?  The authors are clear. Humans must stop emitting greenhouse gases:

Rapidly phasing down fossil fuel use should be a top priority… Drastically cutting methane emissions can slow the near-term rate of global warming, helping to avoid tipping points and extreme climate impacts.

One way to get those human actions going is by communicating the problem and solutions.  The authors get meta towards the end of the paper, reflecting on how they should best communicate the science in that document and elsewhere:

With the increasingly undeniable effects of climate change, a dire assessment is an honest assessment. Denying the existential threat posed by climate change is becoming increasingly less plausible. The fact is that avoiding every tenth of a degree of warming is critically important.

What does this mean for higher education?  The paper is clear and direct, starting with our teaching mission:

Climate change instruction should be integrated into secondary and higher education core curriculums worldwide to raise awareness, improve climate literacy, and empower learners to take action. [emphases added]

Next, the authors request academic research into many climate fields, including geoengineering:

Research into solar geoengineering needs to focus on understanding the potential environmental, social, and geopolitical impacts, as well as assessing effectiveness and safety on both regional and global scales (Sovacool et al. 2022). In addition, interdisciplinary research is required to explore ethical, legal, and governance frameworks, along with public perception and acceptance, while emphasizing the critical importance of drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Note the interdisciplinary dimension, which goes against the specialist nature of much of academic research.

In addition to those curricular and research charges, the authors provide a list of topics which academia (and everyone else) can work on through research, teaching, and community outreach:

In a world with finite resources, unlimited growth is a perilous illusion. We need bold, transformative change: drastically reducing overconsumption and waste, especially by the affluent, stabilizing and gradually reducing the human population through empowering education and rights for girls and women, reforming food production systems to support more plant-based eating, and adopting an ecological and post-growth economics framework that ensures social justice… We also need more immediate efforts to protect, restore, or rewild ecosystems.

(Note that emphasis on educating girls and women. This is an underappreciated aspect to how higher education can help with the crisis.)

A second major report appeared this month, from the United Nations. “Emissions Gap Report 2024: No more hot air … please!” is a furious warning from the title on.  (And yes, the authors and peer reviewers are also largely academic researchers, as with the previous report.) Right out of the gate it admonishes us: “To get on a least-cost pathway for 1.5°C, emissions must fall 42 per cent by 2030, compared with 2019 levels. For 2°C, emissions must fall 28 per cent by 2030.”  Recall that limiting global warming to 1.5°C was a major international goal. And yet:

Current promises are nowhere near these levels, putting us on track for best-case global warming of 2.6°C this century and necessitating future costly and large-scale removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to bring down the overshoot. [emphases added]

Best case of 2.6: think about that.  And it could get worse. The same report gives us a spread of temperature ranges, based on different choices we could make now:

See the 3.1 degrees at a 66% chance, if we don’t change?  And just below that, a spread from 2.3 to 4.5 degrees with a 90% probability?  All of that is under the header of we keep doing what we’re doing now.  Which is increasing emissions:

Global greenhouse gas emissions set a new record of 57.1 GtCO2e in 2023, a 1.3 per cent increase from 2022 levels The increase in total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of 1.3 per cent from 2022 levels is above the average rate in the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic (2010–2019), when GHG emissions growth averaged 0.8 per cent per year.

What are the sources of those emissions?  Here’s the latest breakdown:

So despite decades of climate action, repeated international agreements, repeated national promises and corporate announcements, many demonstrations and protests, the rise of climate fiction, popular awareness… we’re still heating the planet.  We’re not just still heating the planet, but doing it even more.  With full awareness of our actions.

Now, the “we” is unevenly distributed.  The report offers this breakdown by nations and organizations:

There’s a lot to glean from this ranking, like the huge importance of Chinese actions, the excellent decrease in EU emissions, the rise of India’s, and just how little the least developed nations contribute to the crisis (while being deeply exposed to its dangers). Further, while many of these nations have pledged to change, those pledges look increasingly weak if not worthless:

Collectively, the G20 members are also still assessed to miss their NDC targets for 2030, with current policy projections exceeding NDC projections by 1 GtCO2e in 2030. Eleven G20 members are assessed to be off track to achieve their NDC targets with existing policies, and the G20 members projected to meet their NDC target based on current policies currently are those that did not strengthen, or only moderately strengthened, their target levels in their most recent NDCs. Further, collectively the NDC targets of the G20 are far from the average global percentage reductions required to align with 2°C and 1.5°C scenarios…

Those G20 nations account for about 77% of all emissions.  (If you’d like to dive into the national dimensions, check out the report’s chapter 3, which goes into detail.  Look to the countries which seem to have passed their CO2 emissions peak, for one.)

Naturally a Trump victory will knock the United States off of participation for four years, which matters given the scale of American emissions as well as our global influence.

Our slow responses as a species have several crucial short-term results. First, there is the “continued lock-in of carbon-intensive infrastructure” – i.e., we generally practice our fossil fuel habits as a civilization, making them harder to break.  Second, we have “less time available to realize the emission reductions required.”  This, we now face increased  “risks of temperature overshoot and compounds increasingly severe climate impacts, some of which are irreversible.”

What does this UN report want us to do?  One group of nations must take aggressive actions right now: “G20 members excluding the African Union must go further and faster…”  These cannot be isolated actions: “stronger international cooperation and support, including through enhanced climate finance, will be essential…”  The nature of those actions is well known, but needs repeating, it seems:

[switching power generation to] solar photovoltaic and wind energy… In forestry, reduced deforestation, increased reforestation and improved forest management present readily available low-cost options with large emission reduction potentials of about 19 and 20 per cent of the total potential in 2030 and 2035, respectively. Other important and readily available mitigation options include demand-side measures, efficiency measures, and electrification and fuel switching in the buildings, transport and industry sectors.

Chapter 6 breaks things down into categories ranging from rolling out more solar to mangrove restoration, providing interesting benchmarks.

What does the UN report have to say about higher education?  Surprisingly little, which suggests to me academia has failed to make much of an impression on this world of climate action.  There is one very precise call for professional development in a certain area: “To activate the potential for material efficiency and circularity/recycling, building codes, public procurement and regulation should all be employed, with education for architects, structural engineers and designers of all kinds.” I think we can generalize from this to other fields, from medicine to public service.

I’ll leave the last words today to those BioScience paper authors:

We must urgently reduce ecological overshoot and pursue immediate large-scale climate change mitigation and adaptation to limit near-term damage. Only through decisive action can we safeguard the natural world, avert profound human suffering, and ensure that future generations inherit the livable world they deserve. The future of humanity hangs in the balance.