078 SUSTAINABILITY
Waking up to the bigger picture Co-founder of Forum for the Future, former director of Friends of the Earth and co-chair of the Green Party, Jonathon Porritt is a leading authority on sustainable development. FX spoke to him about the very real challenges we face at the moment
‘We are beginning to see ways in which new technology can accelerate our way out of this carbon- intensive lifestyle, and to do so with a level of speed and urgency that no one thought possible’
COP26 – it feels like a pivotal moment. What’s your hope for the kind of commitments and cooperation that are necessary?
Not good at the moment frankly. Te signals are very worrying right now. A lot of countries have failed to produce their revised emission reduction plans. Te quality of leadership coming from the UK government in the run up has been very poor indeed. None of the heavy lifting that has to go into these big international conferences has really been done.
In the meantime, the science – the evidence – keeps materialising in front of our astonished eyes as these extreme climate events become more frequent and more extreme. So there is a really disturbing contrast between what is happening in the big wide world versus what is not happening in terms of the political response.
How likely are the 2050 aims in your opinion? Are governments in their current form capable of delivering? I’m not hopeful on this. Everyone has settled on this notion of ‘net zero by 2050’, which means that by 2050, the entire global economy will have reduced emissions of greenhouse gases as much as it possibly can, and then we will have sequestered the equivalent amount of greenhouse gases by absorbing CO2
into terrestrial systems – into forests, wetlands etc. Tat’s the big game plan.
Now, even if we were to do that – and currently we’re way off track – it still wouldn’t guarantee a stable climate for humankind in the second half of this century. Te prospects for a stable climate depend on us seeing no more than a 1.5°C increase in global temperatures by the end of the century, or at the very, very worst, no more than a 2°C increase. Of course, we’re already at a 1.1°C increase since the start of the Industrial Revolution, so you can see that all of these windows of opportunity are getting smaller and smaller, and that’s what causes an awful lot of climate scientists now to be very concerned about the lack of focus and the lack of urgency on the part of our politicians globally.
Neither India nor China has produced an updated emissions plan ahead of COP26, and nor has the US. In terms of percentage of global emissions, these are absolutely crucial countries.
One of the goals for Forum for the Future is to ‘build new narratives about the risks of climate change’. Do you sense that the narrative has changed in recent years, not least with the increasingly flow of extreme weather for example? I think people are much more aware of the degree to which this is a ‘present’ danger, rather than a future danger. Te
number of people now whose lives have been devastated by climate-induced weather shocks is growing every year, and as soon as you get caught up in this personally, you realise that when politicians talk about this as something we have to do for the future, in reality they are way off track because it is impacting on people’s lives today. Te narratives around that are narratives of real pain and loss, going on in rich world and poor world countries right now. On the other hand, we are beginning to see ways in which new technology can accelerate our way out of this carbon-intensive lifestyle, and to do so with a level of speed and urgency that no one thought possible. We’re already seeing the accelerated take-up of renewable technologies all around the world to an astonishing degree, and that is because they are – in economic terms – outperforming other sources of energy in almost all markets. So wind and solar can compete on their own terms with other sources such as coal or gas.
If we wanted to press the emergency button as it were – and remember, all of the politicians are always happy to sign up to emergency climate declarations to keep critics off their backs – and we responded to the climate emergency with the same degree of urgency and focus with which we
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