‘We must remember that impossible is not a fact, it’s an attitude’, six climate change experts including former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, write in an article in scientific magazine Nature. Hence, ‘encourage optimism’ is one of the three practical steps they propose to bend the greenhouse-gas emissions curve downwards by 2020.
Attacking climate change and its consequences with optimism and a positive attitude is exactly what we want to achieve with the WDCD Climate Action Challenge. The challenge calls upon the creative community to come up with ground breaking solutions to adapt to climate change.
The authors of the Nature-article state that in order to reach the ambitious 2015 Paris climate agreement target of keeping temperature rise well below 2 °C, greenhouse gas emissions have to start to decrease by 2020.
Emissions stayed flat
We’re on the good way, the authors say: ‘Greenhouse-gas emissions are already decoupling from production and consumption. For the past three years, worldwide CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have stayed flat, while the global economy and the gross domestic product (GDP) of major developed and developing nations have grown by at least 3.1% per year.’
But keeping emissions flat is not enough, reason why the authors launched Mission 2020, a collaborative campaign to raise ambition and action across key sectors get greenhouse-gas emissions going down by 2020. For this they suggest the introduction of a ‘carbon law’ that halves emissions every decade. Such a simple target could work for individuals, companies and countries alike. In this beautifully made video Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, one of the initiators, explains the principle.