Daily Times

On September 23, the UN Climate Summit in New York displayed a definite rise in the tempo of the global struggle against climate change. People around the world held a week of climate protests alongside the summit; beginning with the largest global climate marches ever on display in the run-up to the summit on September 20. As part of the global fervour, the first-ever climate marches were held in Pakistan the same day. Alarm over climate change has been stoked in recent years by frequent occurrences of natural disasters in the most polluting countries on earth. Additionally, a UN report in 2018 created urgency by predicting that the world has until 2030 to stop climate change from reaching a point where it will inevitably lead to disastrous consequences.

2019 has, thus, become the year the world is waking up to climate change. It is a pivotal development in the fight to save the climate. In the last decade, we have made a lot of progress in getting countries to pay attention, including Pakistan. Pakistani environmental journalist, Rina Saeed Khan, noted that her report on the Copenhagen Climate Summit of 2009 made the last page of a newspaper in Pakistan because, as the editor said, “There are more important things happening in the country.” The Climate March that took place in Pakistan, this September, was carried on the front page of the same newspaper.

The question is: where do we go from here?

The whole point of today’s climate protest campaign is to apply pressure on governments the world over to take meaningful action on climate change. Since 1992 in Rio, world leaders have kept meeting and kept failing to reach agreement on emissions reductions, most notably at Copenhagen. They succeeded at the Paris Summit of 2015 but have failed to act on their agreement since. Millions of climate activists are now fed up and are fighting hard to end this political lethargy, garnering irreversible momentum in the process.

There is, however, a void in the climate campaign that needs to be filled as we move onto the next phase in climate campaign. The climate movement has hitherto been confined to calling for ‘meaningful action’ but the guidance it provides for action is far from sufficient. For the world to act, it has to know what can be done. We need to find the right solutions. Yet, millions of people are being mobilised only for pushing the statesmen to end their inaction. Activists give scant thought to developing new solutions to the climate change crisis.

Climate activists unanimously agree that the main aim is to limit humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions to halt global warming, but figuring out how to achieve this is a monumental task. Some activists propose plans like America’s Green New Deal. Lead campaigner Greta Thunberg, on the other hand, talks of little else besides heeding scientists on the threat climate change poses. Many of her fellow activists also have the same attitude. They seem to want to leave it to politicians to decide how to fix climate change.

The problem is that the issue is too enormous for politicians to handle it by themselves.

Governments are tarrying on climate action because the solutions on hand are too difficult to work with. Finding a cure for climate change has proven to be an enormous puzzle. We, therefore, have to devote significant time to further developing innovative climate solutions. The climate campaign has hitherto focused its energy on pressuring the world to tackle climate change through protest, not on helping out with ideas on how climate change can be tackled. Greta Thunberg implies that the work of the scientists is already done and now it is up to the politicians to play their part, whereas realistically speaking, the scientists have yet to discover how to save the world from climate change.

Curricula in physical and social sciences need to be applied to the study of the environment and climate change

The climate movement has mainly been led by the youth, who expended time and the energy to push world leaders. But for real progress to be made, scientists, intellectuals, and professionals in myriad fields have to get busy in creating practical solutions. Those seeking professional training in a variety of fields must apply their expertise to fighting climate change.

The scope of the climate issue is vast. The scope of the knowledge required for tackling the issue is equally vast. We have to look at technology and engineering to find out how to make machines pollute less, social and political science to find out how to make the people and the decision-makers responsive to climate change, economics to find out how the world economy can be restructured to be more climate-friendly, biology to find out how photosynthetic organisms can be made to sequester carbon dioxide and how agriculture can become more sustainable, geology to find out how carbon dioxide can be sealed away in stone, etc.

It is vital to improving the global education system to serve this aim. Curricula the world over, in physical and social sciences, needs to be applied to the study of the environment and climate change. The climate change issue should be taught across various subjects, like physics, chemistry, biology, earth sciences, economics, social studies, etc. In the long-run, staying in school, not skipping it, will equip youth with knowledge to halt climate change.

The young activists have succeeded in waking the world up to the threat climate change poses. Our next struggle is to make the world think about how to tackle the threat. Fighting climate change will be a huge challenge. If we are to save humanity from slipping rudderlessly into the catastrophe that is climate change, we must embark on a voyage of discovery. The next step in the climate movement is for the professionals to come forth with prescriptions and for the education system to accommodate R&D on climate change across various disciplines taught in academic institutions.

The writer is an environmental journalist and director at Pakistan’s People-Led Disaster Management