You, me and the planet – putting sustainable lifestyles back in the game

But it was also true.

I do care if Miami is under water in 100 years time. I care because clearly if that happens we will have failed in our immediate mission: to drop greenhouse gas emissions right now, and to taper them off to net zero as fast as possible. Also we will have failed humanity, those on earth now and those future generations still to be born.

Indeed this level of global heating, leads many to suggest (quite reasonably) that the 1.5 degree target (above the pre-industrial era surface temperature) mandated by international climate treaties has now gone. We will soon cross that threshold, and incur the ecological penalties that come with a 1.5 degree rise. But these are largely felt in non OECD countries and by non human species. So if you’re determined only to act when Miami is sinking, that may take a little longer. But to me, it’s not a sensible, nor morally defensible metric.

So what’s a good plan of action? Well the first thing to say is that every part of a degree matters and must be fought for. Clearly the scale and depth of the planetary crisis requires action from every different quarter. Fortunately this is something that is understood by Quilter Cheviot, who established a climate fund 12 years ago, well before the ‘birth’ of green finance at the Paris Climate Summit in 2015. But the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s report concluded that current efforts to mitigate (reduce) emissions are likely not enough to prevent the most devastating impacts of climate change on humans and other life on Earth. We must go further and faster. Obama’s go-to climate scientist, John Holdren puts it this way:

To mobilise action on a huge scale requires massive system shift, and this obviously needs to be financed. This is as true of shifting from fossil fuels to renewables and electrification as it is of the shift from a linear economy to a circular economy – so changing from the use goods and services from natural resources extracted from the Earth with a one way ticket to incineration or landfill to one where goods and services are predominantly circular and keep resources and energy in constant flow. To the entrepreneurially minded, these giant transitions offer up incredible opportunity to remake, redesign and finance new systems. To them, where others might see constraints around Planetary Boundaries (a way of accounting for the resources provided by the biosphere and what proportion of them can be regenerated to prevent overreaching, this concept is beautifully explained in the Netflix Documentary Chasing Boundaries), they see an opportunity to design-out the pitfalls. But to the fearful, change on this scale can seem as out of reach as a science fiction plotline. They may find it hard to visualise how such a system would ever work or what it would look like. We need to help them.

I predict this will get easier. For a long while the environmental movement itself has held non specialists (what we might also term ‘normal people’) at arms length. The theory goes that individual actions and responses are irrelevant because it is all about shifting the system. To me this has never made much sense. Individual carbon footprints and resource use in industrialised nations are huge; the UK average carbon footprint is about 10 tonnes CO2 per person per year, double the world average and hasn’t shifted since 1990. To cut here and encourage decarbonisation in lifestyles and households makes a lot of sense to me.

Besides, individual action on energy, food waste, plastics, whatever it might be, represents a point of engagement and is often the start of deeper action. Arguably it is by trying to figure out what should go in your recycling that alerts you to the fact that all of this packaging (40% of plastic in the UK is single use packaging) is made from oil and has no end destination; it has been put out on the market without a plan for its capture and disposal. Once the penny drops, you begin to make different decisions. This too is a question of opportunity. From changing your pension (according to the Make My Money Matter campaign this is 26 times more effective at cutting carbon than shifting your diet to a predominantly plant-based one) to insulating your loft, there are scores of opportunities to take the heat out of our impactful lifestyles.

Increasingly there is an opportunity to boost individual action, laddering it up into community or collective action. Think of the opportunity here too! For example small scale community power generation could power 2.2 million homes across the UK by 2030, and cut £300 million from household energy bills. Our twenty two million private gardens across the country could become wildlife havens, saving vital species including bees that pollinate our food. In my opinion, individual footprints (you can use the WWF app, downloadable from the app store or wwf.org.uk to measure and monitor yours) and actions have been much maligned and misunderstood.

For those of us who had long argued that we need to fight for the hearts and minds of every individual and communicate change on an individual as well as system level, it was an ‘hallelujah!’ moment.

A broadening of scope and audience will also lead to a wider array of solutions and advice. Green decisions won’t seem so apart from the mainstream, because they will become mainstream. Not least, because they are the only logical game in town. When we quibble about taking action and whether it’s worth the upheaval of massive change, it’s worth noting that there will be no opportunities at all on a dead planet. But there’s also an uplifting flipside too.

Tomorrow’s generation wouldn’t have to worry about climate change, because we will have done the work and sorted it. That’s the legacy I’d like to leave, rather than a sunken Miami.