UN Secretary-General António Guterres kicked off this year’s COP25 in Madrid this morning with sobering yet inspiring opening remarks designed to galvanize action at the conference and around the world to insure the global temperature does not rise by more than 1.5%.
Millions throughout the world – especially young people – are calling on leaders from all sectors to do more, much more, to address the climate emergency we face.
They know we need to get on the right path today, not tomorrow.
That means important decisions must be made now.
COP25 is our opportunity.
Dear Delegates,
Before I focus on what we need to do at this session, let me step back to give a sense of perspective to our deliberations.
The latest, just-released data from the World Meteorological Organization show that levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached another new record high.
Global average levels of carbon dioxide reached 407.8 parts per million in 2018.
And I remember, not long ago, 400 parts per million was seen as an unthinkable tipping point. We are well over it. (Link to the entire text.)
We have to choose between the path of surrender - letting the climate emergency jeopardize everyone on this planet - or the path of hope, sustainable solutions & successful UN Secretary-General António Guterres
So what can you do over the next few weeks as negotiators at the UNFCCC gather with hopes of incentivizing more radical action from member organizations? How about getting out your shovel and planting a tree? Recent research reports that 2/3 of emissions from human activities could be removed from the atmosphere if there was a global effort to plant up to a trillion trees.
“This new quantitative evaluation shows [forest] restoration isn’t just one of our climate change solutions, it is overwhelmingly the top one,” said Prof Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, who led the research. “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.”
Crowther emphasised that it remains vital to reverse the current trends of rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and forest destruction, and bring them down to zero. He said this is needed to stop the climate crisis becoming even worse and because the forest restoration envisaged would take 50-100 years to have its full effect of removing 200bn tonnes of carbon.
“There’s 400 gigatons [of CO2 stored] now in the 3 trillion trees,” Crowther said. “If you were to scale that up by another trillion trees, that’s in the order of hundreds of gigatons captured from the atmosphere – at least 10 years of anthropogenic emissions completely wiped out.”In the US, the areas in the south and the east are the most promising for massive tree planting.
Virtually all the pathways laid out by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to reach the targets in the Paris agreement require huge deployment of so-called negative emissions technologies (NETs) in the second half of the century. The IPCC, recognizing that efforts to sufficiently scale back GHGs will not be enough, has calculated that by 2050, methods to capture and store 12bn tonnes of CO2 annually will need to be implemented. That amount equals approximately a third of all present global emissions.