Which sounds more urgent: "global warming" or "pollution blanket overheating planet"? In this actionable talk, communications strategist John Marshall explains why we need to rethink how we talk about climate change -- and offers small but mighty language adjustments to get people to more intuitively understand and care about this existential threat.
About the speaker
John Marshall · Environmental advocate, communications strategist
John Marshall is changing the way people talk about climate change so that we can better understand and act against it.
In unprecedented times like this, we often reflect on what we as humans can do to better our world. In terms of climate change, there are many ways we can make
Thanks to Robert Collins for sharing their work on Unsplash.
Newswise
— In unprecedented times like this, we often reflect on what we as
humans can do to better our world. In terms of climate change, there are
many ways we can make a difference, whether on a small or large scale,
in order to create a sustainable and healthy environment for all.
Seattle
Children’s is committed to fulfilling its mission of treating the whole
child, and with this comes the responsibility of understanding the
facts, sharing our knowledge, and developing ways to combat climate
change and the drastic impact it has on our health.
Children are
especially vulnerable to the health effects of climate change, and as an
organization, we are striving to minimize our carbon footprint and
improve the health and well-being of our patients, families, workforce
and our local and global community.
Knowing the facts
It
is scientifically evident that with global warming, the Pacific
Northwest region has been experiencing hotter days that have led to
wildfires, higher streamflow in the winter and lower streamflow in the
summer, reduced snowpack, prolonged drought, water shortages, increased
heavy rain events and sea level rise.
Severe weather, air
pollution and extreme heat are just three of the many factors that
impact our overall health. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics,
climate change poses threats to human health, safety, and security, and
children are uniquely vulnerable to these threats. Given this
knowledge, failure to take prompt, substantive action would be an act of
injustice to all children.
That’s why teaching children about climate change is crucial in building a better future for generations to come.
“We
need to communicate to our children the importance of natural life and
how we depend on natural resources, which are finite,” Dr. Markus Boos,
a climate change advocate and dermatologist at Seattle Children’s,
said. “Children are drawn to a sense of ‘fairness’ in our world which is
rooted in equity and justice, and without everyone doing their part to
take care of our natural resources, our environment and health will
suffer.”
As an example, Boos encourages parents and caregivers to share how the environment affects all of us.
“Talk
about simple things like recycling, composting, why we should choose to
walk instead of drive, and using reusable bags when we go shopping,”
Boos said. “Be purposeful and intentional and model positive behavior
that children will then follow.”
Seattle Children’s commitment
To
help mitigate the health impacts of climate change, not only do we need
to teach children about the health impacts of climate change in
general, but we must also be aware of how the healthcare sector is
contributing to and impacted by greenhouse gas emissions, and how
Seattle Children’s is working to improve its carbon footprint.
Greenhouse gas are gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
states that human activities are responsible for almost all of the
increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the last 150 years.
The largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in
the U.S. is from burning fossil fuels for electricity, heat, and
transportation.
Our carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gases that are generated by our actions.
According to this study,
the healthcare industry contributes almost 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas
emissions, and hospitals are the second most energy intensive facilities
in the country, using 2.5 times more energy per square foot than other
commercial buildings.
“Seattle Children’s has been working on
various ways to improve its energy consumption,” Boos said. “From staff
transportation incentives, to building new locations such as our second Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic
in a neighborhood accessible to those who need it, to offering
telemedicine options to help limit the traffic coming to our sites —
these are just a few ways we are helping to make a difference.”
To
cultivate a healthier environment, Seattle Children’s has made a
steadfast commitment for the organization to go carbon neutral by the
year 2025. Carbon neutrality means achieving net zero carbon dioxide
emissions by balancing carbon emissions with carbon removal (often
through carbon offsetting) or simply eliminating carbon emissions
altogether.
Along with the mission of improving the health of the
children in our community, the driving factors that constitute this
commitment include:
Environmental justice: Underserved
communities and communities of color in the U.S. are disproportionately
impacted by the health effects brought on by climate change. We are
working to decrease our greenhouse gas emissions because we care about
community health.
Regulatory requirements: The 2019 Washington state Clean Buildings bill or House Bill 1257, requires hospitals to meet ambitious energy performance targets. Decreasing energy will decrease our emissions.
Cost savings: The primary focus of our climate action plan will be energy reduction that will reduce our annual utility costs.
“Seattle
Children’s is committed to the health of all children, so pursuing a
carbon neutral goal for our organization is important as children are
one of the most vulnerable populations to the impacts of climate
change,” Russ Williams, Sr. Vice President and Chief Operating Officer
at Seattle Children’s, said. “Action to reduce our impact on climate
change aligns with our mission and our vision for community health.”
What you can do
While
tackling climate change as a whole can be an overwhelming feat, there
are many simple ways to support climate action and energy reduction.
“Alternative commuting, such as taking public transit, is one action you can take,” Colleen Groll, manager of Sustainability Programs
at Seattle Children’s, said. “There are high impact actions such as
adopting a plant based diet, buying green energy utilities, and simply
talking about the connection between climate and health with your
friends, family, neighbors.”
Moderate impact actions include,
reducing home energy use, planting a garden, eating local and organic,
and unplugging your devices.
“The power lies in us in making a
better environment for our community,” Boos said. “I’m proud to be a
part of an organization whose core value is a commitment to equity and
fostering a healthier world for all children.”
With the 2030 deadline for achieving the Sustainable Development
Goals approaching, the fight against climate change intensifies each
year, with governments pumping resources into achieving them.
One of the most critical SDGs is SDG 5, achieving gender equality
and empowering all women and girls, because it will have positive
cascading effects on the achievement of the other SDGs, including
quality education, poverty alleviation, clean energy, reduced
inequalities, good health and wellbeing, zero hunger, clean water and
sanitation, decent work and economic growth and most importantly,
climate action.
SDG5 is central to achieving all SDGs.
Image: UN Women/GenUrb
We are already seeing some of the devastating effects of climate
change, with increasing floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters.
Women are the most vulnerable in these situations, facing the maximum
risk due to their socio-economic status. With 70% living in poverty,
women are disproportionately affected by extreme weather events, loss of
agricultural productivity, destruction of life and property and so on,
all of which stem from the climate crisis.
Women also have the knowledge and understanding of what is needed
to adapt to changing environmental circumstances in order to determine
practical solutions. But women remain a largely untapped resource due to
existing biases, including restricted land rights, lack of access to
training, technology and financial resources, and limited access to
political decision making due to under representation. For practical and
effective climate change mitigation, we must unleash the knowledge and
capability of women.
To find sustainable solutions, it is critical to recognize the
important contributions of women as decision makers, caretakers,
stakeholders, experts and educators across all sectors. Greta Thunberg,
Christina Figueres and Franny Armstrong, to name a few, are already
leading the way in not only climate change advocacy but also in crafting
sustainable, long-term solutions.
What is the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact summit?
It’s an annual meeting featuring top examples of public-private
cooperation and Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies being used to
develop the sustainable development agenda.
It runs alongside the United Nations General Assembly, which this
year features a one-day climate summit. This is timely given rising
public fears – and citizen action – over weather conditions, pollution,
ocean health and dwindling wildlife. It also reflects the understanding
of the growing business case for action.
The UN’s Strategic Development Goals and the Paris Agreement
provide the architecture for resolving many of these challenges. But to
achieve this, we need to change the patterns of production, operation
and consumption.
The World Economic Forum’s work is key, with the summit offering
the opportunity to debate, discuss and engage on these issues at a
global policy level.
According to McKinsey,
in a “full potential” scenario in which women play an identical role in
labour markets to men, as much as $28 trillion, or 26%, could be added
to global annual GDP by 2025. This is more than enough to bridge the
climate finance gap needed to fund the battle against climate change,
which stands at €530 billion ($585 billion) per year by 2020 and €810
billion ($894 billion) by 2030. Just increasing the participation of
women in the labour force will sufficiently increase the world's GDP for
financing sustainable development.
One of the most potent tools for increasing the effectiveness of
women in climate change mitigation is renewable energy, which can help
transform the lives of women by improving their health, providing them
with better livelihood prospects, improving their education
opportunities and more. In fact, it offers women many entrepreneurial
avenues for further deployment of renewable energy, which in turn
mitigates carbon emissions.
And rural women will be the primary beneficiaries. Looking at examples such as Solar Sister
in Africa, renewable energy increases women’s relevance in society,
shields them from harmful health effects of indoor pollution (through
burning of biomass) and makes them agents of climate change mitigation
through their involvement in renewable energy deployment.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2013
found “a nation’s competitiveness in the long term depends
significantly on whether and how it educates and utilizes its women” and
whether they have “the same rights, responsibilities and opportunities
as men.”
As elucidated by a position paper by UN Women in 2015, “women’s
empowerment and gender equality have a catalytic effect on the
achievement of human development, good governance, sustained peace, and
harmonious dynamics between the environment and human populations”.
What is the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact summit?
It’s an annual meeting featuring top examples of public-private
cooperation and Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies being used to
develop the sustainable development agenda.
It runs alongside the United Nations General Assembly, which this
year features a one-day climate summit. This is timely given rising
public fears – and citizen action – over weather conditions, pollution,
ocean health and dwindling wildlife. It also reflects the understanding
of the growing business case for action.
The UN’s Strategic Development Goals and the Paris Agreement
provide the architecture for resolving many of these challenges. But to
achieve this, we need to change the patterns of production, operation
and consumption.
The World Economic Forum’s work is key, with the summit offering
the opportunity to debate, discuss and engage on these issues at a
global policy level.
At the national and sub-national level, effective policies,
projects and programmes for gender equality must be crafted to ensure
equal space and resources for women and men to participate in climate
change decision making. There must be investments in multi-stakeholder,
multi-sectoral and participatory Climate Change Gender Action Plans to
integrate gender-related concerns and build on the capabilities, unique
knowledge and perspectives of women, to not only build their climate
resilience but also make them active agents of mitigation. Climate
finance should be made available to men and to women to share the mutual
benefits, rather than exacerbating existing inequities.
The endeavour to protect the Earth and survive in the
Anthropocene stage requires a collective effort, which, as the Agenda
2030 motto says, cannot “leave anyone behind”. Gender equality is a
prerequisite, and the new world order must include women leading the
way, capitalizing on their caregiving, educating and nurturing selves.
As Neri Oxman said: “It demands of us for the first time, that we
mother, nature.”
"For all that's ever been said about climate change, we haven't heard nearly enough about the psychological impacts of living in a warming world," says science writer Britt Wray. In this quick talk, she explores how climate change is threatening our well-being -- mental, social and spiritual -- and offers a starting point for what we can do about it.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page
About the speaker
Britt Wray · Science storyteller, author, broadcaster
Britt Wray's work is about life and what we make of it: past, present and future.
Sky
Dominguez and Joachim Jansen, part of an international team led by Ohio
State University's Virginia Rich, process samples from a peat core in
Arctic Sweden.
Credit: Scott Saleska
An
aerial view of the field site in Arctic Sweden, where researchers
uncovered thousands of previously unrecognized microbes that could
contribute to the speed of climate change.
Credit: Nicole Raab
Sky
Dominguez and Joachim Jansen, part of an international team led by Ohio
State University's Virginia Rich, process samples from a peat core in
Arctic Sweden.
Credit: Scott Saleska
An
aerial view of the field site in Arctic Sweden, where researchers
uncovered thousands of previously unrecognized microbes that could
contribute to the speed of climate change.
Newswise — COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new understanding of the
microbes and viruses in the thawing permafrost in Sweden may help
scientists better predict the pace of climate change.
Microbes
have significant influence over global warming, primarily through the
production of – or consumption of – methane, and new details about these
microscopic beings’ genetics is now available, thanks to a trio of
studies from a project co-led by researchers at The Ohio State
University.
The research appears in Nature, Nature Microbiology and ISME Journal.
“Because
of global climate change, huge amounts of permafrost are rapidly
warming. To microbes, they’re like freezers full of juicy chicken
dinners that are thawing out,” said Virginia Rich, an assistant professor of microbiology at Ohio State and study author.
“In
many cases, microbes take advantage of this situation to chew up what’s
in the permafrost and breathe out methane. That methane really packs an
environmental wallop, with 33 times the climate warming power of carbon
dioxide.”
Many of these bacterial “consumers” and the viruses
that influence them have been identified for the first time in these
studies.
While scientists have a clear understanding of the
dangers of thawing permafrost for releasing methane, they haven’t had a
lot of details on the ins and outs of these microbial communities and
their contribution to the process.
“The problem is, we don’t
know all the microbes involved and how they will respond to climate
change as the conditions get warmer and wetter, and to do a better job
at predicting what will happen in the coming decades we need more
information about the key players,” Rich said. Matt Sullivan, a professor of microbiology at Ohio State
and senior author on the virus study, said the research is also
important because it contributes a great deal to the general
understanding of what is happening in soil.
“While we’ve learned a
lot about ocean viruses in recent decades, we know next to nothing
about soil viruses,” he said. “This work’s viruses are so novel that
they have doubled the total known viruses in the world.”
The
multinational study was conducted in the portion of Sweden in the Arctic
circle, one of the best places in the world to study thawing permafrost
because of the rapid changes happening there and because of
long-standing and well-documented scientific work in the area, Rich
said.
A team of researchers from 10 organizations with expertise
in a variety of areas including microbiology, geochemistry and climate
modeling are working together in the IsoGenie Project, co-led by Ohio State’s Rich,
to figure out how they can better predict future climate change based
on improved understanding of the connections between microbes and
geochemistry.
In these studies, they recovered more than 1,500
microbial genomes in the soil, which was 100 times what was available
previously for these habitats. They also found more than 1,900 new viral
populations, where none had been previously identified. A genome is the
complete set of genes present in an organism.
The researchers were able to link more than a third of the viruses to the microbes they impact.
“Now, we have a roadmap from these genomes to be able to understand the roles they play in these communities,” Sullivan said.
By looking at the genomes of the microbes, the team was able to figure out what capabilities they have.
“It’s
like now we have not only their fingerprints but also their resumes, to
know both who they are and what they are capable of. The next step is
figuring out more of what they’re actually actively doing out in the
field,” Rich said.
This is important for several reasons, she said.
It
will enable climate scientists to better estimate the speed of climate
change, giving humans a clearer timetable for response. The study of
these rapidly changing habitats also helps the public better appreciate
the realities of climate change, Rich said. Furthermore, there might be
opportunities for mitigating those effects, including the potential to
“fertilize” areas of permafrost to encourage environmentally protective
microbial activity, she said.
Not everything about the microbial
communities in the permafrost is bad news. Some, called methanotrophs,
consume methane in the soil before it gets to the air, which is good for
the environment.
“As the conditions get warmer and wetter microbes are going to be changing, and some that eat methane may rise up,” Rich said.
Other
researchers who worked on these studies at Ohio State are Joanne
Emerson, Simon Roux, Jennifer Brum, Benjamin Bolduc, Ho Bin Jang,
Suzanne Hodgkins, Lindsey Solden, Gareth Trubl, Ahmed Zayed and Kelly
Wrighton.
The study was supported by the U.S. Department of
Energy, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the National Science
Foundation.
We need to take note of this, people have ignored Climate Change for too long........................
Before the Flood
Whether you believe man-made climate change is real or not, I urge
you to lay your judgments aside for an hour-and-a-half and watch this
film. A fact that cannot be denied is that our world has become
increasingly and devastatingly toxic, and these toxins are damaging our
ecosystem, thereby placing the survival of mankind at risk.
We are eroding soils, polluting water, draining aquifers and
contaminating our air. Any one of these issues progressing will have
devastating consequences, and at our current pace we have roughly 50
years before time will run out. Some instances of pollution, such as the
plastic now choking our oceans, or agricultural runoff contaminating
our fresh water supplies, highlight serious damage that we can and must
stop.
The decimation of forests, be it for the purpose of tar sands
operations or paper milling or building cities and suburbs, also has an
impact on the Earth. Whether man-made CO2 is instrumental in climate
change or not, what's clear is that our Earth is in peril, and it's up
to all of us, corporations included, to reassess our impact on the world
at large.
2015
has been declared the International Year of Soils, with the objective
to achieve full recognition of the prominent contributions of soils to
food security and climate change adaptation
Carbon
sequestration in soils can help regenerate soils, increase crop yields,
reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, limit fresh water usage,
reduce use of agricultural chemicals, and reduce pollution
About
40 percent of agricultural soils around the globe is currently
classified as degraded or seriously degraded; the world only has about
60 years’ worth of topsoil left
