How Big Is Your Drop in the Ocean?
Why and how the pandemic is the perfect time to make permanent lifestyle changes in the fight against climate change.
Improving your mental health through having a shared purpose and focus away from what’s happening around us, whilst helping to quite literally save our planet; how does that sound? If you’ve got this far; please read on, this article will, I hope, help to change the way you think, and the way you act. It will give you purpose, and help to re-focus some of your stresses and anxiety away from what’s happening all around us, improving your mental health whilst at the same time having a monumental impact on the world around us.
You don’t even have to open your eyes to be affected by it; that “c-word” we’re all so sick of; Coronavirus or “COVID-19” or its most recent variants is dominating our lives. So many of us have had their lives changed through endless cycles of lockdowns, economic uncertainty, changes in ways of working, job losses, and much more.
One crucial thing seems to have dropped far lower down political, social and economic agendas, and it’s far greater than COVID-19. It will permanently and irreversibly change our lives. Unlike COVID-19 — there will be no vaccine that will solve this issue. It will not discriminate by age, gender, ethnicity or other.
“The future of humanity and indeed, all life on earth, now depends on us. Right now we are facing a man-made disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change. If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilization and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon” — David Attenborough, October 2020
Forget the “C-word”; the “double C word” will become our lives — we talk about it, but it barely makes it onto our news feeds these days. We are focussed on a pandemic that has and is causing suffering, but only in a comparatively short-term until a vaccine is rolled out. With each day that we prioritise the pandemic, we accelerate towards an irreversible climate catastrophe faster. COVID-19 is currently a dangerous distraction from the absolutely necessary steps to save our planet, and ultimately the human race in our own lifetimes.
As a quick reminder: The world must halve its emissions by 2030, and reach net-zero by 2050 in order to reach the goal of a cap of 1.5°C increase in global temperatures. 126 countries equating to 51% of global greenhouse gas emissions have adopted, or are considering a net-zero pledge — even China by 2060. However, the pandemic has taken our attention, and of our governments away from taking action on many of these changes. This is a great time to move your focus from stress of the pandemic, and create an opportunity to change the way we live to save our planet.
You and I must take action. Today.
By focussing your energy and attention on ways to really make long lasting changes in your life that will stick beyond the pandemic we can move our energies away from pandemic-related stress, and focus them to an area of impact that will ultimately help to prevent the kind of social and economic unrest we’re seeing happening through “CC”. Implement the actions below into your lives and between us we can save millions of tonnes of CO2 per year increasing the size of your drop in the ocean. You may feel like one person doesn’t make a difference, but it does collectively.
1. Travel less (permanently) and take public transport when you must travel. Resist that urge to get on a plane post-pandemic!
2. Eat a plant-based diet, reducing or cutting out your meat intake (meat substitutes are actually really great!)
3. Invest (if you can) into sustainable projects and SDG bonds.
4. Plant a tree! This is rewarding, fun, and has a huge impact (One tree can sequester up to 150kg of CO2 per year)
5. Wash on 30c and hang your clothes out to dry. A load of laundry washed at 60c and then in a drier produces 3.3kg of CO2 vs just 0.6kg for the same load at 30c and air dried.
6. Raise awareness. Put pressure on our governments to focus the action onto what really matters. Write, create polls, whatever you can do.
7. Educate yourself on climate change, and campaign for education for all. Stemming population growth is crucial.
8. Stop using disposable items; and boycott companies and products that use them.
9. Download an app to track your climate impact. I guarantee it will shock you (and probably scare you!)
10. Recycle and reuse. No more excuses. No laziness.
“If we fail to meet these goals, the disruption to economies, societies and people caused by COVID-19 will pale in comparison to what the climate crisis holds in store.” — Secretary General Antonio Guterres
This may all seem a very long way away with the barrage of pandemic information. COVID-19 and its impact has become our lives, but it’s time to use this as an opportunity to realise a warning. Our lives will be far, far worse than they are now, and there will be no vaccine, no hand gel or face mask that will be able to protect us. Our forests are burning at astonishing rates with wildfires from Australia to California. The Nordics and Baltic regions are unnaturally warm for January and large parts of the Ukraine in January are wet, and several degrees warmer than even a few years ago.
We simply do not have time. We must act right now. I really challenge each and every one of you to sit down today, make a plan of how you can implement these permanent changes in your life. What can you do? Any investment of time and effort now will pay back in many multitudes if we all do this together. But we need your help.
Finally, the most important part! Please share this article. Make a difference and make your voice heard.
