climate change

            

Climate change is not only hitting close to home – it’s knocking on our front door and demanding to come in. But we’re not going to let that happen.

We’re going to make an educated guess here. When we talk about who climate change affects, we’re guessing your first thought isn’t me. Or your friends and family today.

You’re not alone. If you’re like most people, you maybe imagine your grandchildren or even great-grandchildren having to deal with record heatwaves. Or people far away struggling in the face of rising seas.

But the (rather inconvenient) truth is that the climate crisis is already affecting most of us right here and right now. From the second we wake up in the morning, to the minute we doze off at night. And we have to do something about it.

We all know that global temperatures are rising – and we know why. For centuries, humans have been burning fossil fuels to power their lives. This process releases additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping heat that would escape into space otherwise.The planet has already warmed 1 degree Celsius and temperatures could rise even more – significantly changing life as we know it.

             

Climate change is striking harder and more rapidly than many expected, according to the World Economic Forum. The last five years (2015-2019) were the warmest on record, and natural disasters are becoming more intense and more frequent. Last year,

we witnessed unprecedented weather — heat and cold waves, heavy rainfall and floods, tropical cyclones, severe storms, drought and wildfires — throughout the world. Global temperatures are on track to increase by at least 3 degrees Celsius toward the end of the century — twice what climate experts have warned is the limit to avoid the most severe economic, social and environmental consequences.

The year 2019 was the year of “climate emergency” declarations. A rapidly changing climate drove hundreds of governments — national and local — around the world to declare states of emergency. Today, about 800 million people live in places that have declared climate emergency — in fact, one in ten people on the planet.Climate-related impacts on health include heat-related illness and death; injury and loss of life associated with severe storms and flooding; occurrences of vector-borne and water-borne diseases; exacerbation of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases through air pollution; and stress and mental trauma from displacement as well as loss of livelihoods and property.

 

By Shubham Sharma.