Time for a change: corporate social responsibility
In December 2015, 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, resolving to take collective action to halt the global temperature rise this century to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Beyond this threshold, it is agreed, the Earth’s climate will descend into dangerous, irreversible levels.
The International Cryosphere Climate Initiative reported in 2015 that the Arctic, which has a significant role in regulating the atmosphere, is at risk of irreversible damage and that the temperature on Earth has passed, or is close to passing, thresholds that will kick certain processes into action. Once begun, these processes cannot be stopped, with the Initiative adding that even if temperature rise is halted now, there is no mechanism to stop sea-level rise from melting glaciers and ice sheets, and expansion of warming waters for the next 200 years.
The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change corroborates that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as other parts of the Earth. Coupled with ongoing warming from a growing global population’s activities, the ability of the Earth’s systems such as biodiversity to maintain equilibrium and curb negative effects is severely threatened. A loss of biodiversity because of agriculture, livestock farming, and deforestation removes the very systems needed to stabilise warming.
With atmospheric greenhouse gases at an all-time high, rapid melting of polar ice caps in the Arctic, large ice sheets carving off in the Antarctic, vast deforestation, rising sea levels, biodiversity loss, increasing air, water and land pollution, and each of the past 16 years recorded as the hottest years since record-keeping began, the distant threat of climate change is now a dominant reality offering unprecedented risks and challenges.
In this changing landscape where the Earth’s systems are pushed by the current global population of 7.5 billion, the projected rise to 8.5 billion in 2030 and 9.5 billion by 2050 will put further pressure on the world’s natural systems and finite resources. While the forecast population growth and projected ‘middle class’ of three billion people by 2030 present immense economic opportunities for rapid expansion of consumption-driven markets, the uneasy truth is that the Earth’s systems are unable to cope, while further accelerated consumption has serious ramifications for the planet’s climate upon which we depend.
