Prioritising environmental action may feel like one task too many. Unfortunately the climate crisis isn’t a remote event but a reality we are already seeing in extreme storms and temperatures, mass displacement and heartbreaking loss around the world. The time for change is now. And the sooner we act, the less we lose.
Global warming is cause climate change. Rising temperatures are causing more extreme and destructive typhoons, hurricanes, floods, heatwaves, droughts and wildfires. These extreme conditions are destroying homes and agriculture, spreading disease and preventing people from accessing clean water.
On 21 March 2023, an IPCC report gave a clear, final warning – we must act now to limit the damage, loss and death that global warming will cause.
The outlook is grim, but most importantly we can improve it. Everyone’s actions can make a difference and save more of our future – save more land from sea or desert, more homes from floods and fires, more lives from hunger and disaster.
But is it really for UK ELT, a sector of small and medium businesses, to take on this huge, global problem? If you are not convinced, please read: Why should you care?
Business as usual = disaster
So if you respond well to a deadline, this is about as hard as they come.
We are already seeing more extreme weather, water scarcity, forest fires, floods and heatwaves, we keep breaking temperature records and adding more names to the extinction list, and there is only more to come. 1.5°C increase would cause irreversible damage to our ecosystems and the habitability of our planet, and we are on a trajectory for 2.7°C.
In the world we are creating, two-thirds of our large cities will be lost to the sea, intense wildfires will burn, including in Europe, and tropical diseases will thrive in warmer oceans. We are already in the sixth mass extinction (and it is human made) and seeing a widening gap between the richest and poorest.
But you are here now!
And we can prevent disaster if we make the changes an emergency demands and encourage our UK ELT colleagues to do the same. Take action now.
Join a growing movement for change
Awareness of global warming and the destruction of nature has grown massively over the past ten years.
And in the past years we have seen Fridays for Future/ the Youth Strike for Climate grow from one to several million young people around the world; Extinction Rebellion’s civil disobedience and activism spread from the UK to 45 countries; and the EU and a number of other countries have declared a climate emergency.
It is time for the language teaching sector to join the movement en masse. We can cut our contribution to global warming, create a positive environmental impact, inspire other industries and demonstrate our environmental responsibility to a generation that recognises the importance of climate action and sustainability.
And the changes we make will take time to take effect so we must act decisively now. (If we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, it would take several decades, if not centuries, for the earth to respond.)
Resources
- For more about how global warming leads to climate change see the Climate Reality Project’s climate crisis 101 and NRDC’s global warming 101.
- The Consensus Project
- Read the IPCC’s reports for the latest projections and recommended actions to avert the worst effects of climate change
- Green Facts website
- NASA climate
- What we want to do is save humanity from extinction – lecture by behavioural neuroscientist for Extinction Rebellion
- The Guardian newspaper’s global heating – the facts
- Do we really have 12 years to save the planet?