2021 and the race to save the world

Why are some experts upbeat despite the litany of ‘catastrophic failures’ to curb – let alone reverse – the demise of the natural world? Kate Hughes finds out

Men herd their cattle away from an advancing fire in Turkey (AFP/Getty)

Chaos. That’s the word that comes to mind – and that’s not just about the rise in incidents of extreme weather. The year has left confusion, anxiety and division in its environmental wake, with those of us on the ground without the relevant PhDs trying desperately to navigate the marketing spin, greenwashing, photo ops and weaponised slogans.

In the meantime, the bombardment of doomsday data continues. The Arctic Ocean is getting warmer decades faster than expected, Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is now a net carbon emitter pumping out a fifth more CO2 through record levels of burning and tree removal than it is absorbing. Global warming, according to the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, shows we’re closing in on the 2015 Paris Agreement’s 1.5C ceiling desperately fast, with temperatures already 1.239C warmer than they were in 1880.

Even when the most powerful people in the world congregated in one room, the existential threat didn’t seem enough to produce a commitment to change.