by Human destruction of nature is pushing the planet to a point of no return, and even ending fossil fuels will not end climate disruption unless we also protect the natural world, one of the world’s top climate scientists has said world.
Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told the Guardian: “Even if we phase out all fossil fuels, if we don’t touch nature, [the destruction of natural landscapes and habitats] we can lose what we have all agreed on for a safe future for humanity on Earth – that is, to stay within the 1.5C limit. It is very decisive, that we put it right on nature.”
All the scientific models that show a path for the world to stay within the critical temperature threshold of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels make major assumptions about maintaining natural “carbon sinks”, such as forests, wetlands and peatlands, he said. Without these carbon sinks, excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase even faster.
Speaking from the UN’s Cop28 climate summit in Dubai, he pointed to the Amazon, where the rainforest is under unprecedented threat from a combination of logging, rising temperatures and regional drought. Many scientists fear that the rainforest could be approaching a “tipping point” where the forest could give way to the Savannah.
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Research suggested the Amazon could tolerate up to 3C of warming before turning into a Savannah-like state, but that didn’t take into account the impact of deforestation, Rockström said. When the forest is cultivated, the “fishbone” pattern of roads encroaching on the trees creates a flow of evaporation, which dries out the forest. This probably means that when deforestation reaches about 20% to 25% of the area, it combines with high temperatures to bring the system close to the tipping point to Savannah.
Currently, he said, deforestation was at about 17%. “So we are very close to the ecological tipping point,” he said. “We have a lot of evidence that says that combining deforestation, biodiversity loss and temperature rise is a very dangerous path.”
Similar forces have been at work in the world’s other great forest systems, in the Congo basin in Africa and the great forests of southeast Asia, and boreal forest ecosystems are being degraded by bark beetles and wildfires.
Rockström warned: “Once you cross that point, you can’t go back; you can’t go back from the Savannah state, you can’t just kind of magically preserve the moisture all of a sudden. This is what one must understand: that tipping points of intersection mean points of no return. And we can’t let that happen.”
Razan Al Mubarak, president of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and a high-level champion at Cop28, said the pressure on natural systems around the world to phase out fossil fuels was “absolutely” necessary. together. .
“We need to phase out fossil fuels. But it’s also clear that fossil fuel phasing out alone won’t keep us safe from the impacts of climate change – we need nature too,” she said.
Governments meeting at Cop28 disagree on whether to phase out or phase out fossil fuels. Draft versions of texts that could be agreed by the two-week conference, which ends on Tuesday, allow for different commitments, or for the deletion of any commitment regarding fossil fuel use.
More than 100 fragile and developing countries, including the world’s small island states, are calling for an unconditional phase-out of fossil fuels. Some rich countries, including the EU, the UK and the US, supported weaker language, calling for a phase-out of fossil fuels. Opponents of phasing out include major oil producers such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, while several fossil fuel-dependent countries, including India, are demanding equal funding for the implement a transition from coal, oil and gas. China, the world’s largest exporter, has indicated that it may favor some form of compromise, which has not yet been announced.
Rockström has said that climate science supports the need to phase out fossil fuels, if the world is to stay within 1.5C of warming above pre-industrial levels. He asked governments to agree to protect nature at the same time, to give the world a chance to stay within the limit.
“We’re going to have to draw a line here somehow and say we can’t put these at risk [natural] no more systems. And the first step that we talked about is to stop destroying them, to protect them. We need to have an agreement on preserving the remaining nature,” he said.
Rockström said scientists were increasingly concerned about what they were observing in the world’s forests and other natural ecosystems. He said: “The climate models that give us a remaining carbon budget for the orderly end of oil, coal and gas have assumed that nature will not surprise us. And now nature surprises us so of course that worries us a lot.”
Razan asked the government meeting in Dubai to pay more attention to the warnings they were hearing from Indigenous Peoples around the world, who are seeing the huge changes taking place in their native regions.
“What science has to say is also exactly what Indigenous knowledge has to say, and Indigenous people have been at the forefront of it all,” she said. “They are also saying that there is a need to reassess our relationship with nature.”
