Climate Emergency
A high level overview
Historically, the vast resources of our world have been considered infinite. Productivity increases were demanded, notwithstanding natural resource depletion. Altering our atmosphere was simply considered (if at all) an externality when computing the costs of products.
As we rapidly approach 1.5ºC of global warming, the 21st century will be a period of consequences. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) there's an extremely likely (95–100 %) probability that human influence has been the major cause of scientifically quantified warmings of our planet since 1950. This is reinforced by the latest IPCC summary for policymakers: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and, since the 1950s, many of the observed changes have been unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and the sea level has risen".
According to IPCC, projected harm by cumulative emissions of greenhouse gasses will, at best, increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts on people’s well-being (SPM IPCC 2018 Special Report).
In a less likely, but entirely possible scenario, climate change caused by anthropogenic carbon emissions could exceed critical tipping points within the lifespan of most people reading this website. Reaching these critical thresholds could trigger step changes in the climate system that would be beyond human adaptation. Recently, a paper led by researchers from Cambridge University also points out that the risks of anthropogenic climate change, resulting in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction, are a dangerously underexplored topic.
To prevent further severe harm to our species over the next few decades, carbon emissions can no longer be accepted as an externality in an infinite world that allows us to contaminate as much as we desire. Forefront climate science has unequivocally proved this line of reasoning to be invalid in the IPCC AR6 Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.
In the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) the United Nations states that climate action is needed because “The annual average economic losses from climate-related disasters are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. This is not to mention the human impact of geophysical disasters, which are 91 percent climate-related, and which between 1998 and 2017 killed 1.3 million people and left 4.4 billion injured.”
Because alterations in the climate system are already visible to many, society is increasingly aware of the climate emergency that forces us to endure rapid changes in the global economy encompassing a wide variety of sectors including energy, transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture. Supply chain optimization is urgently needed in all these sectors to internalize the costs of adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in order to drastically reduce our carbon footprint to attempt to ensure our survival.
Despite efforts to reduce pollution, organizations are not yet able to achieve a net zero emission target without irreparably damaging the economic system they depend on to undergo the transition to a sustainable economy. As a consequence, European companies under the EU Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) are forced to use allowances, which are contracts that allow polluters to emit a certain amount of carbon (or other greenhouse gas equivalent) to the atmosphere.
Article 29.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, states that "Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible". In light of the climate emergency, at Kakubi we've felt that it is our duty to do what we can to help the community now.
Our civilization is running out of time to fight climate change, internalizing costs of carbon emissions to reduce the footprint of our economies is imperative. It needs to happen soon; it needs to happen across many sectors, and it ought to be done in a transparent and efficient way.
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