Climate Change: Learning for Action

Reduce 90 percent of your emissions and then remove and store some carbon permanently on top of that.

As climate scientist Glen Peters points out, to have a fighting chance of staying within 1.5 C of average warming, globally we *must* stop 90 percent of our emissions, and further remove carbon from the atmosphere. There is no substitute for these deep emissions cuts for climate stability.

Carbon removal is not a substitute for mitigation. We need both, and we need to prioritize mitigation

Coral reefs, which sustain about 25 percent of the ocean’s fish, are also highly threatened by increasing ocean temperatures—the IPCC estimates that more than 99 percent of all coral reefs will disappear if global average surface temperatures increase by 2 C.

the oceans have now absorbed about one third of the CO2 humans have emitted since industrialization began.

This class may come across as critical at times, but we prefer to think of our approach as cautionary . When you approach these topics with global, systems, and justice lenses, you begin to see why they may be both necessary and important —and also risky and fundamentally insufficient. And if you think that sounds contradictory, it is.

Indeed, if... See more

Some solutions aim to take food production out of the fields altogether through what is known as controlled environment agriculture. CEA includes vertical farms, hydroponics and high-efficiency greenhouses.

Agriculture uses almost half the world’s vegetated land, consumes 70% of freshwater withdrawals, drives deforestation in tropical nations and generates nearly one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The specific number that answers this question depends on these three factors, but the range of possible answers is not too large: around 25% to 30% of global emissions come from our food systems, and this rises to around one-third when we include all agricultural products