Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD: The world is at risk of descending into the climate “doom loop”, a think tank report has warned.
According to the Guardian, it said that simply coping with the escalating impacts of the climate crisis would draw resources and focus away from efforts to slash carbon emissions, making the circumstance even worse.
The damage caused by international heating is increasingly clear, and recovering from climate disasters already costs billions of dollars. These disasters can cause cascading issues, including water, energy crises, and food, as well as raised migration and conflict, all draining nations’ resources.
The researchers of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and Chatham House said that a recent example of the climate crisis’s impact on reducing emissions and other actions was the debate over whether to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5C – the international goal – was still possible.
The researchers said those arguing that 1.5C was still possible risked perpetuating complacency that today’s slow pace of action was sufficient. In contrast, those claiming it was not possibly threatened supported fatalism that little could now be done or “extreme approaches” such as geoengineering.
The researchers said that avoiding a doom loop required a more honest acceptance by politicians of the significant risks posed by the climate crisis, including the looming prospect of the tipping point and the massive scale of the economic and societal transformation required to end global heating. This should be combined with narratives focusing on the great benefits climate action brought and ensuring policies were pretty implemented.
Climate and ecological crisis
“We have entered, sadly, a new chapter in the climate and ecological crisis,” said Laurie Laybourn, an associate fellow at IPPR. “The phoney war is ending, and the real consequences now present us with hard decisions. We absolutely drive towards a more sustainable and more equitable world. But our ability to navigate the shocks while staying focused on steering out the storm is key.”
The report said that “This is a doom loop: the consequences of the climate crisis draw focus and resources from tackling its causes, leading to raised temperatures and ecological loss, which then create more severe consequences, diverting even more attention and resources, and so on.”
It noted, for example, Africa’s economy was already losing up to 15 percent of GDP a year to the worsening effects of international heating, cutting into funds needed for climate action and emphasizing the need for support from developed nations, which emit the carbon dioxide.
Laybourn said that “the thing I am most concerned about is that we’re not factoring in the cascading risks to societies,”. “It’s not the big city-smashing storms we should be concerned about, and it’s the consequences that ripple through our international systems.”
He said that “For the United Kingdom, it may not necessarily be the sheer cost of responding to climate disasters that’s the biggest distraction. It could be it has to deal at the same time with a food prices shock and resurgent nativism, playing off fears about so-called climate refugees,”.
Laybourn said that the narratives used to describe the circumstance were very important. For example, he said that greener transport was not simply about switching to electric cars but about better public transport and redesigned cities that meant people were closer to the jobs, healthcare and education, they needed. This, in turn, meant reevaluating local authority budgets and taxes to implement the changes.
