Discover 18 opportunities in climate change

In 2019, the University of Bristol became the first UK university to formally declare a climate emergency. In the following year, a further 36 institutions in the UK followed suit. Beyond their own climate research and agendas to achieve carbon neutrality, universities play a key role in educating their students and the public about the climate crisis.

In 2018, United States President Donald Trump said his administration was putting more coal miners back into work, having previously rattled on about how important coal jobs were to the future of the US. Perhaps it should be no surprise that his words were empty. The Trump administration has added a negligible  2,000 coal mining jobs since it took control, and whatever bump in coal production 2018 saw was quick to fade away. Obviously, Trump’s pledge to keep the industry alive was a political stunt, not a decision based on the economic realities of the moment; for if it had been, Trump wouldn’t have been talking about coal, but about renewable energy. 

Although recently popularised in America, the Green New Deal (GND) was actually born during the early days of the 2007/8 financial crisis, in a small flat in London. The owner of the flat was analyst and foreseer of the crisis, Ann Pettifor; the occasion was a get-together of environmentalists and economists who had convened to draft a plan they hoped would both ‘transform the economy and protect the ecosystem’. Unfortunately for the London attendees, the prevailing political currents post crash proved especially hostile toward their idea, and prioritised, instead, principles of fiscal discipline and austerity, while largely sidelining issues of climate. And as long as such consensus reigned, the nascent GND was forced to lie dormant, far from political discourse.

The history of economic growth, the kind to which we are now accustomed, is inseparably intertwined with the discovery, and then plunder, of fossil fuels. Some historians have even argued their unearthing was its main catalyst, relegating more popular theories of free trade and technological innovation. The argument is seductively simple, and although something of an exaggeration, usefully highlights the strong connection between the two – for in tandem, they radically altered the course of human civilisation.

In 2018, the World Meteorological Organization published its statement on the State of the Climate. The report showed that the 20 warmest years on record have occurred in the last 22 years. In the same year, the State of California’s Energy Commission published a report linking changing atmospheric conditions due to global warming as a direct cause of the devastating forest fires that swept through California, burning nearly 1.9 million acres’ of land and costing more than US$3.5 billion of damages.

Climate change is back on the front pages of the world’s press – belatedly. Its return is thanks to the landmark IPCC report, published in October 2018, which has served as a brutal reminder of the dystopian future that awaits humankind if radical policy change is not enacted immediately.