Want to help save the planet?
Avoid flights Eat less meat Have fewer children
For one person to have any real impact on climate change, it would take some major sacrifices: give up the car, stop eating meat, avoid transatlantic flights and, most importantly, have one fewer children than you had planned, according to a new study by a researcher at the University of British Columbia.
So why then, the study asks, do Canadian high school textbooks still tell students to do their part by merely hanging their laundry and recycling? Especially since recycling, upgrading light bulbs and hanging laundry doesn’t cut greenhouse gas half as much as skipping out on a single transatlantic flight.
The study, by UBC PhD student Seth Wynes and Prof. Kimberly Nicholas at Sweden’s Lund University, was published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
The research paper calls for education curriculums to be upfront about the real, often difficult, ways for individuals to reduce their footprints.
The study surveyed Canadian high school textbooks from seven provinces and found that students rarely, if ever, learned about the most effective ways to reduce climate change. The study’s top four most effective tactics — going car-free (an annual savings of 2.4 tonnes of CO2), abstaining from meat (0.8 tonnes), flying one less transatlantic flight per year (1.6 tonnes) and having one less child (58.6 tonnes) — make up only four per cent of suggestions given to students.
One textbook claimed that “making a difference doesn’t have to be difficult” and suggested swapping reusable shopping bags for plastic ones to save five kg of CO2 emissions a year.
“This is less than one per cent as effective as a year without eating meat,” the study reads.
“Examples like this create the impression that the issue of climate change itself is trivial in nature.”
The problem, the study says, is that changes at the government and corporate levels may not be enough to meet the Paris Agreement target of keeping the global average temperature increase to well below 2C by 2050. That means individuals will need to pick up the slack, capping their CO2 output at 2.1 tonnes a year, the authors said. Currently, the average Canadian produces 13.5 tonnes a year, according to World Bank data.
The biggest, and perhaps most controversial, of the study’s suggestions is having fewer children. The data that backs up the assertion is wildly complicated. To figure out the footprint of having one child, the calculation looks at the emissions that child and all their descendants will create in their lifetime, if average emission rates stayed at current levels.
So a mother is considered responsible for half of her child’s emissions (the father takes the other half). She’s also responsible for a quarter of her grandchildren’s emissions, an eighth of her great-grandchildren’s emissions and so on. The total is divided by the average lifespan, to get an annual emission output. So if a person lives for 80 years, the total output of their share of dependants gets divided by 80.
Japan has lower birthrates and lower per capita emission levels, so the impact of a child isn’t as high there as it is in the United States, since a parent there is responsible for fewer descendants who, on average, emit less greenhouse gases.
In the U.S., the annual impact of a child is almost 120 tonnes. In Japan, it’s closer to 20 tonnes. The study marks the global average at 58.6 tonnes, though Wynes said Canada is probably closer to the United States, since it has similar per capita emission rates.
Wynes said he’s doing his part. He doesn’t have kids, but when the time comes, the environmental impact will inform how big his family gets. He doesn’t own a car, and takes long train rides instead of flying.
“I eat mostly a vegetarian diet.” But, “If my buddy’s about to throw out half of his hotdog, I’ll finish it off for him because I don’t like food waste either.”