Climate remains the big picture

John Lennon said life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. We cannot let climate catastrophe be what happens to us while we’re busy trying to cope with other emergencies.

The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a compelling call, justified by science and by increasingly bitter experience, to make last-ditch efforts to prevent what harms we still can, and to prepare ourselves to endure what we now must.

The prospect of a world that has fairly been described as sicker, hungrier, poorer, gloomier and way more dangerous is shocking when taken in isolation. But right now it’s so very hard to take in isolation.

The report landed on a day when nearly 20,000 new Covid cases were reported in New

Zealand, alongside further accounts of the civil unrest that has so many of us at one another’s throats.

Meanwhile in Europe, half a million Ukrainians are now refugees from a battle that has swiftly become a humanitarian crisis, and an acute threat to international peace and global economic stability.

All of which carries a sense of scare and urgency, sufficient to invite the delusion – and delusion it would be – that we all have so much on our plates that the naggingly familiar and complex issues of climate change still cannot be met by swift action.

Climate Change Minister James Shaw says the Government’s upcoming national adaptation plan, which will be ready for public comment in the coming months, will reflect the need for “a huge step change’’.

Huge step changes are not what you want to face when you feel like you’re staggering already.

By the time the plan is ready for public comment, what state will we be in to pay that sort of attention?

In the interim, let’s hope Omicron will have peaked, and the Ukraine disaster won’t have escalated too badly. But even then, we’ll be in the midst of economically turbulent times of high inflation and pressured households.

Will we be just so fed up with being so scared, so exhausted by sustained tension, so sick of bitter dispute, so longing for things to just settle down for a spell, that we aren’t up for properly scrutinising whatever the Government puts in front of us? Or leaving it to the lobby groups and vested interests to fight over?

Perhaps a misplaced sense of fatalism is also a risk. The IPCC report does acknowledge that many of the impacts of global warming – ugly ones – are now irreversible. That plain statement may be the point at which some tune out, missing what should be the adrenalising aspects of the report. For a little longer we still have the capacity to adapt. As one of the report’s lead authors, Dr Helen Adams, says: “the future depends on us, not the climate’’.

The report increases the focus on human rights – issues of health, housing, economic security and education – and rightly so. As with so many tribulations, the poor and vulnerable are likely to be disproportionately affected.

Mind you, the future we’re trying to guard against is shaping up to be so harsh that even to be proportionately affected will be hard enough, especially for the generations ahead.

When things seem like a kaleidoscope of troubles, it’s hard to hear that we need to keep aware of the big picture. But we do, and the climate crisis is it.

Huge step changes are not what you want to face when you feel like you’re staggering already.