Racing Against an Accelerating Climate Clock: It’s All Hands on Deck
Sabine E. Apitz, IEAM Editor-in-Chief
Republished with permission from Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management (IEAM), Volume 21, Issue 1, January 2025, with minor edits for style.
It's a challenging time to be an environmental professional, or simply a human being, on planet Earth. The news we receive daily is disheartening. There’s little evidence that we’ve begun to reverse the effects of biodiversity loss, climate change, chemical and plastics pollution, deforestation, water scarcity, unsustainable resource use and waste management, which are felt nearly everywhere globally. Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres reports that only 17% of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets are on track. Nearly half show minimal or moderate progress, while more than one-third have stalled or regressed. The lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with several escalating regional conflicts, geopolitical tensions and rapidly evolving climate chaos, are seriously affecting ecosystems globally (UN, 2024).
Human well-being is entirely dependent on functioning ecosystems. We manage land and water resources to maximize the services we value most, often at the expense of the planetary processes that set the boundaries for human activity and sustain all life on Earth. The Planetary Health Check Report by Caesar et al. (2024) concludes six of nine planetary processes (i.e., climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flow and the introduction of novel entities) have breached their safe planetary boundaries (PB). Ocean acidification is nearing its PB limit. Atmospheric aerosol loading and stratospheric ozone depletion remain, for the moment, within safe operating spaces.
The Earth's poor health report should not come as a surprise to anyone. The northern hemisphere experienced the hottest summer on record, possibly the hottest in 2,000 years (Esper et al., 2024). Extreme weather events have become common worldwide. Every measure of biodiversity shows a decline at unprecedented levels. The decline in insect populations, for example, can be attributed to habitat change, chemical and pesticide pollution, and shifting climate conditions that disrupt plant and pest profiles (Sánchez-Bayo et al. 2019). Armed conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and other regions are causing significant regional environmental changes, as well as terrible human suffering and loss of life. The deliberate poisoning of resources, a centuries-old military tactic, continues in the twenty-first century (Harding & Mazhulin, 2024).
We find ourselves in a race against the clock. In fact, it’s a race against several clocks, each counting down to irreversible environmental changes affecting life on Earth if we are unable to stop, slow or reverse the multitude of damages that we inflict on this planet as a consequence of rapid and demanding population growth. We may, in fact, have lost the first of several races against the Climate Clock. Some climatologists argue the Carbon Clock has expired and we have passed the 1.5 °C global warming threshold. We are dangerously close to losing the race against the Biodiversity Clock, measuring the rate of extinction of plant and animal species globally (Jaishanker et al., 2021). The Pollution Clock tracking global air pollution trends continues to tick vigorously (Wilhelm et al., 2023).
How we navigate the future—beginning right now in this new year of 2025—will dictate the course of all life on Earth for future generations. Managing the complex and interconnected environmental and societal issues that have led us to this point in time will require immediate and coordinated changes in behavior from peoples and cultures unprecedented in human history.
Our role as environmental scientists is to aid in that global coordination by delivering science that is meaningful and relevant to science-informed societal decision-making. IEAM strives to be a platform for communicating new knowledge while asking and answering the “so what” question: How does this help us better manage the environment? While our sister journal, ET&C, focuses on reporting scientific research on its eponymous topics, we seek to take results from these and other disciplines of science and apply it. We are not only a scientific journal but also a platform for the discussion of how we use science and technology to support society in solving environmental problems, supporting science-informed environmental management, policy and decision-making.
For the complete list of references, please see the original publication in IEAM.
Author’s contact: [email protected]