All posts by : Prachi Jain

Politicians, economists and some natural scientists tend to assume that the climate tipping points in the Earth system, like the loss of the Amazon rainforest or the West Antarctic ice sheet and many such points, are of low probability and are little understood. However, evidence is mounting that these events could be more likely, have high impacts on the planet’s ecosystem and are interconnected across different biophysical systems, potentially committing long-term irreversible changes worldwide.

The analysis of the tipping points helps to identify that we are in a state of “climate emergency” and further strengthens the chorus of calls for urgent climate action worldwide. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) introduced the idea of tipping points nearly two decades ago. Such ‘large-scale discontinuities’ in the climate system were possible only if global warming exceeded five degrees Celcius above pre-industrial levels.

Furthermore, the information summarized in the recent IPCC Special Reports (published in 2018 and September 2019) suggested that tipping points could be exceeded even when the temperature rise is between 1 and 2 °C of warming.

The term “climate tipping points” has become a core concept of discussions about climate change science and is used as a metaphor for abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous climate change by climate scientists and the news media. The IPCC described the concept as “once a given climate threshold is reached, it can cause life on Earth to face prolonged, irreversible changes“.

A tipping point in the climate system is a critical threshold which, if crossed, results in a major, and often irreversible, change in the states of the system.

The IPCC has identified several tipping points in climate change that are critical thresholds in a system that, if crossed, could result in irreversible consequences. Climate tipping points are critical thresholds that, when crossed, push a natural system into an entirely different state, and result in possibly irreversible, catastrophic consequences — including even greater warming — for Earth.

A tipping point is where the threshold for temperatures is crossed, leading to an irreversible shift in the climate system, even though global warming is ending. Tipping points also require self-reinforcing feedback and result in changes to a climate system that are not irreversible over the human timescale. However, crossing the tipping points risks irreversibly perturbing the natural systems which have kept Earth’s climate relatively stable over thousands of years.

From melting the Greenland Ice Sheet to the Labrador Sea’s convection melt and the Amazon rainforest’s disappearance, climate thresholds throw Earth’s systems into catastrophic tailspins. In climatology: “a tipping point is a point where more minor changes become large enough to produce a larger, critical shift, one that may be sudden, irreversible, and result in cascading effects“.

Scientists explain that such change happens on longer timescales, and the limits of computational power make it impossible to accurately depict every climate system’s tipping points or how they interact. The tipping points were considered probable only when global warming exceeded five degrees Celcius above pre-industrial levels.

Assessments have been done in the past, like those of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the sixth assessment report was released in three parts in 2021 and 2022, suggested most of the main tipping points would be reached if the planet warmed beyond 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, giving humanity more time to develop mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Abrupt changes in the tipping points are essential because they could dominate climate change impacts far beyond their effect on the way global warming changes relative to emissions.

Since the impacts are inevitable, we must prioritize and ramp up climate mitigation and adaptation. On the mitigation front, it means working in all, and one can limit global warming and not exceed the 1.5-degree celsius tipping point. The same requires transformative global shifts by the developed countries. On the adaptation front, efforts will mean actively preparing for climate impacts coming down the pike and prioritizing resources for already-vulnerable communities.

Concluding, continued GHG emissions will worsen climate change, and future changes will include a warm and more acidic ocean, a warm atmosphere, sea level rise, and drastic changes in precipitation patterns. The Earth is likely no longer in a safe climate since temperatures exceed the warming limit by approximately one-degree celsius. Therefore, even the UN Paris Agreement’s target of keeping global warming well below two-degree celsius and preferably 1.5 degrees celsius might fall short of mitigating severe climate change.

However, to even have a 50% chance to limit global warming by 1.5 °C and to avoid crossing any climate tipping points, GHG emissions must be cut in half by 2030 and eliminated by 2050.

Ecosystem services are the myriad benefits humans derive from their natural surroundings and healthy ecosystems. Ecosystem services are the benefits of ecosystems, which help make human life possible and worthwhile. Regulated services are the benefits provided by ecosystem processes that moderate natural phenomena. Despite an estimated value of $125 trillion, these assets are not adequately accounted for in the political and economic policy. The same explains that there is insufficient investment in the protection and management of such services.

A regulating service is classified as any benefit obtained through natural processes and the functioning of an ecosystem. Regulating services are the benefits that ecosystems provide to the regulation of our environment: protection of coastlines, prevent erosion, purification of water, and storage of carbon. Provisioning services are characterized by humans’ ability to extract products from ecosystems, like food, water, and resources, including timber, petroleum, genetic resources, and medicines.

Cultural services comprise the non-material benefits humans can derive from ecosystems. Such services are non-material benefits derived from nature–recreation, beauty, and mental, intellectual, and cultural benefits. A cultural service is a non-material benefit which promotes human development and cultural progress, including how ecosystems are instrumental to local, national, and global cultures; building knowledge and disseminating ideas; creations that arise through interactions with nature (music, art, architecture); and recreation.

Some primary examples of ecosystem services include products like food and water, regulation of flooding, soil erosion, disease outbreaks, and non-material benefits like recreation and mental benefits from natural areas. Although nature’s value to humans has been recognized for some time, the concept of ecosystem services has been developed over recent years to describe these different benefits. Ecosystems–living elements that interact with one another and with their nonliving surroundings–provide benefits, or services, to the world.

Ecosystems are sources of food, water, medicines, timber, and biofuels, along with conditions that allow those resources to grow. Wetlands provide many valuable ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration, water cleaning, plant and animal habitat, and reducing storm damage and flooding to neighbouring areas. In anticipation of widespread ecosystem changes and potential losses or changes to ecosystem service provision or distribution, landowners and managers may want to focus on strengthening the resilience and adaptive capacities of forests and prairies so that these landscapes continue providing vital benefits in the future.

There is an increase in forest loss worldwide, and there have been significant challenges facing efforts to safeguard forests and the ecosystem services they provide for sustainable development. The global community appears to be arriving at a critical turning point, with several recent developments pointing to a positive trajectory of progress. These developments include:

· New Policy Signals

Global policy drivers such as Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement—must play a role in achieving global development and climate change mitigation goals, sending a powerful political signal that the global community is committed to forest conservation, along with offering pathways for the provision of finance to facilitate the objective.

Furthermore, Global and national commitments for Forest Restoration are increasing yearly to restore 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested land by 2020 and nearly 350 million hectares by 2030. Presently, 160.2 million hectares have been pledged for restoration. However, achieving the 350 million hectare goal will generate about US$170 billion per year in net forest ecosystem service benefits in watershed protection, improved crop yields, and enhanced provision of forest products.

· Growing Investments

The Green Climate Fund is poised to be a significant new source of public REDD+ finance, having pledged $500M in October 2017 to pay for REDD+ offsets. Additionally, The World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility is one of the most extensive public-sector REDD+ financing programs globally that aims at moving closer to formally contracting offsets from its member countries.

Nearly US$1 billion in voluntary “forest carbon market” offset transactions have been reported since Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace first started collecting this data in 2009.

· Corporate Commitments

Corporate commitments to reduce emissions and deforestation are proliferating. They would help create new demands for forest carbon offsets and concerted action aimed at reducing deforestation associated with commodity production, which could lead to positive outcomes for securing forest ecosystem services.

· Advances in Technology

Rapid technological improvement enables frequent, accurate, cost-effective monitoring of forest cover change worldwide. The above will allow an unprecedented level of awareness concerning real-time threats to forests and provides governments with the tools needed to enforce laws and policies to conserve forests and ecosystem services.

CATEGORIES OF ECOSYSTEM SERVICES

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, published in 2005, divided ecosystem services into four categories:

a. Provisioning services (the supply of goods) of direct benefit to people: These are often with a clear monetary value, like timber from forests, medicinal plants, and fish from oceans, rivers and lakes.

b. Regulating services (the range of functions carried out) by ecosystems: are often of great value but not monetary value in conventional markets. They include regulating climate by storing carbon and controlling local rainfall, removing pollutants by filtering air and water and protecting from disasters such as landslides and coastal storms.

c. Cultural services: These are the services that are not providing direct material benefits but contribute to the broad needs and desires of society. These include the spiritual value attached to particular ecosystems and are not directly beneficial to people but essential to the functioning of ecosystems.

Concluding, ecosystem services are complex in nature of any ecosystem; humans are generally assumed to derive benefits from the combinations of such services. Multiple services can usually be combined, and where benefits of targeted goals are assured, ancillary benefits can be provided too: a single forest can provide habitats for other organisms and recreation to humans, all of which are ecosystem services.

Every year, at the end of November, there is one day when brands and retailers make a killing – “Black Friday. Mass sales, which start from “Thanksgiving“, end up till Christmas, and the tradition, though American, has been exported globally over the past decade.

To what avail…???

A massive increase in online sales, ramped-up transport of merchandise, and a boom in air pollution… therefore, costing the planet big time.

Although Black Friday started as a one-day sales event, it has since snowballed into a month-long rush of fast fashion excess, ultimately doing more harm to our environment in a quest to save money, even though 80 per cent of items go to landfill. Like fast fashion, the Black Friday sales encourage mass consumerism and push people to purchase products solely because they are on sale, without considering how much they will be used.

According to a study conducted by Adobe Digital Insights, during Black Friday, US consumers spent around 9 billion dollars online (7.95 billion euros), 21.6% more than in 2019. The study further points out that Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2020 were the days that generated the most online commerce in U.S. history – and they are looking to build on those figures in subsequent years as well.

Black Friday provides influence-focused promotions and deals for stock already in place instead of producing items blindly with the intent of them being bought during the sales period.

Green Friday – a concept that emphasizes responsible shopping, buying from smaller, local stores or used items. Waste is a huge problem, particularly on the day after Thanksgiving, because significant discounts and low-priced products lead people to buy things they do not need, simply for the sake of doing so.

Another aspect of enormous environmental impact is the transportation of the orders both locally and globally. Shipping and delivering online orders account for as much as 4 per cent of global emissions over a year, with most of that coming during The Day After Thanksgiving and the Christmas Shopping Period. During 2021, it was estimated that the U.K.’s Black Friday sales deliveries released more than 429,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases, i.e., about 0.12% of the total annual emissions in the U.K.

According to the U.K.-based comparison shopping site Money.co.uk, the year of 2020 Black Friday‘s home deliveries in the U.K. are estimated to emit 429,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions — equivalent to 435 round-trip flights from London to New York City (or seemingly, about as much weight as 61,308 elephants).

According to the Spains Trade Organization, UNO, there will be approximately 50 million deliveries to match Black Friday purchases in the years to come. Shipping the ordered items is expected to cause the most impact on the environment, with Amazon expected to generate over 15,000 tons of carbon emissions just from Black Friday. From a production perspective, from packing and delivering the items, the planet will be affected by increased carbon emissions twice during Black Friday and Cyber Monday through product waste.

A report by Green Alliance, a think-tank, found that 80% of all items purchased at Black Friday sales end up either in a landfill, being burned, or being recycled — usually at low quality — after a short lifespan. Wastemanaged.co.uk added that 80 per cent of purchases made from Black Friday sales would either be placed in landfill sites or burned or recycled incorrectly.

So, if Black Friday has an environmental impact, what possible ways to make it eco-friendly?

Tips for Green Black Friday

There are several ways to make “Black Friday and Cyber Monday eco-friendly and reduce the environmental impact. Some of such methods are:

a. Consolidating Purchases and Shipments

The above is one of the most effective ways to reduce the environmental impact of “Black Friday”. Consolidating purchases and shipments into one large packet minimizes the burden on transportation and, thus, the environment.

b. Sustainable Shipping

Sustainable shipping is another option for creating a healthy planet. Many environmentally conscious retailers and consumers choose one another so that they can do their part—an example of the same use of fleets of electric delivery vehicles choosing local vendors to avoid transportation.

c. Shop Locally

Many organizations offer huge discounts and large variety during the holiday season; shopping locally is another sustainable option that can make Black Friday “GREEN“—boosting local businesses and supporting the local economic system. Additionally, gifts bought from local companies have a particular ethnic charm, making them more memorable.

d. Use Alternative Wrapping Papers

Wrapping papers are one of the essential elements of gifting and might seem harmless, but they are one of the most plentiful forms of physical waste due to holidays. Most of the wrapping papers are non-recyclable and cannot be reused and adding damage to the landfills. Using alternatives like newspapers is one of the options. Newspapers are cheap, widely available and recyclable. Additionally, using the newspaper’s comics section keeps the wrapping paper fun instead of black and white. Using box packing of another product and wrapping in a quirky sustainable way is another option to reduce wrapping paper wastage. Another alternative to wrapping paper is the box of another product. Fabrics, old maps, tissue paper, grocery store bags and more can all be used to wrap the gifts making them more rustic and authentic.

e. Fight the Urge to Impulse Buy Gifts

One of the downsides to sales is the amount of physical waste impulse gifts produce. Impulse gifting happens due to encouraging sales the shoppers to purchase more products than is needed. Sometimes completely unused products are even thrown out. Avoiding impulse purchases will reduce the amount of packaging in landfills.

In conclusion the discussion, the only solution is to reduce our consumption levels and adopt sustainable shopping practices. One of the ways could be taking a break from shopping on Black Friday and participating in a global “Buy Nothing Day” campaign. The campaign aims to raise awareness about less or no shopping and invites people to stop shopping for a day. Lastly, we are not close to the fight against climate change, and robust actions and direct actions are needed to prevent habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and other concerns not within the net of carbon offsetting.

However, climate scientists worldwide are calling to limit human-caused emissions that can impact climate change. Humankind is on a deadline, so waiting for companies that produce the products and services we buy to do the right thing is not viable. The silver lining is that each of us is a consumer; we can demand the power to start curbing our purchases’ effect on the environment through carbon offsetting.