Caretakers of our planet

One of the side effects of climate change, which we hadn’t expected, is the acidification of our oceans. This is because when we put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, some of it just a little bit of it dissolves into the surface ocean and makes a weak acid. Now, the oceans have been around for millions and millions of years. It’s actually where we evolved and came from. Life first came from the oceans. So therefore, the oceans have been incredibly stable environment for all that period of time.

Unfortunately, it means that the organisms that live in the oceans are not able to deal with this sort of change. They’re already starting to suffer due to this increased acidity. And this is going to get worse in the future. The shells are actually slightly dissolving. They are reproducing in less efficient ways, and therefore we’re starting to threaten the food webs in the oceans.

So in the future, we’re deeply worried that the oceans would become less productive or produce less fish, and therefore our resource where we rely on fish for food will become a lot less. And that’s a problem because we have a huge population to feed in the world.

But if we can stop our emissions as quickly as possible, then perhaps we can minimize the effects on the ocean and the food webs that we all rely on.

What happens when ice melts at the poles?

We are in a unique geological period of time where we have ice at both poles, both in the Arctic and on Greenland, but also on Antarctica. But because of climate change, these ice sheets are very vulnerable to melting. If you think about Greenland, if we melted the whole of Greenland, that could take hundreds of years, we would increase the sea level by five to seven meters. That’s an issue huge amount and would flood most major coastal cities.

What are your biggest worries about climate change?

My big worry about climate change is our ability to produce enough food to feed the world at the moment, half the food in the world is produced by small farmers on small plots of land that produce enough food for themselves and their family. But they also have enough to export to the local town and to the local cities.

This has been a very efficient way of actually producing food, but the problem is with climate change in the future, if the temperatures start to go up too much and humidity rises, suddenly, there are going to be more or more days when it’s physically impossible to go outside and work.

This is one of the great crises that people don’t talk about, because if they can’t produce enough food, then we are going to look at billions of people not having enough food to live and we will see some major food crises around the world.

Many of us have to fly for business. But if we can start to reduce the amount we fly, perhaps for personal reasons and even within business, we have to ask ourselves, is this really important enough to actually fly across the world? Then we can start to make a difference. If you have to fly, then again, one of the most important things you can do is you can offset the carbon emissions for that flight. Now, I would suggest that the best way to do that is entirely within your company have an offset scheme, which allows your company to reduce its footprint so you can actually balance your own travel against your own reduction targets.

One of the most powerful things individuals can do to shape the future is actually divest their pensions from fossil fuels. Pensions invest trillions of dollars of your money every year. If you turn around your pension company and say, I do not want you to invest in fossil fuels or you move your pension to a company that doesn’t, that suddenly sends a huge message to the economic power centers that says fossil fuels are dangerous investments, and therefore people do not want to invest in them.