This week, the 22nd of April marked ‘Earth Day’, an annual global event to demonstrate support for environmental protection. This came during a time when India was experiencing its second heat-wave of the month. The first spell scorched parts of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, while the second is currently hitting Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha and Gangetic West Bengal. This, naturally, will have effects on agriculture and energy consumption, in addition to the upcoming general elections. India’s power ministry has asked the state-run National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) to secure additional gas supplies in case of a surge in demand. The 2022 heatwave impacted wheat production severely, forcing an export ban, and climate experts are predicting a similar derailment this year.
In 2020, four stories above New York’s Union Square, an eighty feet wide ‘climate clock’ was installed – counting down the critical time window remaining for humanity to act, to save itself from climate chaos. The tool has 2 main components – a clock that counts down the critical time window to reach zero emissions (the “deadline”), while tracking progress on key solution pathways (“lifelines”). The clock frames a critical mission — a rapid and just transition to a safe climate future — and puts it at the very forefront of human attention. Since its famous launch in New York, Climate Clock teams have sprung up across the world from Chiapas to Kazakhstan, Korea to Glasgow. How do we, as a society, respond to an ongoing crisis like this? And how can we do it before time runs out?
Existential risks have been in our discourse lately – in association to pandemics, nuclear warfare, and now, climate challenges. There could be several threats that make up this risk, some of which could be very low probability. However, we now occupy a space in which anthropogenic existential risks are becoming possibilities. They are direct consequences of humanity’s growth, actions and movements. “The existential nature of existential risks means that we cannot wait until one materialises and then draw lessons from our mistakes – by then it will be too late”, says diplomacy and defense expert Tom Barber.
Research has shown that psychological distance is one of the most common barriers to collective efforts in the climate space. “As soon as someone says ‘climate change,’ people are already beginning to turn off their feelings of risk and morality, as they place it in a box marked ‘someone else’s problem’ or ‘a problem I will deal with in the future’,” says energy scholar Espen Stoknes. This distance could be temporal (perceiving the climate crisis as far off in the future), spatial (perceiving it as happening elsewhere) or social (perceiving it as happening to other people, unlike oneself). While these are framed in the context of impact (how far away is the impact of the crisis), they can also be framed in the context of action (where, when and by whom is climate action being pursued). Of these, the social dimension finds most relevance in the climate context – focusing on the relational aspect of climate and people has significant bearing on collective action.
