I’ve always been the environmentalist nutjob in my group of friends. For a school project we made a parody video of what everyone in our class would be doing in 10 years. My bit? Jumping out of a bush and telling someone to pick up the coke bottle they had thrown on the ground. At this point I’ve accepted it - working towards keeping earth habitable for humans (and a lot of other life) is just a core part of who I am. But even though this has been the case since my parents took me to go see An Inconvenient Truth when I was 10, I’ve recently realised that I haven’t really understood the crisis we face.
It started as being known as global warming, but we decided that wasn’t a good name, so it’s now climate change (although I typically opt for ‘climate breakdown’ to emphasise the severity of the issue). So I’ve been saying that my mission in life is work on preventing climate change, calling it the biggest problem we (humans) face. But climate change is just one piece of the problem. I knew that there was more to it than just a changing climate - that biodiversity loss, land use change, pollution, water usage, and resource extraction were an issue - but to me, these were all just part of this wider ‘climate change’ problem. But I’ve come to see that this isn’t a helpful or accurate way of viewing the problem.
The big problem is an environmental crisis, and climate change is just one part of that. We’re also facing a ecological crisis.
These problems are very intertwined, but they are different issues. We need to recognise and understand this so that our responses can be appropriate for each issue.
Where as the climate crisis refers to the unfettered pumping of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, the ecological crisis deals with all the human driven actions that destroy the physical world around us - pollution through plastics and chemicals, changing natural landscapes through deforestation and monoculture farming, extreme biodiversity loss, and destruction of landscapes for resource extraction, to name a few.
Real sustainability requires two actions: net-zero (or even ideally net negative) CO2e/ GHG emissions, and nature positive ecological action. In other words, we need to get to a point where we are emitting no more CO2e than the planet can absorb, and that our actions have no wanton negative effect on ecosystems and biodiversity - thus ensuring that no other plant or animal species on is harmed by our going about our business. Ultimately, we need to look after the planet, because everything we do relies upon a functional Earth.
Over the last 5 or so years, we are finally starting to see business grudgingly start to take responsibility for the impact they have on the world, but pretty much only when it comes to carbon. Net-zero pledges and action to achieve these goals are becoming common-place - this is indeed something to celebrate. However, there has been little to no acknowledgement and understanding that this is only one side of the coin - the other, ecological destruction - needs just as much urgency. We are beginning to see some companies understand this, and talking to Heads of Sustainability they assure us that this is on the horizon - “we’re planning to work on that later this year” they say.
Not unreasonably, climate change has overshadowed the ecological crisis - it’s much easier to understand a single metric (number of atoms emitted) and to show how this has a direct impact on warming the planet. Understanding and showing the complexity of the ecological crisis is much trickier, especially as so many who have the most impact are living in cities, rather detached from nature. But it’s time to start dealing with our impact on nature because it’s just as important as dealing with carbon emissions. Academia still doesn’t fully agree on how to measure and manage these issues, but that shouldn’t stop us from starting anyway, because we don’t have the time to not act. If we don’t start dealing with the ecological crisis now, the impacts will be just as severe as a warming climate.
I’m building a company to help companies understand, manage, disclose, and reduce their impact on nature. We believe companies can take control of their impact and play a role in stopping the ecological crisis. If this sounds interesting, get in touch.