The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its first of three reports from its latest assessment (6th Assessment Report) on the state of the climate change crisis. The findings are very disturbing. Even at about 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming, we are already experiencing unprecedented and catastrophic impacts from global warming, and reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming over the next few decades is likely inevitable, which will make these impacts even worse.
We can still prevent disaster, but we have even less time than we thought. Which means that aside from ending fossil fuel emissions, we also urgently need to protect ecosystems. Primary forests in particular store vast amounts of carbon and can keep it stored safely for millennia or even millions of years. We absolutely cannot afford to release the carbon stored in primary forests. Those emissions alone would get us well beyond 1.5C, regardless of fossil fuel emissions.
We need a whole lot of ecological restoration to draw down even more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but we must start with protecting primary forests to make sure that what is already safely stored stays that way! This is a key part of our mission at Wild Heritage.