The Solution to Halt Climate Change for 20 Years is Available
So let’s get on with it!
Australia is burning. Indonesia is flooding. And it’ll only get worse. We grieve, we’re angry, we feel despair. Our hearts are bleeding.
But what if we would transform this grief and anger into positive action? Apparently, there is ONE solution that will hold back climate change for up to 20 years while we work on further regenerative solutions.
It can be funded by just a few billionaires. People like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and others have foundations anyway. So let’s get on with it and buy ourselves two decades more time.
Bloomberg wrote about this solution to climate change: ‘How to halt global warming for $300 billion’. The first paragraph goes like this:
“$300 billion. That’s the money needed to stop the rise in greenhouse gases and buy up to 20 years of time to fix global warming, according to United Nations climate scientists. It’s the gross domestic product of Chile, or the world’s military spending every 60 days.”
So what will we spend the $300 billion on? New green technology? Solar panels and windmills? Space adventures to see if there are other planets we can live on?
No! No! No!
The answer is much easier: we can use simple, age-old practices to lock millions of tons of carbon back into the soil.
We’ll make dead soil alive again. Full of healthy microbes, and mycelium networks. And we will feed this soil with organic matter. We will restore the water cycles. Thus, we will regenerate ecosystems. There is enough degraded land around and we can turn the problem of desertification into a big part of the solution to climate change.
A short summary:
- United Nations scientists say reclaiming wasteland can capture enough carbon
- Global effort would stall emissions growth for up to 20 years
- Costs will be $300 billion
This sounds mighty interesting, doesn’t it?
Wasteland
Is there enough degraded wasteland around to make this solution work? Yes, this statement is backed up by scientists. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) states that desertification and degradation of land affect almost 2 billion hectares of land worldwide. This degraded land is home to 1.5 billion people.
Until now degraded land is a problem. But what if this problem can be turned into a huge part of the solution…
Of the 2 billion hectares (almost 5 billion acres) of land around the world that have been degraded by misuse, overgrazing, deforestation and other largely human factors, 900 million hectares could be restored.
Wow! What if we just took the decision worldwide to do just that… Restore the 900 million hectares to become living soil again and learn together with the communities living on this land how to create a living while keeping nature alive as well.
The solution to climate change
How can restoring land be a solution to climate change? The soil, and the plants and trees that grow on it, can become a so-called carbon sink. Soil, plants, and trees take CO2 out of the air and use it as their building blocks to make new bark, leaves, fruit, seeds, etc.
Restoring ecosystems means that we turn degraded land into biodiverse pasture, food crops or trees again. Biodiverse is the keyword here. Just planting trees is not enough, we need to restore the soil in a biodiverse way to make the ecological cycles as healthy as possible and thus halt climate change.
Paul Hawken wrote about it as one of the 100 big solutions to reverse climate change in Project Drawdown. Also, there are many real-life examples of restoring large scale ecosystems, as you can see in one of my earlier articles.
Nature-based solutions
In this story of Bloomberg, there is one remark I want to make: please keep in mind that they are writing from the old paradigm of owning land, wanting to measure everything quantitatively and making money, as compared to creating value for all.
Personally, I hold the worldview of deep ecology. I think that the planet should be owned by itself and that we humans are part of the ecosystems we live in. Interbeing… Charles Eistenstein explains it beautifully.
So, there is more to do than restore the land. We should not hold back on the next steps. We should also enhance our efforts to find more nature-based solutions for the period of time after the 20 years. Solutions that can really be part of ecosystems. However, much is in progress already and I have a feeling these efforts have been growing at great speed lately.
The UN Climate Action Summit in September 2019 brought great political attention to the power of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) for climate and sustainable development. Scientists in many different countries are convinced it can be done.
Furthermore, we have the movement for regenerative cultures. We hear the call for changes to our economic system, finding a balance between economy and ecology. We see entrepreneurs finding new business models.
And we watch the very practical steps people themselves are taking to simplify their lives, consume less and become a creator, a contributor instead. All these hopeful movements are steps in the right direction…
Help of billionaires
According to the Bloomberg article, we will need $300 billion to make it work. So that’s another step in the plan. This amount is peanuts for the 10 richest people on our planet!
According to Forbes, there are 2,153 billionaires who are worth $8.7 trillion. Hello, rich guys and girls, give us a hand here and pay up for our planet and the future of all of our (grand)children…
It will be possible to convince them. If billionaires understand something it’s their economics. And let me tell you, this plan is also the most economically sane one I have read about in ages. Okay, it needs a mind-shift towards regenerative business thinking, but some of them would be open for that, I guess…
So let’s restore ecosystems in a huge way first. And then use synergy as a driver for our business models.
So this is the plan
Last month, at a UN conference on desertification in New Delhi, 196 countries plus the European Union agreed to a declaration that each country would adopt measures needed to restore unproductive land by 2030.
If the foundations these billionaires own anyway are getting behind this plan and governments all around the world give us support, we can make it work.
The knowledge is available, regenerative farming is gaining huge interest anyway, and many entrepreneurs are jumping the bandwagon of regenerative business models.
Movement, no organization
I’m not suggesting we should build the next organization to make it a controlled action with a dedicated director and such. I love biodiversity and every local situation needs different actions to restore their degraded lands. So lots of decentralized action is called for.
The plan is to stimulate a movement with large and small projects, feeding on each other, stimulating each other, cheering each other on. Organized, disorganized. Measuring or not measuring, just doing. All have a place in the movement. Nobody is leading and everybody is leading.
Let’s never judge each other harshly on using the wrong technique. Just help each other find better techniques if necessary. Be kind to each other while restoring the earth! There are many right ways around, just some more suitable than others for a certain local situation. We need to learn, experiment, helped by science, intuition, common sense and most of all our hearts.
A few examples of the land restoration techniques that are in progress. There will definitely be more that I don’t know of (yet):
- Indigenous techniques for restoring land
- Permaculture
- One straw revolution by Fukuoka
- Regenerative farming
- Agro-ecology
- Biodynamic farming
- Holistic grazing
- Korean natural farming
- Food forestry
All these techniques have one big thing in common: they restore the ecosystems by looking at the ways nature does it. Water cycles, carbon cycles, soil health, the interaction between plants, trees, animals and crops are all important aspects.
Good plan?
Well, there is lots of action needed. And we can all do our bit if we believe in it. Maybe Greta Thunberg can talk to the billionaires? Maybe a Catholic person can talk to the Pope to restore the vast area of lands owned by the Catholic church?
Maybe we can start movements in every country to convince our governments to give us wasteland to fix? Maybe we can start by restoring our own gardens?
Ecologists, permaculturists, regenerative farmers, scientists, nature-protectors, entrepreneurs, inventors, building with nature specialists, and rich people let’s join forces and just do it…
Any more suggestions on how to move this plan for reversing climate change and increasing resilience? I would love to read about them in the comments.
And of course, I’m available on LinkedIn or Facebook for discussion.
Thanks, Kees Klomp for lighting the spark that resulted in this article.
