Climate change is a topic that deeply concerns all of us and here is why.
Climate change is coming faster than we think
Climate change is potentially the most devastating and hardest problem that we have faced during our existence.
Although the impacts of global warming such as decreased harvests, increased floods, droughts, extreme weather events, desertification, and the displacement of hundreds of millions of people are happening, it is slowly occurring year by year giving us a false sense of comfort.
This is why the world is only progressively moving towards eco-friendly solutions, allowing for decades to pass before we truly stop releasing greenhouse gasses and stop making the problem worse.
We cannot stop climate change without stopping deforestation
In addition to all of this, trees, our primary allies in the fight against climate change, are being cut down at alarming rates. By 2021, it is estimated that 15 billion trees are cut down every year to make space for the production of crops that are used for consumer products, or to make space for cattle ranching in order to produce more meat.
Meanwhile, we are answering this problem by planting trees ourselves, but our current collective effort of organizations such as Tree-Nation and world governments only sum up to an estimate of 5 billion trees planted per year, which means we lose roughly 10 billion trees every year.
At this rate, we can expect to have no more rainforests by the year 2100 and no trees by the year 2200.
With trees storing around twice as many greenhouse gasses as there are currently in the atmosphere, without stopping deforestation we will doom our planet and ourselves to an extremely dangerous future with global temperatures increasing by over 4.0 °C this century, and potentially much more in centuries to come.
The responsibility of addressing this problem has fallen upon our shoulders, and ensuring that we are increasing the number of trees on this planet every year rather than waiting until there are no more trees is one of the most important missions set upon humans ever. At Tree-Nation we are committed to planting 1 trillion trees by 2050. We consider the 1 trillion trees milestone to be sufficient to put a full stop to the continuous worldwide loss of trees, basically solving deforestation, while also allowing the capture of at least 250 billion tons of already emitted CO2 particles from the atmosphere.
Read more about our mission here
If we fail, large parts of the world's population will suffer
Allowing for climate change to continue at its current rate will lead to at least 200,000,000 climate refugees by 2050. If we do not prevent a tipping point and an exponential increase in the speed of global warming by this point, the number of refugees by the year 2100 will lead to the collapse of multiple population centers around the world.
Although this news is certainly dire and frightening, we cannot hope to solve the problem if we ignore the true risks and consequences of acting too slowly.
If you would like to learn more about the details of climate change, check out our Eco Education series.