Across the world, communities are facing multiple crises, all at once, and as long as we look at each issue as separate and unrelated, we will fail to adequately address any of them. The reality is that climate change, poverty, inequalities and more intersect and interact and it is impossible to look at one without the others.
A new report from Scientists Warning Europe puts the UK’s cost-of-living crisis in the context of the climate crisis and demonstrates that “the impacts of COVID, conflict, and climate change have driven consumer prices higher around the world”, with strikes and protests taking place on a range of issues, an estimated 12,500 protests across 148 countries last year.
The report explains that the climate crisis is being underestimated, but that failing to address it is already causing significant problems around the world.
In terms of the cost of living specifically, the impacts of climate change “can be directly experienced by consumers, such as crop failures driving up food prices. They can also be indirect, such as flood-induced infrastructural damage and productivity losses.”
Like other issues, a rising cost of living does not only affect people who are struggling to pay their bills. It leads to social instability and combines with other local, national and international pressures. And as long as the climate issues are not dealt with, supply chains (which are also affected by conflict and Brexit) will continue to be interrupted, leading to food shortages such as the salad shortages seen in the UK earlier this year.
It’s not just food that is impacted by this polycrisis. Energy prices have risen dramatically and geopolitical conflict, as well as the changing climate affecting renewable energy, can worsen this significantly. As long as people are unable to stay warm – or cool – this can then have a detrimental effect on their health.
Health, of course, being another area of life that relies on factors like having access to food, being able to stay warm, and being able to pay bills. As prices rise and benefit cuts become yet more punitive, new diseases (as we saw all too clearly in 2020) can become even more of a threat as they spread “further north as the country warms, from the emergence of zoonotic diseases, and antimicrobial resistance”.
Plus the structures we rely on, such as buildings (including hospitals and homes) are at risk of damage from floods, heat waves and wind damage.
All of this combines to present a picture that Western governments’ current complacency is putting the world at risk, with biodiversity, human health, structures, food and fuel under threat.
The Scientists Warning Europe report advocates speeding up the timeline by which we plan to have reached “net zero”, saying:
“Given increasing climate impacts and large mitigation opportunities, net-zero could be accelerated to earlier than 2050. Setting an earlier goal for 2040 or 2030 could provide the anticipated benefits of net-zero earlier at low to negative cost. That is, moving faster in energy and food transitions may be better for the country, both economically and environmentally.”
And when conservatives (and Conservatives) inevitably grumble about costs, speeding up the energy transition is actually cheaper than not doing so.
“The net-zero transition has been identified as the economic opportunity of the 21st century by numerous agencies and reviews. It has been estimated that the market opportunity of net-zero to British businesses is worth £1 trillion 2030, growing larger past 2030. Government estimates place the number of jobs required in the transition at 480,000 (reviews place the estimate somewhere between 135,000 and 725,000 net new jobs). An estimated 250,000 new jobs have already been created in the transition so far. The race for net-zero is speeding up internationally, with the US, EU, and China all releasing major investment packages. However, there are no signs of any similarly ambitious package being developed in the UK.”
By contrast, paying for the consequences of the ongoing roll-out of the polycrisis is exhausting and endless, with no solution in sight.
However, we should not be doing this because of the money. Even if it cost substantially more than the current inaction, that would still not justify burying our heads in the sand and waiting for disaster to strike. Because as long as people can’t afford to eat, become unwell, lose their homes, have to relocate due to climate change, and suffer, that should be justification enough to invest as much as is needed to do our utmost to resolve the problem.
The report comes with recommendations for governments to adopt.
Despite the demonstrated benefits of a faster energy transition, the UK is falling behind on the required policies and emission reductions to reach net-zero by 2050. Additionally, it is relying on technologies – such as Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage and hydrogen heating systems – that will cost more, that will not deliver the co-benefits of energy and food transitions, and that threaten to increase the cost of living, rather than reduce it. Fortunately, there have been many landmark reports that offer evidence-based guidance for transitioning energy and food systems. The below recommendations for tackling cost-of-living (resulting from climate impacts) overlap with the policy recommendations from various national reviews summarised throughout this report. Also included, is a call to conduct further work to account for the distributional impacts of the net-zero transition, and the development of new models that can investigate the impacts of an earlier net-zero target of 2030 or 2040:
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Adoption the 300 recommendations of the 2023 Climate Change Committee Progress Report to Parliament.
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Adoption of the 14 recommendations of the National Food Strategy, ranging from subsidy reform to help farmers transition to more sustainable land use, to improving access to fruit and vegetables for low-income families.
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Adoption of the UK Climate Change Committee’s recommendations for a step change in the National Adaptation Programme to both increase ambition and to ensure delivery of adaptation measures. Adoption of the CCC’s 94 2023 climate change adaptation recommendations.
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Campaign for a national, government-led program for mapping distributional climate impacts on lower income communities and the development of pre-emptive policies for easing the burdens of increasing cost of living.
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Further modelling to assess benefits of an earlier transition, by 2040 and by 2030. Given the large-scale investment and labour changes that would be needed, this may require the development of new classes of models that account for larger scale changes to the economic system.
I hold out no hope for Rishi and co to take any proactive steps, but as people we have the power to insist that those who claim to represent us are doing all they can to protect our future and improve our present.
Image: Mike Liu