Climate change and environmental change: one problem, many converging solutions!
If you want to understand climate change and its solutions, here are two sites produced by competent and honest scientists:
– to ask questions that the expert community will answer: https://questions-climat.be/
– to be documented with solid data validated by the scientific community of climatologists: http://www.cdeclin.be/focusclimat/
To go to the source of the most correct and complete knowledge that scientists produce for policy makers:
* On climate: the GIEC or IPCC brings together climate scientists from all over the world to prepare reports on the state of the climate. On the official page https://www.ipcc.ch/, you can find these reports and especially the “summary for policy makers” or summaries of about thirty pages, of each of the reports. These texts are usually in English, but you can easily translate from English into the language of your choice by copying the text you want to read into the free translation software “DeepL” for example https://www.deepl.com/translator.
* On biodiversity and the state of our living planet: IPBES brings together biologists from around the world to report on the state of living nature on earth, similarly to the IPCC regarding climate change. On the official page https://www.ipbes.net/assessment-reports, you will find these reports and especially the “summary for policy makers” or summaries of about thirty pages, of each of the reports. The latest report is the report published on May 6th, 2019. These texts are usually in English, but you can easily translate from English into the language of your choice by copying the text you want to read into the free translation software “DeepL” for example https://www.deepl.com/translator.
If you want to take action, and reduce your impact on your environment: you can do it by consuming less and better!
A first solution accessible to everyone and good for the portfolio is to consume less and better. Here is how to do it in Wallonia, Belgium: the “Guide du Consommateur wallon Heureux” gives you many solutions to ensure that your daily consumption is done in a way that respects our environment. It was the students in the Master of Ecology and Environment at UCLouvain who wrote this guide in 2016 under the supervision of Prof. C. Nieberding. This guide that won the Prize of the Wallonian Region for the competition “1001 ideas to save our planet” by the Belgian national museum of natural history. To be read and to spread around you!
A second solution within everyone’s reach, which makes it possible to limit climate change, to reduce the pressure on our natural environments, and to live longer, is to eat less meat. Numerous reports have been accumulating on this subject since 2018: in the flagship scientific journals of PNAS (Shepon et al 2017), Nature (Springmann et al 2018), Science (Godfray et al 2018), The Lancet (Willett et al 2019). In Wallonia, less than 10% of the cereals produced on our land are eaten by humans, while almost 50% is used to feed the animals we feed (Delcour et al 2014). Hence, we could easily leave more space to our beautiful nature of we just reduced our meat consumption. And this goes with longer and healthier lifespan as well.