UN Report: Hopeful Actions for a Code Red Climate

In August 2021, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a new report on the precarious status of Earth’s changing climate. This article was published in the September-October 2021 issue of NewsNotes.

A new UN climate report paints a grim picture of the conditions facing life on Earth if humans do not act immediately to drastically reduce carbon emissions. Global temperatures are getting so hot, the report says, that Earth is on track to surpass damaging levels of warming in about a decade. 

Calling it a “code red for humanity,” the United Nations says the report demonstrates “incontrovertibly” that global temperature rise over the past 200 years has been driven almost entirely by human activity. It explains how the next decade will be crucial for reducing planet-warming emissions, and that the greater the warming the more intense the extreme weather — hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and heat waves — and the more likely the impacts will be irreversible. 

Hope and motivation to move forward can feel fleeting in the wake of such grave news. In an article for Sojourner’s Magazine, Avery Davis Lamb and Karyn Bigelow, co-executive directors of Creation Justice Ministries, reflect on finding hope amid the climate crisis: