Writing about the environment can be depressing and repetitive, and I am relieved that I have been able to take a break from it this year to focus my attention on biomedicine and health stories. But I have still kept an eye on progress, or lack of it, and can say with confidence that it is still depressing and repetitive. This has been another terrible year for the planet.
The litany of woes is wearily familiar: record temperatures, extreme weather, the continued collapse of nature and tides of waste and pollution. So is our collective global response. Don鈥檛 Look Up, indeed!
In November, the latest round of biodiversity negotiations, held in Cali, Colombia, delivered what we described as a 鈥�big flop for protecting nature鈥�. Meanwhile, the science just continues to deliver bad news. A from the Zoological Society of London and the World Wildlife Fund, for example, found that the collapse of biodiversity is accelerating. Its 2022 report found populations of wild vertebrates had declined by 70 per cent since 1970. This year, the figure reached 74 per cent.
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The climate is faring no better. In October, a group of leading scientists issued a bleak assessment of 35 key 鈥減lanetary vital signs鈥�, finding that 25 of them are in their worst-ever state and that Earth is on the brink of an .
This calendar year also looks certain to be the first to be 1.5掳C warmer than the preindustrial era. According to an by the climate news outlet Carbon Brief, 3 out of 5 of the leading research groups that track global surface temperature are predicting with some certainty that we will overshoot that figure. Only the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) thinks we won鈥檛, mainly due to differences in the methods it utilises to estimate global temperatures prior to 1900. But even NOAA predicts that 2024 will be the warmest year on record, beating the current holder, 2023, by some margin.
Speaking of NOAA, it is reportedly in for a bashing from the upcoming administration of US president-elect Donald Trump for producing data he doesn鈥檛 like. His disdain for environmental protections appears to know no bounds and, like many environmentalists, I shuddered at the prospect of him winning and despaired when he did. But on this front, maybe I am being too pessimistic. In the days after the election, I received a flurry of media statements and invitations to dissecting the likely impacts of his second presidency.
The take-home message was that, while not good news, Trump 2.0 won鈥檛 halt the unstoppable progress towards a clean energy economy and probably won鈥檛 lead to a domino-effect collapse of climate change negotiations. Small mercies.
But the fact remains that the climate and biodiversity crises barely got a look-in during the US election campaign. Maybe if they had, the Democrats would have done better: the result of the UK election showed that climate action is electorally popular.
Next year, I will be back on the environment beat and hope to bring better news. There were some green shoots of hope this year 鈥� the vital signs report found record levels of consumption of solar and wind energy and divestment from fossil fuels, and a decline in the rate of deforestation in Brazil. Yet, overall, our collective inability to solve these interlinked crises continues unabated.
Graham Lawton is a staff writer at New Scientist and author of Mustn鈥檛 Grumble: The surprising science of everyday ailments. You can follow him @grahamlawton
