Take Action on Climate: Educate, Communicate, Mitigate, Adapt

by Dr. Alexandra Moore, Senior Education Associate

August 4, 2021

I was living in France in August 2003 during one of the most deadly weather events of the last 100 years.  A heat dome that broke temperature records across the European continent was responsible for an estimated 70,000 fatalities. Extreme heat in places that are more commonly cloudy and cool – such as Europe or the Pacific Northwest – focuses our attention on the threat of climate change. As least temporarily, until concerns that seem more urgent turn our gaze to other issues – economic concerns, racial justice, gun violence, the pandemic, and endless Zoom school.

With so much to think about we can easily feel overwhelmed. But what if we reverse that logic? With so much to think about, there are so many opportunities to make an impact. When I think about climate change, I organize the issues into four boxes: education, communication, mitigation, and resilience. Staying well-informed, and learning from reliable sources, builds understanding of climate science and helps each of us decide how we are best able to take action. Talking about climate change with friends, family, and co-workers is also important. The changing climate has a longer timeline than most of the other issues that confront us, so an ongoing conversation is key to making sure the subject doesn’t get pushed to the back of the line. Mitigation is the heart of the matter – we’ve got to mitigate, ASAP, to avoid permanent damage to human and natural communities. Resilience is where we go to make sure that the changes that are already inevitable will have as small an impact as possible.

As a climate educator, I engage with a lot of people and I answer a lot of questions. The most frequently asked is, “How do we solve the climate crisis?,” where the questioner is usually looking for a single silver bullet solution. The answer is that no single action can solve the problem. Which is an advantage, because it gives us so many opportunities to engage and to each bring our unique skills to work on the issues. Many actions taken by many people will build the solution.

I think about my experiences in Europe and learn from both the successes and failures there. The 2003 heat wave exposed hundreds of millions of cool-climate residents to an unprecedented weather event, revealing a deadly lack of resilience. European buildings are not air-conditioned and the concept of cooling centers was unknown. Sweaty families like mine went shopping for fans and air-conditioners and found every store out of stock with no new deliveries scheduled until the new year. Even without the power demand of extra AC units, the electric grid was strained to the point of having to violate environmental standards for the use of river water as a coolant at power plants. This was a multi-national, continent-wide failure to plan.

But why? The threat of global warming had been understood for decades. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was convened by the United Nations in 1988. By 2003 the IPCC had released three Assessment Reports, the third, in 2001, focused on adaptation. In the U.S., Congressional Representative Al Gore of Tennessee held hearings on climate change beginning in 1981. In 1997, 82 countries and the European Union committed to the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a group that now includes 192 nations.

Yet even as I write this in July 2021, the headlines pile up with more news of weather emergencies: floods in Europe and China, fires in Siberia and the U.S., and endless hot weather everywhere. “Everywhere” is the key word because that’s where the solutions are found too. We need to learn, talk, mitigate, and adapt, now.

I am once again in France, where I see myriad changes since 2003. Parisians are reimagining their city to improve the quality of life for residents and to reduce their climate impact. Cars are being pushed off city streets in favor of bicycles; 200 miles of new, dedicated, protected bike lanes have been created and the city’s bike-share program has expanded to 20,000 bikes. Shared electric car and electric moped programs are growing.  Subsidies to those who ride public transportation are provided both by the government and by employers. Green transportation is a win-win proposition, because the reduced fossil fuel use and expanded mobility of individuals improves human health while simultaneously cutting global greenhouse gas emissions.

At the national level, France provides rebates not only for electric vehicles but for E-bikes as well. A newly enacted law bans short-distance air travel when a high-speed rail alternative is available. Schools are expanding vegetarian options in state-funded meal programs. Landlords cannot rent properties with insufficient insulation. New solar farms have appeared, and Europe trails only Asia in installed wind power capacity. Fossil fuels are being replaced by renewably-powered electric systems, and more indoor spaces are now air conditioned with the expanding low-carbon electric grid. Even more extraordinary than the breadth of climate change solutions now codified in French law is the manner in which the 2021 law was crafted. In 2019 the Citizens’ Convention on Climate was created by the government, convening a panel of 150 French citizens, chosen by lottery, partnered with climate and legal experts. The Convention was tasked with designing a series of actions that would achieve a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions relative to a 1990 baseline by the year 2030. The government pledged to act on the Convention’s recommendations, and this week the new laws were finalized (learn more).

Any of these ideas could be the inspiration for action in other communities. Many other great ideas are also available to us. For example, Project Drawdown is a collection of 100 tested and currently available strategies at all scales to mitigate the impacts of climate change. For hands-on learning about climate science and climate change solutions, I recommend resources created by my own organization, the Paleontological Research Institution, and our new museum exhibit, Changing Climate: Our Future, Our Choice, as well as our collection of hands-on activities & experiments and videos related to climate change and energy.

Every action matters. We can start close to home, in our families and communities, then build on our success and expand outward to countries and continents. Is it time for a new car for your family? Go electric. How about convincing your school district to move to electric school buses or lobbying your city council for more bike lanes? Even a small step makes the problem a little bit easier, and there are plenty of steps for each of us to take. The most important thing is to step it up, starting right now.