Incinerating: ‘Only One Earth’

Just a few days to go for World Environmental Day, 5^th June, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on May 18 launched a plan to revolutionise the use of renewable energies. The plan comes when the UN’s weather agency World Meteorological Organisation, WMO, in Geneva stated in its 2021 report that greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat, sea-level rise and ocean acidification all hit new records last year.

We seem to be on top of breaking the records all the time, though in a negative way. The last seven years were the seven hottest on record. The impacts of extreme weather have led to deaths and diseases, migration and economic losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars, without showing the signs of slowing down.

‘Only One Earth’ is the theme of this year’s World Environment Day. We are not only pushing our ‘Only One Earth’ into the inferno but we are also breaking yet another record of the number of years of inaction by the citizens of that Earth in the wake of climate catastrophe.

We surely know what actions are needed. Windows of the opportunity are indeed crack-open. That crack is a narrow space of carbon neutrality by 2050, by making carbon emissions ‘net zero’. There are four key actions that our university movement of ‘Smart Campus Cloud Network’ promotes (sccnhub.com): 

• Skill the youth for ‘not zero’ but ‘net zero’. Building such skills by making the Campus of the university a laboratory and observatory is essential – Learning by Doing.
• Share the results of the activities of campus neutrality through digital technology to accelerate the implementation – Accelerate by Sharing.
• Encourage North-South and South-South University collaboration for the development of technologiesand not just for ‘technology transfer’ in the field of renewables and energy efficiency – Save Cost through Collaboration
• Keep the knowledge and data open for easy availability and quick accessibility of renewable technologies, by lifting intellectual property protections in renewable technologies, such as battery storage and E-waste –UNESCO’s Open Data movement.