'The clock is ticking': Less talk, more action needed in the race against climate change
It's been over a year since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned global warming needed to be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, so what has been done in that time to address the rising risk of climate change? Brittney Deguara reports. Around the world, more people are talking about climate change than ever before. But in crucial ways, conversation hasn't led to change. It's time to "get on with the action", says Victoria University climate scientist Professor James Renwick. "This is an emergency. This is not a joke, not a drill. Every year that passes, even every month that passes without action just makes the problem that much harder. "The clock is ticking," he told Stuff . * Read more from Because Journalism , our campaign focused on the valuable role our quality, local journalism plays in society. More than a year has passed since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its special report and outlined the importance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. "When that IPCC report came out last year, they said 12 years to reduce emissions by half, meaning from 2018 to 2030, so now it's 11 years, and by the time the Climate [Change] Commission comes to life, it'll be 10 years, and if they come up with their first recommendations within a year, it'll be nine years." The introduction of the Zero Carbon Bill , the Government's flagship climate change policy , was a step in the right direction, he said, but democratic processes meant it took time to take effect. "If it [the Zero Carbon Bill] can be made to happen, it's exactly what New Zealand needs and what the whole world needs ... but again, the pace of that ... that's the catch, democracy is not a fast process." While more people were talking about climate change than ever before - Renwick said this widespread conversation didn't even exist a year ago - it had been a topic of importance among scientists for almost 30 years. Renwick researched the changing climate and its future effects on New Zealand for almost three decades. During that time, numerous IPCC reports, the first of which was published in 1990 , detailed the potential dangers of climate change, including the rate of rising temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations. Renwick said this original information didn't have the same "level of detail" as the most recent publications, but "the message was basically the same". "The warnings have been there for decades that we risk these sea level rises ... damage to food production ... damage to society basically, so yeah, a lot of time has been wasted." The warning was heeded by several parts of the world - Renwick highlighted parts of Europe and the UK as leaders of change - but others were working backward - India had increased its use of coal and Australia approved a large coal mine in Queensland . New Zealand was somewhere in the middle of this, Renwick said. As a whole, he believed all countries needed to do more. "2018 global emissions of greenhouse gases were a record high, there's no sign 2019 emissions are going to be any less." Though changes were slowly being implemented, Renwick believed the urgency of the situation still hadn't been fully comprehended by those in power. "That mindset that this is ... a race for all our futures and if we don't make it, the future could be really, really grim, that didn't seem to [get] through. "I think if governments everywhere really took on board how urgent this is and how risky this is if we don't take enough action, I would think they'd be doing an awful lot more. "The potential costs are just ... almost infinite. What cost if you lose your country?" In the last year, Renwick explained New Zealand had been slowly walking towards the goal laid out by the IPCC, rather than rushing. "If we came out of the gate walking 30 years ago, that probably would've been enough, we could've taken quite gradual action over a couple of decades, but we didn't. "If we're going to tackle this the way we say we want to, it is a sprint." New Zealand was already ahead of the game with its renewable energy - 40 per cent of the country's energy was renewable, according to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment data - but the rate of change was poor. Renwick believed if we continued moving at the same pace over the next 10 years in the hopes of reaching the IPCC goal, we wouldn't even come close. "We need to start seeing emissions going down by several per cent every year". Seeing greenhouse gas reductions of 5 per cent or 6 per cent by the end of next year would be a hopeful start. "That's what we need to see and we need to build on that and then keep it going." The IPCC's 2018 recommendations aligned with the rules set out by the 2015 Paris Climate Accord , but Renwick explained 1.5C wasn't a "magic number" nor an indicator for when the world would be "all out of control". It would be possible for us to have a warmer limit but it would result in more extreme events. "The warmer it gets, the more extreme events change, the more sea levels rise, the harder it is to deal with and the more risks of big losses, big drops in food production and displacement of people." "It just becomes really difficult to deal with as it gets warmer and warmer," he said. Ideally, Renwick hoped we would be able to halt warming before 2C, but if we missed the mark it didn't mean we should stop trying. "In a way, it's never too late. "Whenever we stop emitting fossil fuels, that's when climate change will stop, and if that's at 5C of warming, well okay, so be it, that's still better than 6C of warming, not much better [though]." He also suggested extending the "zero carbon" end date to a more realistic goal of 2070. "The time frame is pretty brutal," he said. "We have generated this problem from our emissions of carbon dioxide ... we are the ones with our foot on the throttle and it's totally over to us as to when we stop doing this, whenever we stop emitting ... greenhouse gases, that's when climate change will slow down and stop." You'd be hard-pressed to go a day without reading, hearing or watching a news story about climate change . But media saturation was a necessity, according to Renwick who said climate change coverage from Stuff and various global media outlets was crucial and "totally powerful".. "We all seem to have pretty short attention spans these days and people do need to hear things more than once to really get the message. "We're in this era of alternative facts and fake news ... having news organisations with journalists whose job it is to find out what's going on and tell people about it, I think, is absolutely vital." Renwick believed Stuff's original coverage of the IPCC report in October, 2018 , was "important" and "really brought home the urgency of the problem". "Covering that story thoroughly, in-depth, well, and repeatedly, I think was a great thing to do. "It really hammered the idea that if we're going to stop warming soon then we have to act right now." Stuff's dedicated climate change project , launched in November - titled Quick! Save the Planet - "really helped move things along in terms of public perceptions" about the urgency of climate change. Renwick recalled a recent encounter with someone who claimed they were "over climate change" and "tired of hearing about it". But he compared the current climate coverage to that of the All Blacks. "We hear about the All Blacks pretty much every day, no-one's ever said, 'oh geez, I can't be bothered hearing about this rugby anymore, give me a break from that'," he laughed. "[Climate change] is way more of a drama than what the rugby result was last weekend." In the last few years, climate change coverage had multiplied, and rightly so, because we "can't just let it go away or fade into the background". "It's such an all-encompassing thing and it does affect everybody and everything, and it is only going to get worse unless we take action. "We do need to be constantly reminded about it at least."