The Earth is on a “disastrous trajectory” with “no adequate global governance” to deal with the scale of threats posed by climate tipping points, warns a major new report.
These tipping points “pose some of the gravest threats faced by humanity”, according to the authors.
They identify more than 25 tipping points across the Earth system, ranging from ice-sheet collapse to rainforest dieback.
“Five major tipping points are already at risk of being crossed due to warming right now and three more are threatened in the 2030s as the world exceeds 1.5C global warming,” the report finds.
Crossing Earth system tipping points would have “catastrophic” impacts on societies, with the potential to “escalate violent conflicts, mass displacement and financial instability”, the report also warns.
The authors say that promoting “positive social tipping points” in socio-behavioural, technological, economic and political systems is “the only realistic systemic risk governance option” to limit the risks.
Many positive tipping points have already been crossed – such as renewable energy becoming the cheapest form of electricity in some countries, and electric vehicles gaining the largest share of the market in others – the report finds.
An international team of more than 200 researchers have contributed to this report, which was initiated at a conference on tipping points in September 2022. (See Carbon Brief’s coverage of the event.) The report was funded by the Bezos Earth Fund.
The authors of the report support a proposal – currently under consideration – for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to prepare a special report on the topic of tipping points.
They also call for the risks and opportunities around tipping points to be included in the global stocktake of progress towards the goals of the Paris Agreement, as well as future revisions of Nationally Determined Contributions and national and sub-national policy measures.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief unpacks the report’s findings on “negative” Earth system tipping points and “positive” social tipping points.
- What are tipping points?
- What are the main Earth system tipping points?
- When could key thresholds be crossed?
- What are the impacts of crossing tipping points?
- Can ‘positive tipping points’ mitigate the risks?
What are tipping points?
Scientists have warned for decades that many Earth systems are at risk of crossing “tipping points” – critical thresholds that, if exceeded, could push a system into an entirely new state.
Prof Tim Lenton is the chair of climate change and Earth system science at the University of Exeter and lead author of the new report on “global tipping points”. He describes a tipping point as a system in which “a small change makes a big difference and changes the state or the fate of a system”.
The report uses the analogy of a ball in a valley to describe tipping points, as shown in the graphic below.
In the left-most panel (blue), the ball sits in the left-side valley. If the ball is given a small push, it rolls briefly up the side of the valley before returning to its starting position. This “resilience” – the system’s ability to withstand changes – shows that the system is stable, the report says.
However, the report warns that human activity – including climate change, ecosystem degradation and pollution – are making many Earth systems less stable. This is shown by the left-hand valley getting shallower in the middle panel (purple) and the lowering of the hill between it and the right-hand valley. Now it would be easier for the ball to move into the right-hand valley when pushed.
As a system comes close to a tipping point, it may be slower to return to its original state after a “perturbation” or disturbance, the report says. This would be shown by the ball returning more slowly to its original position after it is pushed.
Dr David McKay – an independent research consultant and visiting fellow at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute – is a section lead on the new report. He describes this behaviour as a “wobble” and tells a press briefing that it can often be picked up using observational data. This is important, because it can provide an early warning signal that a tipping point is approaching.
A “tipping point” is crossed when the ball rolls past the point of no return into the right-side valley, leaving its original state and settling into a new stable state. This is shown in the right-hand panel (red). It is now very difficult for the ball to return to its original state in the left-hand valley.
The report says that a tipping point occurs “when change in part of a system becomes self-perpetuating beyond a threshold, leading to substantial, widespread, frequently abrupt and often irreversible impact”.
Under this definition, it is also possible for tipping points to be reversible and “non-abrupt” – although this is not usually the case, the authors note.
What are the main Earth system tipping points?
In recent years, there has been plenty of academic discussion about which elements of the Earth system might exhibit tipping points.
The report synthesises hundreds of peer-reviewed articles to identify more than 25 parts of the Earth system that have tipping points across the cryosphere, biosphere, atmosphere and oceans. (Carbon Brief has previously unpacked nine of them in detail.)
Importantly, the authors also show which systems they do not believe to exhibit tipping behaviour.
Cryosphere
The report identifies multiple tipping points in the cryosphere, as shown on the map below.
The colours and markers indicate how confident the authors are that each system has a tipping point. A red bar and “+++” marker indicates that the authors are very confident that the system is a tipping point. A blue bar and “- – -” marker indicates that the authors are very confident that the system is not a tipping point. The four arrows and globe symbols indicate regional and global systems, respectively.
There are “multiple lines of evidence” to support the existence of “large-scale” tipping points from the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the report says, explaining that if ice loss exceeds a threshold amount, self-amplifying feedbacks could cause the ice to disintegrate even faster, leading to large-scale ice-sheet “collapse”.
Conversely, the authors have “high confidence” that Arctic summer sea ice loss is not a tipping system, finding that in models and observations, summer sea ice loss tends to increase “gradually, but surely” in line with warming.
Meanwhile, the authors find evidence for “localised and regional” tipping points in glaciers and permafrost, but find that these systems do not exhibit “large-scale tipping dynamics”.
Oceans and atmosphere
There are four further tipping points in the oceans and atmosphere, including monsoons over west Africa, India and South America, clouds and El Niño southern oscillation (ENSO), according to the report. These are shown in the map below.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is a major system of ocean currents that plays an important role in regulating the global climate. The report explains that rising temperatures, combined with an influx of cold, fresh water from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, could destabilise these ocean currents, potentially causing the entire system to “shut down”.
Similarly, the authors find evidence for tipping points in the overturning circulations in the Atlantic and the Southern oceans, as well as for the west African monsoon.
The authors also assess the literature on cloud-induced tipping points. Various different mechanisms linked to incoming solar radiation and outgoing infrared radiation have been suggested, but the authors conclude that “concern about cloud-driven tipping points is relatively low”.
Biosphere
The report finds the most tipping points in the biosphere, as shown in the map below. Different colours of shading indicate different biomes – for example, coral reefs in red and mangroves in pink.
Systems in the biosphere have more “co-drivers” that can reduce their resilience – such as climate change, habitat loss and pollution – making tipping points easier to reach, the report finds.
For example, it notes that the Amazon provides much of its own rainfall by cycling water between the atmosphere and vegetation. Deforestation and climate change can disrupt this mechanism, pushing the system over a tipping point where it turns from forest into savannah. This process is called forest “dieback”.
Among tropical forests, there is most evidence of a tipping point for the Amazon, the report finds. Other tropical forests such as the Congo have evidence for local tipping points, but are less likely to cross them, the report finds.
The authors also find that mangroves and sea grasses – which are “historically among the most human-threatened ecosystems in the world” – are at risk tipping regionally. They highlight regional examples of “mangrove die-off”, which typically occur when the mangroves are “physiologically stressed”.
The report also looks at marine food webs and fisheries, finding that “marine community shifts take place when abrupt changes cascade through several species or functional groups of an ecosystem”.
When could key thresholds be crossed?
Assessing when key climate tipping points may be crossed has been a key area of research for many years. One way to identify imminent tipping points is by looking for the “wobble” or “loss of resistance” in a system.
For example, the report cites research that finds three-quarters of the Amazon rainforest has lost “resilience” since 2003, making it slower to recover from droughts and heatwaves. This indicates that the forest could be approaching a tipping point, the authors say.
Parts of the Greenland ice sheet and AMOC are also exhibiting a loss of resilience, the report finds. It adds that given present-day warming of 1.2C, tipping of warm-water coral reefs is likely:
“Coral reefs are already experiencing tipping points, as more frequent warming-driven bleaching events, along with pollution, extreme weather events and diseases, tip them to degraded algae-dominated states.”
As the planet continues to warm, the likelihood of crossing key thresholds increases. The report also draws on research recently published by McKay, which assesses how many tipping points could be triggered at different levels of global warming.
The upper half of the plot below shows the likelihood of triggering 15 tipping elements at different temperature levels. Yellow indicates a low likelihood and red indicates a high likelihood, while the dotted line indicates a central estimate.
The grey line underneath shows observed warming to the present day and projections out to 2100 from 1.5C (green) to more than 4C (red). The grey shading in the upper chart indicates expected warming given current climate policies.
The report says that five different tipping points are already “at risk of being crossed due to warming right now”. These are Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheet collapse, warm-water coral reef die-off, widespread localised abrupt thaw in permafrost and overturning circulation collapse in the North Atlantic subpolar gyre.
The North Atlantic subpolar gyre is a counter-clockwise ocean current to the south of Greenland, which drives the oceanic currents and redistributes heat and freshwater in the high latitude North Atlantic. The gyre is a component of AMOC, and is considered as a major tipping element of the climate system.
The report adds that three more tipping points are at risk of being crossed in the 2030s as the world exceeds 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
However, the report warns that key thresholds could be crossed “at lower levels of global warming than previously thought”, adding:
“Our best models likely underestimate tipping point risks. The world is largely flying blind into this vast threat.”
This underestimation is largely due to “patchy and fragmented” knowledge, the authors say. For example, they note that “typical modelling approaches struggle to accurately represent ice sheet dynamics”.
The authors of the report support a proposal for the IPCC to prepare a special report on the topic of tipping points. The proposal was put forward by Switzerland in May 2022 and is currently under consideration.
What are the impacts of crossing tipping points?
The impacts of crossing Earth system tipping points “could be catastrophic”, the report warns.
Melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets would endanger coastal communities, and could lead to the complete loss of many small island nations, the report finds. Antarctic ice sheet instability alone could lead to a potential sea level rise of two metres by 2100, exposing 480 million people to annual coastal flooding events, it says.
Amazon dieback would be a “catastrophe for biodiversity”, the report finds. Reduced river flow would lead to transport difficulties in the region, and some six million people would face “extreme heat stress risk”. Overall, the report estimates that a complete Amazon dieback would cause damages of between $1tn and $3.5tn.
Thawing permafrost causes the ground to become unstable or “slump”, and the report warns that 70% of current infrastructure in permafrost regions is in areas with “high potential for thaw by 2050”.
It adds that crossing a tipping point in the AMOC would lead to global changes in rainfall patterns, with implications for water security and crop production around the world. The warm water that the AMOC carries northwards releases heat into the atmosphere, which means it plays a crucial role in keeping Western Europe warm.
However, the Earth system tipping points do not act in isolation. The authors find that crossing some tipping points, such as the dieback of rainforests or thawing of permafrost, releases more CO2 into the atmosphere, causing further warming.
Furthermore, many Earth systems are interlinked, meaning that crossing one tipping point can increase the likelihood of crossing others. The authors describe this as a “domino effect” or “tipping cascade”.
The map below shows these interactions. Red arrows indicate that crossing one tipping point causes another system to become more unstable, making it more likely to tip. Blue arrows indicate the opposite. Grey arrows indicate unclear effects.
Systems that may not tip on their own – but are still important due to their interactions with other systems – are shown with a blue outer circle. Tipping systems that exert a notable feedback on global average temperature when they tip are denoted by a red inner ring.
The report finds that the majority of interactions between climate tipping systems are destabilising – indicating that crossing one tipping point will generally lead to further tipping points being crossed.
For example, disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet would result in large volumes of cool freshwater flowing into the ocean, which could push the AMOC beyond a tipping point. This, in turn, could lead to an intensification of ENSO, which could go on to influence weather patterns over the Amazon, causing rainforest dieback, the report explains.
Crossing key tipping points “could have catastrophic impacts on human societies”, including an increase in violence and conflict, large-scale displacement and financial destabilisation, the authors warn.
The report says that Earth system destabilisation could lead to “social cohesion breaking down”, driving an increase in “mental disorders”, as well as “greater radicalisation of various groups and polarisation, making it harder to find collective solutions”. The report adds:
“These impacts could escalate to threaten the breakdown of economic, social and political systems, triggering destructive tipping points in societies experiencing stresses beyond their ability to cope.”
The authors add that each time a tipping point is crossed, humanity will be forced to divert more attention and resources into disaster response, “eroding away some of our agency
to tackle the underlying drivers”. This in turn would make it more likely for more tipping points to be crossed in the future, creating a “vicious cycle”, they say.
Can ‘positive tipping points’ mitigate the risks?
“The existence of tipping points means that ‘business as usual’ is now over,” the report warns. It adds:
“Rapid changes to nature and society are occurring, and more are coming. If we don’t revise our governance approach, these changes could overwhelm societies as the natural world rapidly comes apart.”
However, the authors add that “currently, there is no adequate global governance at the scale of the threats posed by negative tipping points”.
The authors argue that “positive social tipping points” – feedbacks in socio-behavioural, technological, economic and political systems that trigger a positive change – could be “the only realistic systemic risk governance option” to limit the risks.
Lenton told the press briefing that humanity has “left it basically too late for incremental action on the climate crisis”, adding that positive tipping points are key to limiting dangerous levels of warming.
Many positive social tipping points are being reached or have already been crossed, the authors say.
For example, they say that renewable energy has reached a tipping point of cost parity with fossil-fuelled power generation. They add that electric vehicles “show evidence of passing or approaching tipping points in major markets including China and Europe”.
Dr Tom Powell – a research impact fellow at Exeter’s Global Systems Institute and section lead on the report – told the press briefing that “the more of something we build, the cheaper it gets to build”.
He called this a “powerful reinforcing feedback”, adding that it is responsible for some of those cost reductions and renewable energies and electric vehicles.
In a similar way to negative Earth system tipping points, one positive social tipping point can trigger another, leading to a domino or cascade that generates “widespread societal change”, the authors say. Lenton outlined a positive tipping cascade in electric vehicle manufacture:
“As electric vehicles pass the positive tipping point of market dominance, this produces lots of cheap batteries, and those low cost batteries are crucial to provide essential storage capacity to reinforce a different positive tipping point towards renewable energy for our power supply.
“And that can in turn trigger positive tipping points in producing green ammonia and green hydrogen fuels for fertiliser, shipping and so on.”
Powell adds that “social contagion is a really powerful force”, noting that “the more people around you who are adopting sustainable choices, the more likely you are to do so yourself”. He adds:
“The more visible sustainable choices are among the general population, the easier it becomes for politicians to make policy choices that might have seemed very difficult a few years ago.”
However, positive social tipping points “don’t just happen by magic”, Lenton told the press briefing. Instead, he said they need “coordinated action”.
The report’s authors call for Earth system tipping point risks, corresponding action and positive tipping point opportunities to be included in the global stocktake under the Paris Agreement, as well as future revisions of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and national and sub-national policy measures.
The most recent iteration of the global stocktake text mentions climate tipping points twice. In one, it invites the scientific community to:
“Generate information relevant for NDCs and aligning them with 1.5C, cross-cutting considerations such as tipping points, guidance on risks and impacts, vulnerability, cryosphere and closing observation gaps.”
Dr Manjana Milkoreit – a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo and section lead on the report – adds that decisions and actions taken in the coming decades will commit us to “really long-term changes”, adding that the issue of tipping points is important for our notions of intergenerational justice.
The post Q&A: Climate tipping points have put Earth on ‘disastrous trajectory’, says new report appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: Climate tipping points have put Earth on ‘disastrous trajectory’, says new report
Starting on Monday, about 10,000 government negotiators, scientists, journalists and campaigners will gather at a purpose-built venue in a national park in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar to discuss how to stop land turning into desert as the world warms.
Drought is currently sweeping much of the Northern hemisphere, leaving normally green urban parks looking like dry savannah, causing crops to fail, food prices to rise and billions to be shaved off economic output.
On Wednesday, Britain’s prime minister chaired an emergency meeting of the government’s Cobra committee. These are usually reserved for wars, terrorist attacks, riots and pandemics – but this one was on the extreme heat and drought the UK has been suffering since May.
With many countries facing far worse with fewer resources than the UK, the issues to be discussed at the UN’s COP17 summit in Mongolia – often overlooked – should be nearer the top of policy-makers minds.
But what is COP17? What will be decided and announced there over the next two weeks? How does it relate to climate change and how will it help restore the lands on which we all rely for our food, water and other essential resources? Climate Home News explains all below.
What is COP17?
It is the conference of parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The parties are 196 governments, which includes all of the countries recognised by the UN.
The convention was conceived at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, at the same time as the other two larger “Rio trio” conventions on climate and biodiversity.
While the climate convention’s COP takes place every year, the UNCCD COP happens only once every two years. COP17 will be its seventeenth gathering.
What is desertification?
It is the process by which land degrades and becomes more like a desert, making it harder – and sometimes impossible – to grow crops or graze livestock there.
Climate change and other human activities – like excessive irrigation which depletes ground water – are making this process worse, causing poverty, hunger, health problems, forced migration and loss of species.
It’s a widespread problem. The UN estimates that half a billion people live within areas that have experienced desertification since the 1980s and that two-fifths of the world’s land is degraded.
What has it got to do with climate change?
The planet’s climate is heating up, mainly due to humans burning fossil fuels, and drying out its land. This kills plants and exposes the soil which can then be blown away by wind and washed away by water.
Without a top layer of soil, plants struggle to grow again and the land gets closer to being a desert. So combating desertification is a way of adapting to climate change.
It is also a way of lessening the pace of climate change, as land degradation releases carbon dioxide previously stored in healthy soils and plants.
What will be negotiated at COP17?
The main issue is what form a new initiative to tackle drought could take. The last COP saw Africa push hard for this to be a protocol – a kind of binding sub-treaty to the UNCCD.
But the US, Europe, Argentina and others argued that would take too long to set up, cost too much and take money away from what can be spent on the ground. They prefer a legally weaker alternative – a framework instead of a protocol.
Negotiations went late into the last night of talks in Riyadh, with the Saudis hosting informal consultations, but eventually governments had to agree to disagree and pick up talks again in Ulaanbaatar.
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Governments will also negotiate a new policy on protecting rangelands and pastoralists from degradation. Rangelands are areas where animals graze. They cover around half the Earth’s land and include almost everything other than forest, deserts, farms, glaciers and cities. Pastoralists are people who herd animals on these rangelands, often moving from place to place to find fresh pasture.
COP17 host country Mongolia has a lot of both – and pushed successfully for the UN to declare 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. It is keen to agree a decision at COP17 bringing those issues more to the forefront of the UNCCD.
Negotiators will also debate the UNCCD’s post-2030 strategic framework, which they hope to adopt at COP18 in 2028. Campaign groups like the World Wildlife Fund want a stronger focus on biodiversity and nature-positive food systems.
What will happen when?
The COP will formally open with a ceremony on Monday August 17, followed by opening statements by governments and the adoption of the agenda.
Negotiations will begin, mostly behind closed doors for two weeks until the closing plenaries on Friday August 28.
While talks rumble on in the background, the second week will see senior government representatives including ministers get involved, with a “high-level segment” running from August 24-26.
They will discuss issues like drought resilience, finance and pastoralist communities. This is likely to be when any announcements – of new funding, for instance – are made.
On Monday August 24, there will also be an open dialogue between government officials and civil society members. Here, local practitioners are likely to share stories of how they are helping their communities reverse land degradation. UNCCD prides itself on being a bottom-up convention.
Unlike climate COPs, which often end a day or two over time, UNCCD COPs usually finish on the evening of their last day and – while they have gone late into the night – have never run into the next day.
What else should we watch out for?
At the last COP two years ago, host Saudi Arabia led the creation of an initiative called the Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership to help 80 of the poorest nations deal with drought.
It received $12 billion in pledges, mainly from Gulf-based development finance institutions. Saudi Arabia is expected to report back on whether these pledges have been delivered and how the money will reach those in need now.
There are also hopes that governments will announce financial support for Mongolia’s Rangelands Flagship Initiative, which aims to mobilise investment in projects to fight land degradation.
Who will preside over COP17?
While the last five and the next two climate COPs have been or will be presided over by men, COP17 will be woman-led with Mongolia’s foreign minister, Battsetseg Batmunkh, as president.
This will also be the first COP for the UNCCD’s new executive director Yasmin Fouad. Before being appointed environment minister in her native Egypt, Fouad was a scientist and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on desertification. She played a key role at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in 2022.
Although Saudi Arabia’s UNCCD COP presidency is ending, the Gulf power house will likely continue to be influential. It has supported the COP financially as part of the Riyadh-Ulaanbaatar action agenda and will be following up on initiatives announced two years ago.
While Saudi Arabia is often blamed for obstructing progress at climate talks, as a desert nation it is generally thought to have played a constructive role at UNCCD COPs.
What are the negotiating dynamics?
The UNCCD has six main negotiating groups: Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Northern Mediterranean, Central and Eastern Europe, and developed donor countries. Governments can also speak in their own capacities.
While divisions between the Global North and Global South do exist at UNCCD COPs, they are not as stark as at climate COPs. The Global South’s umbrella group – the G77 and China – usually only speaks on finance issues, on which developing countries tend to be united.
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Civil society groups are present but not as vocal or as confrontational as at climate COPs. There are generally no protests and campaigners tend to try to hold governments accountable more quietly. There are likely to be far fewer journalists than at climate COPs too.
What role will the US play?
While the US has left the UN’s climate convention, it remains in the UNCCD and is expected to bring a delegation of officials from its departments of agriculture and state. It is likely to resist any renewed push from Africa for a drought protocol.
The post Will the world’s drying lands get relief from COP17 in Mongolia? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Will the world’s drying lands get relief from COP17 in Mongolia?
Helen Phillips’ book, ‘Hum’, is set in a dystopian near future, in a city suffering the effects of climate breakdown and with dire air quality. Robots (the Hums) press advertising messages during conversations, meetings and even as they carry out medical procedures.
The Hums are vehicles for these ad messages, which are often for products like cosmetics, sweets or anything that might be relevant during interactions with humans. This advertising is poorly disguised, and merges with sentiments that lean towards concerns of well-being, convincing people how much better off they’ll be if they make a purchase.
While the novel is futuristic, the insidious way advertising permeates daily life is resonant of how adverts show up in our world today. And these ads are directly contributing to the worsening future climate Phillips describes in her book.
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Already by the summer of 2026, Europe had seen a 57% increase in wildfires in just four years with western Europe recording the hottest ever June and July on record. We’re facing droughts and floods, as well as predicted hikes in food costs or even chronic food shortages – and that’s before the expected additional effects of a strong El Niño later this year.
Frequent flying and bigger burgers
A portion of this climate breakdown is fuelled by over-consumption in richer countries, particularly of products that are high carbon – for which advertising can take some of the blame. Research shows that adverts drive citizens to consume about a third more goods and services in general, over and above what they might have purchased.
Yet despite a clear link between promoting high-carbon behaviours and climate breakdown, little advertising regulation exists in the UK. Take frequent flying for instance, one of the most carbon-intensive activities we can partake in.
EasyJet’s latest ad campaign is called “Drop Everything”. It encourages consumers to book cheap flights departing within the next 48 hours for presumably short or weekend getaways. Rather than promoting a specific destination, “Drop Everything” promotes a mindset that encourages indiscriminate consumption of flying. The ads were shown on billboards with clever creative slogans, as well as on digital media and through influencer campaigns.
Overall, flight numbers are increasing. The UK Civil Aviation Authority reported the highest number of UK passengers in the first quarter of 2026 (more than 61 million, breaking previous records for travel between January and March). It seems we’re still not joining the dots between flying and a worsening climate.
And how about meat consumption? Scientists advocate for less meat-eating, especially beef which has the highest carbon footprint of nearly all foods. Yet adverts from McDonald’s proliferate, helping make it one of the highest-volume sellers of fast-food chain beef burgers. In 2024, the outdoor advertising budget for McDonald’s UK rose to £86 million, an increase of 71% on previous years.
Small share for sustainability
While over half of UK ad professionals feel increasingly queasy about their profession and its effects on the climate crisis, the people running the show – the UK trade bodies – prefer to focus on the growth advertising brings.
In the first three months of 2026, they stated that UK advertising spend increased by 9.3%, reaching a total of £11.7 billion for that quarter, fuelling consumption and market growth.
But how many of those adverts actually promote low carbon goods and services? Kantar’s Sustainable Ads Tracker shows the percentage of ads featuring sustainability messaging in 2026 is around 4.3%. That’s woefully low, and much of this is made up of messaging that promotes recycling.
Additionally, the ad industry continues to happily produce adverts for the large oil and gas corporations that are fuelling climate breakdown. These adverts only narrowly pass the Advertising Standards Authorities’ advertising codes, allowing the continued greenwashing of the world’s most polluting brands.
There is essentially no leadership from the UK trade bodies, likely because they are directly funded by the brands and advertisers themselves. They are essentially ‘ad shushing’ – pushing for indiscriminate growth and directing attention to their sustainability awards, while confusingly denying that adverts drive higher consumption overall.
Let’s ‘un-shush’
Where does this leave us as we are subjected to hundreds, if not thousands, of persuasive advertising messages every day that support high-carbon lifestyles? Most ad professionals are unable to push back against this agenda at work, often due to the threat of job loss. The advertising trade bodies won’t take the lead as they work in service to big brands and advertisers.
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So, who can push for the changes we need? Members of the public.
Through pressuring our city officials and governments, we can force through restrictions, such as the watershed bans on unhealthy foods on TV before 9pm in the UK. Through supporting the efforts of organisations such as Ad Free Cities and others, we can help achieve bans on outdoor advertising for fossil fuels, aviation, meat and even single-use plastics in cities and regions such as Amsterdam, The Hague, Edinburgh, Florence, Uppsala and many more.
If we’re serious about climate change and stopping big global brands pushing their high-carbon products onto us, then advertising restrictions are one of the best ways to achieve this. If we don’t want a world like the one Phillips describes in her book, we need to make our voices heard above the advertising noise.
The post Pushing the climate crisis: How advertising fuels high-carbon lifestyles appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pushing the climate crisis: How advertising fuels high-carbon lifestyles
An upcoming UK government consultation on weakening targets for electric vehicles (EVs) could cost consumers as much as £3bn a year by 2030, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
It could require the UK to import an extra 17m barrels of oil in 2030, raising expected net imports by 8%, as well as adding 2.5% to national emissions that year, the analysis shows.
After years of fierce lobbying by parts of the car industry – and despite the significant savings on offer for EV drivers – media reports suggest that EV targets could be “watered down”.
Under current rules, battery EVs – BEVs, those which run only on electricity – must make up a rising share of new car sales in the UK.
This policy, known as the “zero-emission vehicles” (ZEV) mandate, was introduced by the previous Conservative government and sets a goal for 33% BEV sales in 2026, rising to 80% in 2030.
(Carmakers are able to use “flexibilities” to help meet their targets, which reduces the effective target under the ZEV mandate to an estimated 25% of sales in 2026.)
Now, the government under new Labour prime minister Andy Burnham is reported to be considering a cut in the BEV target for 2030 to just 50% of new car sales, alongside options for 60% or 70%.
Carbon Brief understands that a consultation on weakening the ZEV mandate is being reviewed by the prime minister’s office in Number 10, ahead of being formally released.
If the mandate is weakened to 50% by 2030 – and if carmakers make more use of “flexibilities” – there could be up to 3m fewer BEVs on UK roads by 2030, according to the NGO T&E.
Previous Carbon Brief analysis found that BEVs are around £1,100 cheaper to run per year than a petrol car, thanks to far lower fuel costs.
Overall, BEVs are more than £1,000 per year cheaper to own than either petrol cars or plug-in hybrids (PHEVs, which can run on petrol or electricity).
This is according to analysis of the “total cost of ownership” by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), including purchase price, fuel costs, insurance and proposed pay-per-mile charges.
In total, Carbon Brief analysis shows that UK drivers could be hit with an extra £3bn in annual ownership costs by 2030, if the ZEV mandate is weakened, as shown below.
A weaker ZEV mandate could “put billions of pounds of committed investments at risk”, reports BusinessGreen, including in the EV charging network and battery supply chains.
Industry group Energy UK says that the mandate is “working in the way it was designed to work” and that it is the “single biggest driver of emissions reductions” in government climate plans.
However, Carbon Brief analysis shows that a weaker ZEV mandate could result in an extra 7.4m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions (MtCO2) in 2030. This would add the equivalent of 2.5% to national emissions in 2030, under the UK’s international climate goal for that year.
In addition, a weaker ZEV mandate could result in the UK needing to import an extra 17m barrels of oil in 2030, equivalent to 8% of projected net imports that year.
Energy UK says that shifting to EVs will help to reduce household energy bills “for everyone”. This is not only through direct cost-of-ownership savings for EV drivers, but also by spreading the costs of upgrading the electricity system across a wider user base.
Car industry group the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders claims that its members are spending “blilions…on discounts, finance incentives and marketing support” and that “natural” EV demand is below the level required to meet the current ZEV mandate. Its claims are disputed.
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The post Analysis: Weaker EV targets could cost UK consumers £3bn a year by 2030 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Weaker EV targets could cost UK consumers £3bn a year by 2030
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