The Guardian
- Bibi van der Zee
A look back at 12 months of key summits, devastating weather and
alarming discoveries
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Local youths and volunteers wait to support firefighters
during a wildfire next to the village of Kamatriades in
Greece.
Photograph: Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images
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January
The year began with a
counting up of the damage
after the catastrophic extreme weather events of 2020, from fires to floods.
Looking at the US alone, California
more than doubled
its previous annual wildfire record with more than 1.7m hectares (4.1m acres)
burned and Nasa concluded that 2020 had been the joint hottest year on record.
The US’s Noaa and the UK Met Office put it in close second to 2016.
And 2021 – the year that would see the crucial UN climate summit held in Glasgow
in November – was not showing signs of being much better. The continent of
Africa had its warmest January on record, while
torrential rains fell in Malaysia, leading to the evacuation of 50,000 people and the death of at least six.
Meanwhile in Turkey there were fears that Istanbul would run out of water
following
the most severe drought
in a decade.
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Residents in Sementeh, near Lanchang in Malaysia’s Pahang state
are evacuated on a digger. Photograph: Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images
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But there were small steps of progress on other fronts. Within hours of becoming
president, Joe Biden
announced that the US
would be rejoining the Paris agreement. The Israeli company StoreDot announced
that
car batteries
that could be fully charged in five minutes had been produced in a Chinese
factory for the first time.
In my view, we’ve already waited too long to deal with this climate
crisis and we can’t wait any longer. We see it with our own eyes, we
feel it, we know it in our bones, and it’s time to act.
Joe Biden
And in the UK a plan to reintroduce white-tailed eagles to the east of the
country was, unusually,
led by farmers, who said they wanted to “inspire people with nature and drive wider nature
recovery”.
February
The internationally renowned scientist James Hansen waded into the UK’s row over
plans for a new coalmine in Cumbria, saying it showed “contemptuous disregard
for the future of young people”. A few days earlier, nine activists had
announced that they were in a tunnel under London’s Euston station, dug secretly
beneath a tent, in order to protest against the high-speed rail link the UK
government was in the process of building.
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Protesters’ canary-shaped handwritten messages outside the Home
Office during a demonstration against a proposed coalmine in
Cumbria. Photograph: Alastair Grant/AP
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A historic wave of winter weather hit the eastern US and Texas, with nearly 10
million people without power at the storm’s peak, and
millions without water
after pipes burst; it was later assessed to have been the most
costly winter storm
event on record.
In an amazing rewilding operation in Indonesia,
10 rescued orangutans
were returned to the wild. Helicopters were used to ferry the critically
endangered apes deep into the forest.
And in Madagascar scientists found what is believed to be the
smallest reptile on Earth. Brookesia nana, a nano-chameleon, has a body the size of a sunflower seed,
just 13.5mm long.
March
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The world’s oldest Laysan albatross, a female named Wisdom,
nesting on Midway Atoll national wildlife refuge. Photograph: USFWS - Pacific Region
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New York was lit up by news that
dolphins had come to play
in the East River – validation of a long-term clean-up of the river which had
cost the city $45m. Further north, in the Midway Atoll wildlife refuge in the
North Pacific, the “oldest wild bird in history”, 70-year-old Wisdom the Laysan
albatross, hatched another chick. Banded by biologist Chandler Robbins in 1956,
Wisdom has outlived a number of partners (albatrosses normally mate for life).
On the other side of the planet, Australia
was being hit by horrendous floods, with thousands forced to flee rising waters in New South Wales, and the
insurance industry facing millions of dollars in claims. The same region,
meanwhile, was also battling
a mouse plague, with horrifying footage showing the ground moving as the rodents took over.
In the US, Deb Haaland was confirmed as the first ever
indigenous cabinet secretary, as she took over the environment department. The huge surge in renewable
energy around the world continued, with China announcing that it had built
windfarms with a
staggering total capacity of almost 100GW
in 2020 – an increase of nearly 60% on 2019.
But Climate Action 100,
launching the first ever benchmark
for tracking corporate progress on climate change, found that only a handful of
the big polluters were taking serious action.
April
A
landmark legal decision
by the German supreme constitutional court found that the government’s climate
protection measures were insufficient to protect future generations. The
government promised it would take action on what one of the young activists who
had brought the case called “a huge win for the climate movement”.
In the UK meanwhile, the coroner who oversaw the sad case of a young
girl, Ella Kissi-Debrah, who died after an asthma attack in 2013,
published a report
which called for the lowering of legally binding maximum levels of particulate
air pollution in the UK.
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Activists from the environmental group Fridays for Future
demonstrating in Berlin’s Invalidenpark. Photograph: Fabian Sommer/AP
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And in the US, a two-day summit on climate change
was wound up with promises
on all sides, including one from the US to cut its greenhouse gases by 50-52% by
2030.
The country also pledged to double financial aid to help other
countries with their targets. “Is it enough? No,” said John Kerry, Biden’s
climate envoy, who
had earlier struck a deal
to cooperate with China on climate change. “But it’s the best we can do today
and proves we can start to move.”
The shifts came against the background of a troubling development
however, as
scientists concluded that
the warm Atlantic current linked to severe and abrupt changes in the climate in
the past was now at its weakest in at least 1,600 years. The current is known as
the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc).
Huge sandstorms in China
turned the skies
over Beijing
yellow for several
days, while Cyclone Seroja brought heavy rain and strong winds to Western
Australia, with some locations seeing their
highest ever daily
rainfall.
May
A Dutch court ordered
Royal Dutch Shell
to cut its global carbon emissions by 45% by the end of 2030 in an unprecedented
ruling that will have huge implications for the energy industry and other
polluting multinationals.
The decision came just as the
International Energy Agency published Net Zero by 2050, a landmark report
which stated that exploitation and development
of new oil and gas fields would have to stop this year, and no new coal-fired
power stations could be built if the world wanted to stay within safe limits of
global heating and meet the goal of net zero emissions by 2050.
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Ava Princi, Liv Heaton, Izzy Raj-Seppings and Laura Kirwin
embrace outside the federal court of Australia in Sydney. Eight
young Australians and a nun sought an injunction in September 2020
to prevent the environment minister, Sussan Ley, from finally
approving the Vickery coalmine extension project in north-east New
South Wales. Photograph: James Gourley/AAP
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Meanwhile in Australia the federal court found that the environment minister,
Sussan Ley, had a duty of care
to protect young people from the climate crisis, in what lawyers said was “the
first time in the world” such a duty of care had been recognised.
In France, the minister for ecological transition delighted and
appalled people in equal measure with the announcement that the new climate law
would take meat off the menu
once a week in schools.
Turkey was hit by
“sea snot”
– a blanket of mucus-like stuff that was silting up the coasts, created as a
result of warm temperatures and agricultural run-off that encouraged
phytoplankton to grow. But in California, after a
short and late rainy season, the governor was declaring an
impending drought emergency
in 41 of 58 counties.
June
One of the most extraordinary and powerful heatwaves ever experienced by North
America hit the west coast in June and did not go away. Caused by what
meteorologists called a “dome of high pressure”, the heatwave extended from
California – worsening the drought even as the first wildfires of the season
began – all the way up to Canada, where temperatures rose up to 121.28F (49.6C),
shattering all previous records.
“This is the beginning of a
permanent emergency,”
the governor of Washington state
said.
Other parts of the world also
saw scorching temperatures. Both Europe and Asia had their second warmest Junes on record, while Africa
and New Zealand had the warmest June ever recorded.
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Smoke billows from the chimneys of Bełchatów power station in
Poland. Photograph: Kacper Pempel/Reuters
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But efforts to fight back continued too. Poland announced it would
shut down Bełchatów, Europe’s most polluting power plant (although only in 2036). The City of
London said it would be
creating a heat network and digging boreholes
for one of the UK’s largest low-carbon heating systems.
Sri Lanka braced itself for disaster after the MV X-Press Pearl, a
ship carrying toxic chemicals, caught fire off the coast and sank. Meanwhile
China was fixating
on a herd of elephants that had trekked 300 miles into the city of Kunming.
July
The average global surface temperature for July was
the hottest since records
began in 1880, with Death Valley in California registering 54.4C (130F).
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People visit the unofficial thermometer reading 56C (133F) at
Furnace Creek Visitor Center on 11 July. Photograph: David Becker/Getty Images
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As the US heatwaves and droughts worsened, India, China and Europe were being
hit by catastrophic floods. Torrential downpours on
India’s west coast
led to 115 deaths, while Henan province in China saw a year’s worth of rain –
604mm – in a single day.
Horrifying videos
showed the waters rising in subways, while hundreds of thousands were forced to
evacuate. And in Germany rows broke out when it emerged that a
flood early-warning system had failed
to work, after torrents of rainwater tore through villages and towns, leaving
more than a hundred people dead.
Meanwhile the Australian government continued
to fight attempts
to have the Great Barrier Reef declared “in danger”, with local politicians
saying they feared for the impact the declaration would have on jobs. In the UK,
the water company Southern Water was fined a record £90m after
a six-year investigation
found evidence that it had deliberately poured untreated sewage into the sea in
order to avoid the cost of upgrading infrastructure.
And, to top off a gloomy month for the planet,
new data showed
that the melting of Greenland was surging, with the amount of ice vanishing in a
single day enough to cover the whole of Florida in 5cm of water, according to
researchers.
August
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivered its starkest warning to
the world yet, concluding that
climate change was unequivocally
caused by human activities, and warning that some of the impacts were now
inevitable and “irreversible”.
As the heat continued, wildfires broke out in
the Mediterranean, where the Greek prime minister described them as the country’s “greatest
ecological disaster in decades”, and across more than 9m hectares of forests in
Siberia.
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A local resident holds an empty water hose near the village of
Pefki in Greece. Photograph: Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images
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Meanwhile floods and landslides hit Japan,
where more than a million
people were evacuated from their homes, and also
Turkey,
Colombia, and Tennessee in the US, where
a record-breaking deluge
swept through homes and roads. Rain fell on the highest point of the Greenland
ice sheet
for the first time
on record.
A Swedish company shipped the
world’s first customer delivery
of “green steel” – made without using coal – as solar power outstripped coal in
Australia for the first time
when, for a fleeting moment, more electricity was generated by solar power.
In the UK, Extinction Rebellion swung back into action, blocking London Bridge
and Oxford Circus, pouring red paint in entrances at the City of London and
locking on outside the Science Museum over its sponsorship deal with the oil
giant Shell.
September
“Blah blah blah”
was what Greta Thunberg called the promises from global leaders around the
world to tackle climate change, pointing out that carbon emissions were still
on track to rise 16% by 2030.
As Cop26 drew nearer, and following
the summer of record-breaking fires, heatwaves and floods, politicians
everywhere were under increasing pressure to improve their offers. A
US/EU deal to reduce methane emissions felt like a good contribution.
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Insulate Britain climate activists block the anticlockwise
carriageway of the M25 near Ockham. Photograph: Mark Kerrison/Alamy Live News
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A new protest movement launched in the UK,
as Insulate Britain
demonstrators began sitting on motorways to demand climate action in the form
of insulation for the country’s housing stock.
In Scotland, as
preparations sped up,
one man built an ark
on a hillside, telling the planning committee when it asked if it was a
permanent structure: “It’s not permanent in the same way that humanity won’t
be if we don’t take action on the climate.”
In a painful irony, new data revealed that the wildfires were
themselves
releasing record-breaking
amounts of carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, an energy crisis was breaking across the
world, with sky-high gas prices in Europe and pressure on
electricity and coal supplies
in China.
October
China
hosted the Kunming conference on biodiversity and announced a $233m (£170m) fund to protect
biodiversity in developing countries.
We shall take the development of an ecological civilisation as our
guide to coordinate the relationship between man and nature.
Xi Jinping
With just days to go before Cop26, Australia, one of the countries most
notorious for holding out against climate action, published its plan for how
it would reduce carbon emissions, but
it was called “a scam”
containing no detail and no modelling.
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Delegates at the Green Middle East Initiative Summit in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia. Photograph: Saudi Green Initiative/Reuters
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Elsewhere, however, signs of change were palpable, with a series of plans
announced at the
Middle East Green Initiative Summit, led by the United Arab Emirates which will be hosting Cop28 in two years’
time.
A Tesla became the
first ever battery-powered
car to top Europe’s sales chart. And in the UK, the government was forced by a
near rebellion to U-turn
and place a duty on water companies to reduce sewage discharges.
In the US, one senator gained global notoriety: Joe Manchin, a conservative
Democrat,
was holding out against his own party for huge cuts
to President Biden’s climate change plans. For a brief moment, it looked as if
Biden would have to go to Cop26 with no legislative progress at home.
November
Cop26
was under way at last, after two years of pandemic, delays, worries,
criticisms and negotiations. World leaders gathered for the first two days and
were exhorted by
David Attenborough
to be “motivated by hope rather than fear”.
Biden had finally got
his bill passed, but the UK’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, put a dampener on
events by making his speech and then
hopping into a private jet
to make the short journey to London.
The first week saw an onslaught of deals on
methane,
deforestation, coal, the ambition to
stick to 1.5C of
warming and
finance, with hundreds of the world’s biggest banks and pension funds with assets
worth $130tn committing themselves to limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
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Alok Sharma receives applause after giving the closing speech
at Cop26 in Glasgow. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
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By the end of the second week of hard negotiation, the summit’s president,
Alok Sharma, had cajoled countries into a deal including a ratchet mechanism
that asked every country to upgrade its emission reduction plans in time for
the next Cop in Egypt in a year’s time, and each year thereafter.
However, many were dismayed that the deal did not include the loss
and damage facility that most of the world had asked for, to help developing
countries in particular pay for the impacts of the climate crisis already
being felt.
Beyond the summit,
rain storms hit British Columbia
in Canada, earlier battered by the summer’s heatwaves, broke up roads and led
to a state of emergency.
Out in the oceans one of the rarest animals in the world was glimpsed: the
mythical white sperm whale, seen surfacing for a moment, from the waters off Jamaica.
December
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced in the middle of the
month that it had
recognised a new Arctic temperature record: the summer of 2020 had seen the
Russian town of Verkhoyansk hit with an all-time high of 38°C (100.4°F).
Floods swept Queensland, Australia, with up to 180mm of rain
falling in 24 hours in some
parts of the state. The UK was hit by Storm Arwen and Storm Barra. Heavy rains
fell in Iraq, leading to serious flooding and displacement.
And tornadoes
ripped through North America, with at least 70 deaths in Kentucky in
what was described
as the “most devastating tornado event” in the state’s history, only to be
followed, by the end of the month, by
record-breaking temperatures
and snowfall.
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A family walks past a destroyed church in Mayfield,
Kentucky. Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
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EO Wilson, who died
on 26 December, had warned many times that humans could not continue to use the land and
resources of the planet in the way they did. The biologist was caught up in
controversies at times during his career.
Nevertheless, his
warning that “we live in a delusional state” if we do not understand the
burden that the western way of life imposes on Earth, rings true even now.
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to
the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If
insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
EO Wilson, biologist
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