Environmental crash course

Climate change has become the most serious challenge facing humanity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released on Aug 9, said that global climate trends are becoming irreversible. The report quantified the degree to which climate change influences the frequency and intensity of extreme events such as longstanding droughts, heat waves, storms and hurricanes.

According to the panel, which brings together leading experts on the subject, the planet's average temperature is set to rise by more than 1.5 C over the next two decades, bringing widespread devastation.

It should be noted that, following the trend in recent decades, the temperature on the Earth's surface may increase by more than 2 C by the end of the 21st century. The inexorable temperature rise is already disrupting the weather patterns we are used to. Extreme events such as droughts, floods, sandstorms, hurricanes and cyclones are destroying homes, infrastructure and crops, resulting in hunger, deaths and migratory displacements.

There are regions where disasters threaten communities' survival, for example hurricanes have caused severe damage to several countries in Central America and the Caribbean Sea. The Sahel, in the southern part of the Sahara Desert, has suffered rapid desertification, forcing the local population to migrate.

The problem is repeated in various other regions, such as the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and the Andes, and the water supply crisis in large metropolitan areas such as Santiago in Chile, S?o Paulo in Brazil, or Johannesburg in South Africa. The change in the rainfall pattern has caused damage to the most productive agricultural regions in Brazil, which used to get regular rainfall. Fires are intensifying in typically wet areas, such as the Pantanal and the Amazon.

Since 1972, when the first United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development was held in Stockholm, Sweden, the international community has been focusing on the impacts of industrialization on the planet's sustainability. Today, ecological awareness greatly influences political processes, whether in Brazil, the United States, China, the European Union, India or South Africa. It is an unavoidable issue, because people are feeling the consequences of a model of predatory economic development.

However, despite increasing evidence of global warming, political groups try to radically deny the relationship between human activity and extreme weather events. Former US president Donald Trump has led the world's far-right to neglect the climate crisis and invent conspiracy theories on the issue. In the US, a discourse on the environment would mean competing powers would be able to break the US economy by making its oil and coal industry unviable.

In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro and his followers say that the international concern about deforestation in the Amazon is part of a conspiracy. On the one hand, they argue that some countries want to internationalize the Amazon. On the other hand, they say that farmers in the US and the EU wish to ruin Brazil's agribusiness.

Due to these conspiracy theories, environmental issues have not been priorities for the Bolsonaro government, which is dismantling Brazil's environmental regulatory bodies and emptying its social institutions. The surveillance and application of fines for environmental crimes have never been lower. Still, the government has systematically cut the budget for preventing deforestation and fighting forest fires. The current government also stopped the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite program, run by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research. This project would have been another example of South-South cooperation, which allowed the building of four satellites to collect high-definition Earth images, including deforestation in the Amazon.

Regardless of the actions of a few governments, humanity will find a way to overcome the challenges posed by climate change. But it is important to stress that only measures to mitigate global warming are not enough. We need to question the economic model that places personal profit over the interests of life, people and the environment. In this sense, it is worth quoting Karl Marx that mankind inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.

The author is a professor of international political economy at Sao Paulo State University. The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn