Allowing nature to repair our broken climate
Have you come across #NatureNow, a short documentary featuring Greta Thunberg and George Monbiot as narrators? This valuable and informative film can be accessed at this website: https://www.facebook.com/roneofficial/videos/239549733627885/.
In case you have no access to this, allow me to walk you through the script.
Aside from shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy and other solutions to global warming, Greta and George explain there is a solution now available, right in front of us. The “magic machine sucks carbon out of the air, costs very little, and builds itself!
You guessed right, “it is called a tree!” Trees are natural climate solutions! Mangroves, peatbogs, jungles, marshes, seabeds, kelp forests, swamps, coral reefs - all of these keep carbon out of the air and lock it away.”
George explains “nature is a tool we can use to repair our broken climate. These natural climate solutions could make a massive difference!”
Sadly, Greta points out that we ignore these nature climate solutions! Instead, “we spend 1000 times more on global fossil fuel subsidies than on natural based solutions,” which George elaborates, just “get 2% on all the money used for tackling climate breakdown!”
Like huge public funds wasted on basura, Greta explains that “it is our taxes and savings” wasted more on expensive fossil fuel subsidies! Instead of allowing nature to help us, George laments that “we are destroying it faster than ever!”
Already, “up to 200 species are going extinct every single day, much of the arctic ice is gone, most of our wild animals have gone, much of our soil has gone! “What can we all do? “
What can you and I do?
Greta says it is simple- “We need to protect, restore, fund.”
“Tropical forests are being cut down at the rate of 30 football pitches a minute. George suggests that where nature is doing something vital, we must protect it!”
Greta continues that “much of our planet has been damaged but nature can regenerate and we can help ecosystems bounce back!-restore!”
George chimes in and advises that “we need to stop funding things that destroy nature and, fund, pay for things that help it!”
It is that simple- protect, restore, fund!
This can happen everywhere; many people have already begun using natural climate solutions. But we need to do it on a massive scale!
Greta and George believe that you, all of us can be part of this if you vote for people who defend nature, share this video, and talk about this!
They suggest that you join the amazing movements fighting for nature” because “everything counts! What you do counts!” Be part of #nature now!
This film is timely now that more trees inside the DepEd compound in Lahug, Cebu are proposed to be cut to give way to the construction of a proposed convention center. We hope you join the campaign demanding that the proponents of this project go green instead and save the trees crucial for solving climate change!
Learning from the Save Naga Trees campaign, which I will write about in a next column, let us campaign that contracts will clearly keep the trees from being cut, that government or any private agencies will not force contractors to cut the trees or else they will not be paid completely for the structures they were assigned to build.
There are already many existing pro-environment green projects to choose from. Let us unite together and insist that no trees need be cut as trees (mangroves, swamps, jungles, and all those mentioned in the film by Greta and George) are our crucial defenders against global warming!
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