Schools invited to take part in week of climate action
Let's Go Zero is behind the Climate Action Countdown 2025, a free week of climate activities running from June 23 to 27 designed to build confidence and creativity in the classroom.
Lee Hughes, chief operating officer at Peterborough Diocese Education Trust, said: "The Climate Action Countdown was an outstanding opportunity for our school communities to come together and show leadership in the fight to reduce carbon emissions."
Schools can win prizes worth more than £700, including a WiFi wildlife camera, climate CPD training, and daily prizes for the best pupil photos and videos.
The programme offers a flexible 'pick-and-mix' pack of curriculum-friendly activities.
The week wraps up with the Great Big Climate Quiz.
A pupil from SS Peter and Paul's Catholic Primary School in Essex said: "It's really fun and interacts with children in the right way to convince them to care about our planet."
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South Wales Argus
a day ago
- South Wales Argus
Schools invited to take part in week of climate action
Let's Go Zero is behind the Climate Action Countdown 2025, a free week of climate activities running from June 23 to 27 designed to build confidence and creativity in the classroom. Lee Hughes, chief operating officer at Peterborough Diocese Education Trust, said: "The Climate Action Countdown was an outstanding opportunity for our school communities to come together and show leadership in the fight to reduce carbon emissions." Schools can win prizes worth more than £700, including a WiFi wildlife camera, climate CPD training, and daily prizes for the best pupil photos and videos. The programme offers a flexible 'pick-and-mix' pack of curriculum-friendly activities. The week wraps up with the Great Big Climate Quiz. A pupil from SS Peter and Paul's Catholic Primary School in Essex said: "It's really fun and interacts with children in the right way to convince them to care about our planet."
The Independent
2 days ago
- The Independent
World now in ‘crunch time' to avoid higher levels of warming, UN scientists warn
UN scientists have warned that the world is in 'crunch time' to avoid higher levels of warming beyond the key threshold of 1.5C but that drivers of climate change are 'all moving in the wrong direction'. In their annual report, a team of more than 60 international scientists have put together a comprehensive picture of the current state of the climate and calculated the human-driven factors behind the changes the world is experiencing. It comes as part of efforts to provide regular updates between landmark UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, the last of which was published in 2021 and the next of which is expected in 2028. The group examined the amount of planet-heating carbon dioxide (CO2) the world can release into the atmosphere in the coming years while limiting warming to the UN target of 1.5C. The report estimates that the remaining 'carbon budget' for 1.5C is emitting 130 billion tonnes of C02 from the beginning of 2025, if the world is to have a 50% chance to stay within the threshold. However, this budget will be exhausted in little more than three years at current levels of CO2 emissions, according to the findings published on Wednesday night in the journal Earth System Science Data. This means that without drastic cuts to emissions, the world will be unable to prevent warming from surpassing the dangerous threshold, which will lead to a rise in extreme weather events, climate-related disasters and increase the risk of triggering irreversible changes. The report also warned the carbon budget for 1.6C or 1.7C could also be exceeded within nine years, which will significantly intensify these impacts. The scientists' long-term estimates show current average global temperatures to be 1.24C higher than in pre-industrial times. Professor Joeri Rogelj, research director at the Grantham Institute, said: 'Under any course of action, there is a very high chance that we will reach and even exceed 1.5C and even higher levels of warming. '1.5C is an iconic level but we are currently already in crunch time… to avoid higher levels of warming with a decent likelihood or a prudent likelihood as well and that is true for 1.7C, but equally so for 1.8C if we want to have a high probability there.' But Prof Rogelj added that reductions in emissions over the next decade can still 'critically change' the rate of warming and limit the magnitude and the extent by which the world exceeds 1.5C. 'It's really the difference between just cruising through 1.5C towards much higher levels of 2C or trying to limit warming somewhere in the range of 1.5,' he said. Piers Forster, professor of Climate Physics at the University of Leeds, who has helped author IPCC reports, said the report highlights how climate policies and pace of climate action 'are not keeping up with what's needed to address the ever-growing impacts'. 'I certainly tend to be an optimistic person but if you do look at this year's annual update, things are all moving in the wrong direction,' he said. 'They're not only moving in the wrong direction, we're seeing some unprecedented changes.' Reflecting on the IPCC reports, he said: 'What we had hope to see by this time is these emissions beginning to turn a corner and unfortunately that hasn't occurred.' Instead emissions have increased year on year since the 2021 report, remaining at all-time highs, he said. This year's update covers key climate system indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations, Earth energy imbalance, human-induced climate change, remaining carbon budgets and maximum land surface temperatures. But for the first time, the annual update also included sea-level rise and global land precipitation. In 2024, the best estimate of observed global surface temperature rise was 1.52C, of which 1.36C can be attributed to human activity, caused by global greenhouse gas emissions, the scientists said. The report said last year's high temperatures are 'alarmingly unexceptional' as the combination of human-driven climate change and the El Nino weather phenomenon push global heat to record levels. While global average temperatures exceeded 1.5C for the first time, this does not mean the world has breached landmark UN agreement, which would require average global temperatures to exceed the threshold over multiple decades. When analysing longer-term temperature change, the scientists' best estimates show that between 2015 and 2024 average global temperatures were 1.24C higher than in pre-industrial times, with 1.22C caused by human activities. Elsewhere, the report found that human activities were found to be affecting the Earth's energy balance, with the oceans storing about 91% of the excess heat, driving detrimental changes in every component of the climate system, including sea level rise, ocean warming, ice loss, and permafrost thawing. Between 2019 and 2024, global mean sea level also increased by around 26mm, more than doubling the long-term rate of 1.8mm per year seen since the turn of the twentieth century. Dr Aimee Slangen, research leader at the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, said the rise is already having an 'outsized impact' on low-lying coastal areas, causing more damaging storm surges and coastal erosion. 'The concerning part is that we know that sea-level rise in response to climate change is relatively slow, which means that we have already locked in further increases in the coming years and decades,' she said. IPCC's last assessment of the climate system, published in 2021, highlighted how climate change was leading to widespread adverse impacts on nature and people. Professor Rogelj said: 'Every small increase in warming matters, leading to more frequent, more intense weather extremes. 'Emissions over the next decade will determine how soon and how fast 1.5C of warming is reached. They need to be swiftly reduced to meet the climate goals of the Paris Agreement.'
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
Only two years left of world's carbon budget to meet 1.5C target, scientists warn
The planet's remaining carbon budget to meet the international target of 1.5C has just two years left at the current rate of emissions, scientists have warned, showing how deep into the climate crisis the world has fallen. Breaching the target would ramp up the extreme weather already devastating communities around the world. It would also require carbon dioxide to be sucked from the atmosphere in future to restore the stable climate in which the whole of civilisation developed over the past 10,000 years. The carbon budget is how much planet-heating CO2 can still be emitted by humanity while leaving a reasonable chance that the temperature target is not blown. The latest assessment by leading climate scientists found that in order to achieve a 66% chance of keeping below the 1.5C target, emissions from 2025 onwards must be limited to 80bn tonnes of CO2. That is 80% lower than it was in 2020. Emissions reached a new record high in 2024: at that rate the 80bn tonne budget would be exhausted within two years. Lags in the climate system mean the 1.5C limit, which is measured as a multi-year average, would inevitably be passed a few years later, the scientists said. Scientists have been warning for some time that breaching the 1.5C limit is increasingly unavoidable as emissions from the burning of fossil fuels continue to rise. The latest analysis shows global emissions would have to plummet towards zero within just a few years to have any decent chance of keeping to the target. That appears extremely unlikely, given that emissions in 2024 rose yet again. However, the scientists emphasised every fraction of a degree of global heating increases human suffering, so efforts to cut emissions must ramp up as fast as possible. Currently, the world is on track for 2.7C of global heating, which would be a truly catastrophic rise. The analysis shows, for example, that limiting the rise to 1.7C is more achievable: the carbon budget for a 66% chance of keeping below 1.7C is 390bn tonnes, which is about nine years at the current rate of emissions. 'The remaining carbon budgets are declining rapidly and the main reason is the world's failure to curb global CO2 emissions,' said Prof Joeri Rogelj, at Imperial College London, UK. 'Under any course of action now, there is a very high chance we will reach and even exceed 1.5C and even higher levels of warming.' 'The best moment to have started serious climate action was 1992, when the UN [climate] convention was adopted,' he said. 'But now every year is the best year to start being serious about emissions reduction. That is because every fraction of warming we can avoid will result in less harm and suffering, particularly for poor and vulnerable populations, and in less challenges to living the lives we desire.' Rogelj said it was crucial that countries commit to big emissions cuts at the UN Cop30 climate summit in November. The hottest year on record was 2024, fuelled by increasing coal and gas burning, and setting an annual average of 1.5C for the first time. There is no sign yet of the transition away from fossil fuels promised by the world's nations at Cop28 in Dubai in December 2023. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion Solar and wind energy production is increasing rapidly and has precluded previous worst-case scenarios of 4-5C of global heating. But energy demand is rising even faster, leading to more fossil fuel burning and turbo-charging extreme weather disasters. The analysis, produced by an international team of 60 leading climate scientists, is an update of the critical indicators of climate change and is published in the journal Earth System Science Data. It aims to provide an authoritative assessment, based on the methods of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but published annually unlike the intermittent IPCC reports, the most recent of which was 2021. The study found that the Earth's energy imbalance – the excess heat trapped by the greenhouse effect – has risen by 25% when comparing the past decade with the decade before. 'That's a really large and very worrying number,' said Prof Piers Forster, at the University of Leeds, UK, and lead author of the study. 'I tend to be an optimistic person. But things are not only moving in the wrong direction, we're seeing some unprecedented changes and acceleration of the heating of the Earth and sea level rise.' Sea level rise has doubled in the past 10 years, compared with the period 1971-2018, the analysis found, rising to 4mm per year. The flooding of coasts will become unmanageable at 1.5C of global heating and lead to 'catastrophic inland migration', a study in May found. Sea level is rising because about 90% of global heating is absorbed by the oceans, making the water expand, and because the climate crisis is melting glaciers and ice caps. Dr Karina Von Schuckmann, at Mercator Ocean International, said: 'Warmer waters also lead to intensified weather extremes, and can have devastating impacts on marine ecosystems and the communities that rely on them. In 2024, the ocean reached record values globally.'
