April 22 is Earth Day, but given the magnitude of the threat a warming climate poses to life as we know it on our planet, every day should be Earth Day.
News organizations like ours have been criticized for reporting on the dangers of climate change while ignoring the means available for adapting to and mitigating its impact. The most recent report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released Monday, says the technology to stave off a disastrous rise in global temperatures is at hand, if only governments can commit to the needed changes in policy to speed their deployment.
But the report also underscores—as noted by environmental reporter Andrea Thompson of Scientific American this week— that the world has a quickly closing window to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century—and ideally to limit it below 1.5 C.
“This will likely be the final IPCC report on mitigating climate change before we are effectively locked into an emissions trajectory that would surpass that threshold,” Thompson writes.
This week, the Press begins a three-part series that will examine the impact of climate change on three of Harvard’s most cherished privately or publicly owned resources: its orchards, Bare Hill Pond, and its forests. Our intent is to report not only on the changes that are already here, but also the steps individuals and organizations in town are taking to adapt to their unwanted effects—and to mitigate the so-far unstoppable rise in global carbon emissions, a goal of the town’s recently adopted environmental policies.
This is also a good time to give a shout out to the Harvard Climate Initiative and Energy Advisory committees and their plans for a townwide Earth Day on Saturday, April 30 (rain date May 1). The event will showcase the steps residents throughout our town are taking to advance Harvard’s goal of reducing the town’s collective carbon footprint. Check out this week’s Notice Board and the Climate Initiative Committee’s website (harvardsclimateinitiative.org) for details.
