The Price of Progress

The unintended consequences of climate solutions

When one thinks about global efforts to tackle climate change, the Paris Agreement springs to mind — an accord that describes plans for global efforts to tackle climate change through regulations and a wider goal to keep the global surface temperature below 2°C. This has largely failed, and with the US continuously leaving and rejoining the agreement, confidence in these far-reaching reforms has dwindled. When the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) introduced regulations in 2020 to limit the amount of high-sulphur fuels being used to power international shipping vessels, most would assume that these measures would benefit everyone. However, it appears that some climate solutions may end up being more harmful than the issues they were meant to address.

When shipping vessels were forced to use lower-sulphur fuels, the amount of sulphur dioxide (SO₂) in the atmosphere decreased. This sulphur had been playing a significant role in reflecting sunlight away from the Earth's surface, acting as a form of natural cooling. Professor Piers Forster and Dr Zeke Hausfather wrote an article for Carbon Brief blaming the reduction in this cooling effect for a rise in surface temperatures by around 0.05°C, aggravating the warming that climate solutions aim to reverse. This example emphasises a key point: the solutions we try to implement, however beneficial and environmentally friendly we believe them to be, do not always yield predictable and positive results.  

Sulphur regulation is only one example of the knock-on effects of climate mitigation strategies. Another case of this is biofuels, the environmental saviour of the internal combustion engine. Initially heralded as a clean and less damaging alternative to fossil fuels, the holistic environmental impact of biofuels is a murky affair. Most ingredients in biodiesel, a form of fuel similar in chemical makeup to fossil fuel-derived diesel, have their own issues. Soybean production is responsible for widespread deforestation and displacement of Indigenous people, especially in Brazil, which, along with the US and Argentina, produces 80 per cent of the world’s soybeans. The destruction of forests, which have been growing for millions of years, trivialises their store of carbon dioxide. This again counteracts some of the benefits of reduced emissions which biofuels provide.

Another impact of this production, which is set to increase over the coming years, is ecological damage. The risk of soil depletion, loss of biodiversity, and water stress now plague once lush and verdant jungles. Much of the land used for biofuel crop production is in developing countries where food insecurity is a real issue, and the growing demand for these ‘eco-friendly’ fuels raises the prices of crops which would otherwise feed the populations of these countries.

Rather than solving these issues, the solutions we’ve implemented in the past few years have been quick fixes of which the full extent of their effects haven’t been considered. We must recognise that the system we seek to fix is a complex one, and we must adapt our strategies as best we can to deal with its unpredictability. Stopping climate change is the most important challenge we face as a society today, but it is not, by any means necessary, a mission, and we must also preserve the natural wonders that Earth has to offer.

Image by Wikipedia Commons