Should we worry about climate change?

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One of many new things I’ve learned during my stay in Joensuu, Finland in terms of my expertise is bioeconomy. It comes as a new concept to address the problems that the climate change has brought to our civilization; resource scarcity, GHGs accumulation in the atmosphere, global warming, ozone depletion, to name a few. I didn’t experience the heatwave while in Finland. Maybe a bit, I guess. There were several days when the temperature went up to 32 degrees in the afternoon in Joensuu, while Central Europe was struck by an alarmingly hot temperature; Paris reached 42.6 degree at that time, an alarmingly record-breaking temperature. Articles on the heatwave have used words like “unprecedented rise in temperature in scale and intensity” or “record-breaking” or “extreme events” when addressing this matter, and to know why, there are many factors to explore. A famous theory provided by most articles is human-driven climate change. Researchers have conducted studies using climate models to predict the increasing temperature in which the result expected a rise of 1.5 degrees in temperature compared to pre-industrial times (when human activities did not cause a pronounce effect in climate, the baseline is 1990). However, the temperature during the heatwave in 2019 was double that it was predicted; the temperature was 3 degrees higher than in pre-industrial level.

Do we need to worry?

There’s always two side of a coin. Some might say that this is just another revolution that the Earth has to take. The changing in climate is not only because of human activities, but also because of the natural processes of Earth, such as volcanic eruption, natural fire, etc. We’ve been through this before, and if it doesn’t recall your memory, I can remind you that we’ve experienced the Ice Age which was also the result of changes in climatic factors. However, some also say that human-induced activities just made the warming worst. We’ve been through war, we killed trees more than we had to, we used too many electronic devices that emit harmful chemical compounds, we increased the probability of fire. And, hear it, we are multiplying.

If the temperature keeps increasing, some species may not be able to go along with it. Living organisms have their own tolerance toward heat, what can happen when the temperature is rising is some agricultural crops may not grow or may not provide enough foods for the growing population. Insects, which are small and has terrifying form that make you squeal when you find them on your shoes and do not seem to contribute much to our life (which actually is not true), may not be able to support plants’ growth because climate may lead to drier soil. Dry soil is lack of water, which is important to regulate soil’s temperature, so the living organisms won’t experience heatwave.

Yes, there are dry, sandy soil in many parts of the world where plants can grow, and the ecosystem is specific for that. You may ask if they can stand without water for so long why they can’t stand the heat and the drought from climate change.

No, imagine this place is getting much drier and that the soil is losing water. The living organisms inside the soil will experience heatwave, and they’ll die. So, at the end, the numbers of available living organisms in the soil will not be able to support the growth of plants anymore. Well there are many things I can list before we’re going to international commitment to climate change, but I guess two examples are good enough for us to get a picture on how climate change can affect humans. If you didn’t get the clue, it’s that climate change will mess with our food supply.

Worrying is no use, what we need to do is to change. Not absolutely changing everything at once, but changing our attitude, at least to save ourselves.

What change?

Climate is changing, so are we. Driven by the importance to address climate change, international organizations have made special regulations about it, and it’s been a trend!

Paris Agreement has suggested the participating countries to act in keeping a global temperature rise well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels and to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees. It is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that deals with greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, adaptation and finance. It’s been ratified to the national laws of the participating countries which is seen as a one step forward. The body within the United Nations that provide an objective and scientific view of climate change, its natural, political and economic impacts and risks is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which has published a new report recently.

Basically, IPCC provides insights, suggestions and recommended responses to climate change to achieve Paris Agreement. IPCC suggested 2 important ways to reduce GHGs emission; growing forests and promoting the use of wood products, which bring us to the important points.

Growing forests basically means sustaining the existing forests and establishing new forest areas. Total forest area in North America, Europe, South Asia, Eastern Asia, and Australia and New Zealand has been experiencing positive change. India and China showed a great positive change in their forest area. However, as I said, there are two sides of a coin. Southeast Asia and North Africa have been experiencing negative change in their total forest area (FAO 2015). Forest fire seems to be a non-stop pull-all-nighter party for the forests in Southeast Asia, led by Indonesian forest. It is worrying because tropical forest is storing most of the carbon in the world, and a burning will release much carbon to the atmosphere which may cancel out all the efforts we’ve made for Paris Agreement. There has been requests and demands and questions about restoration in these areas, but the mother nature does not always go along with our plan, which brings us to another point that may enhance the result from restoration.

Yes, restoration is great; it increases forest cover, it adds more trees to capture carbon, it reduces heat, but mother nature is always ready to strike it with fire, natural disasters, drought, and floods. So, as humans, we should come up with a plan to strike back; we enhance the resilience of the forest. Many ways that we can do; protection measures, tree improvement, updated silviculture techniques, support trees succession, build a suitable forest governance, conservation measures to the living organisms, and integration of local and indigenous people, and many more to add. In short, integrating the economic, ecology and social measures to the governance of a forest. In addition to that, a safe political condition.

There is another way to enhance the things mentioned in the above; use more wood! Well, to some people that doesn’t sound so great because it means we’ll cut more trees, we’ll use more lands and we’ll need new technologies that can process wood. By technologies, I mean the special ones, because woods require more attention than other materials in order to substitute those materials in humans’ daily life.

For example, we want to substitute plastic with wood-plastic composite. With plastic, there is already a fine, well-developed technology to produce that, and people are already familiar with plastics’ elasticity and strength, while with wood-plastic composite, the industry has to deal big time with many pre-treatment processes to produce a wood-composite that is similar to plastic. Wood requires extra headache; it needs to be separated from its lignin because lignin will reduce its plasticity, it needs to be chipped because nobody wants to carry a heavy wooden plastic, it needs to be dried because nobody wants soggy-wet plastics. Moreover, to produce a wood-plastic composite with similar characteristics as common plastic, the wood composite has to be integrated to plastic production, SO a longer chain of production. However, even though it is still a long way to go to substitute the current material to wood, some parts of the world are progressing toward it. It can be a feasible way to deal with climate change. 

Why should we change from the common products to wood products, you ask?

Well, common products that we know such as plastics, aluminum, concrete, steel, etc. are made from fossil resources. Fossil resources emit a lot of carbon because it was formed from the decomposition of the living organisms in the past. Apart from emitting carbon, it is also depleting, and there will be a time where it will run out. To have it again, we must wait a million years because fossil resources can’t be accumulated fast even though the living organisms have decomposed in the soil.

Why?

Because the organic carbon has to reach the deepest part of the soil to produce fossil resources, and the movement is so, so slow.

And do you know what happen to the organic carbon on the top of the soil?

They are eroded. They are carried away by the rain. In the place where forests do not exist, the organic carbon can’t be maintained, which means another time wasted to reach the deepest part of the soil. With more pronounced human-activities, the organic carbon will always have a hard time to find its way to the deepest layer of the soil.

Now getting back to the wood, wood is renewable, and it stores carbon. We can grow forests, enhance its increment (the rate of growth of a tree), harvesting it in a sustainable manner, maximize its productivity in the production chain, and reuse/cascade/recycle it at the end of its life. The wood is taking up carbon during its growth and at the end of life, it will still emit carbon just like everything else in the world, which then will be absorbed by the new generation, we call it “the carbon neutrality of wood”.

Now you have it, climate change is scary but there are ways to tackle it.