In the week that began with the release of the incisive report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, its English acronym), terms relating to the current environmental state have been exhaustively repeated by the media and researchers.
But some of the expressions we used to hear no longer fit: either they are proven wrong or they simply no longer cover the problem in their complexity.
Experts heard before CNN Highlight as a positive factor in language now dependent on the use of time. For the first time, the question is asked clearly in the present, and is no longer a perspective for the distant future.
“This language is really the result of ideas that have been made. Researcher Tiago Reis, who studies environmental issues at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, says the IPCC report itself uses verbs mostly in the present, past and simple past.
Right on the seventh page, text file IPCC Decrees: “Human influence has warmed the climate at an unprecedented rate over the past two thousand years.” “All the data is in the present. There are many studies that indicate that the way of communicating in the future is detrimental to the human reaction in terms of decision making,” adds Rees.
Natalie Unterstil, a professor of public policy from Harvard University, remembers that the sector always works with expectations — not expectations. “Expected futures, and potential futures,” affirms Unterstil, president of the Talanoa Research Center, which is dedicated to climate policy.
For her, this is changing people’s perception, and based on this new approach, it is possible to talk more about climate change nowadays with great confidence. “This report was the first that was completely clear and explicit in that we had actually warmed up and this was due to human impact. We are already seeing this, we can actually attribute some extreme events to global warming.”
Check out five expressions from the ecoregion that could be considered outdated or subject to misinterpretation given the scale of the problem.
Global warming x climate emergency
Although it is technically correct, as global average temperatures are rising increasingly, the expression “global warming” has been replaced by others such as climate change, climate emergency, climate crisis, civilization crisis and ecological collapse.
Researcher at the Environment Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, biologist Myron Bastos Lima agrees that “global warming” can be confusing, especially for people who don’t understand that negative events such as extreme cold days are also a consequence of global warming.
For him, the best expression is “climate change”. It resonates best with what many people already realize on a daily basis. He says that the rural population, the elderly, are already saying that “the weather has changed,” and they are aware that the climate has changed.” “On the other hand, “global warming” ends in confusion, when a person sees phenomena other than heat and cannot identify it with the term . It is a contradiction that is counterproductive.”
Unterstell prefers a “climate emergency”. “Emergency is an equation: risk divided by time. If we have something that has a high risk, like the impacts all described in the IPCC report, and a very short time frame until we can manage those risks, we are in an emergency. It is not an expression Disturbing, but a very technical expression.”
On the other hand, she is against the use of the word crisis. Precisely because it conveys the idea that it is a delicate thing, and that it will end. “And many of the effects that we will experience and that we are already witnessing will not disappear. He asserts that they will remain for centuries and millennia, even if we can reverse the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
Deforestation vs. deforestation
One of the terms most associated with Brazil is “deforestation”, and it’s outdated for several reasons. A conceptual one. Beyond deforestation, there is also forest degradation – with serious impacts on the environment.
Biologist Felipe France, a researcher at Lancaster University in the UK and the Amazon Sustainable Network, explains. “When you clear forests, you clear the forest. When you decompose, you leave the forest in poor health.”
This means that the remaining forest cannot maintain its balance. There is a loss of biodiversity – the most sensitive species cannot resist. Gradually, the biome as a whole loses the ability to do what scientists call ecosystem services, nature’s contribution to nature which, in other words, ensures the quality of life on the planet.
And this kind of scenario does not happen only as a result of the work of loggers infiltrating the forest or as a result of accidental fires. It can also be the result of fragmentation, when small portions of forests – often meeting the limits of legislation – are preserved but separated from one another, making it impossible to exchange animals and plants.
Moreover, the term deforestation can convey the misconception that what has been removed is “just a bush,” something of little importance in the collective imagination. The literal translation of the term used in English, deforestation, conveys a more concrete idea of the verb: the systematic and successive cutting of native plants for later use as soil, generally for agricultural activities.
savannah vs degradation
França refers to another term very present in the lexicon of ecologists, academics, and the media: the savannah of the Amazon. In the Brazilian case, the biome with the natural characteristics of the savannah is the Cerrado – often seen as a sort of “poor cousin” between the much-talked-about Amazon and Atlantic forests.
For decades, rhetoric foreshadowing the continued decline of the Amazon has insisted on this point: something must be done so that the forest does not turn into a savannah. For many researchers, this is not the case. Biologist França argues that the evidence that the Amazon is not a savannah is that there is no record of the flow of animals and plants from Cerrado into that area – what is really happening is the degradation of the biome.
Moreover, the standardization of these terms devalues the concept of savanna, as if the cerrado were not important, rich and biologically diverse. “Deforestation in the Amazon is a destruction and pillage of the natural heritage of the country and the planet. The savannah is not, “confirms biologist Myron Bastos Lima. “Deforestation for livestock is not a plains process. It would really be to downplay the importance of savannah as a synonym for pasture.”
“The Cerrado is actually the cradle of the water that supplies us, the water tank of Brazil,” Unterstil recalls. “What is happening in the Amazon is the risk of collapse. We have already lost 20% of the forest, and until 1970 it was only 1% that was deforested. Studies show that between 23% and 27% is the maximum non-stop production of system services. environmental.”
clean energy
There is a lot of talk about replacing the energy matrix, and little by little, these changes are coming into everyday life – electric cars are evidence of this movement. The researchers warn that the problem is how to ensure that the energy used is truly clean.
Hydroelectric power, for example, widely used in Brazil, was once seen as an environmentally viable alternative – and that’s what it sounds like, when compared to a thermoelectric power plant or a nuclear plant.
On the other hand, installing a hydroelectric power station requires flooding a vast area – formerly forested – and its operation is causing damage to riverine animals and also to riverside communities who are no longer able to use the watercourse as before.
“Hydroelectric plants destroy animals and harm biodiversity and are a bombshell of greenhouse gas emissions, because when an area of native vegetation is flooded, these trees die and become carbon and methane emissions. This was very neglected in the past,” assesses Thiago Reis.
The other chapter is about electric cars. In the unbridled race in search of less polluting alternatives, cars of this type are beginning to establish themselves as a solution. But there is a problem: the batteries used in these cars, which need specific metals.
“I’ve seen many studies that model the use of these metals, such as lithium, and indications are that the planet simply won’t have enough stocks of these materials to eventually replace the entire fleet,” adds Reese.
In addition, at both ends of this equipment – the manufacture and disposal of batteries, at the end of their useful life – it is not difficult to imagine that the energy cannot be considered 100% clean as the expression proved.
“Clean energy is more communicative than analytical,” Lima explains. “Cleanliness is relative. And dangerous, because it allows many to release, for example, natural gas as “clean energy” just because it emits less than oil or coal.”
He remembers that the debate ends up being based exclusively on climate, that is, on greenhouse gas emissions, but it is necessary to consider other harms according to the energy matrix: from landscapes to noise pollution. “Clean or dirty is not binary. It is relative. Energy sustainability must be thought of in a broader way. Not only in other environmental and social impacts, but also in the economic and political aspect.”
carbon neutralization
“A lot of what is presented as an emission-neutralizing agent is as effective as eating a pineapple after grilling and thinking you’ve burned fat,” Lima comments. Whether through marketing or actually with good intentions, carbon offsetting measures, while laudable, can give the false impression that one thing is directly fixing something else.
“Once an area is deforested and burned and carbon dioxide is emitted, that carbon becomes concentrated in the atmosphere and leads to global warming effects. When a similar area of forest is planted to “compensate,” it does not mean that the damage will be neutralized,” says Rees.
First, because these trees will need decades to develop to the point where they absorb the same amount of carbon as the original forest. Meanwhile, the break-even account will not be closed. But the researcher also cautions about the secondary effects of carbon emissions.
“It left the forest and went into the atmosphere and contributed to the warming effect. However, hypothetically, this could cause a piece of Siberian permafrost to melt, thereby releasing methane into the atmosphere – a gas with an effect 300 times stronger than that of methane. carbon dioxide in the global warming effect,” Reis argues.
In other words: one person deforested 10 hectares and replanted 10 hectares elsewhere to “compensate”. But it will take at least 50 years for this new forest to recover the amount of biomass released. And in these 50 years, carbon will continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, causing the planet to warm. It has not been neutralized.”
For Lima, carbon neutrality rhetoric is usually “a way of telling people that they don’t need to rethink their behavior, that we don’t need to review our society or our economy as it is structured,” as if it were “one more measure that should solve everything.” “. “It’s like a magic pill on a social scale. It doesn’t work and it still hampers people’s consciousness,” he points out.
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