A new U.N. climate report offers both a warning and hope. “We know what to do, we know how to do it, and now it’s up to us to take action.”
The looming climate crisis “is horrifying, and I don’t want to sugarcoat that,” says Bronson Griscom, a forest ecologist and the director of Natural Climate Solutions at the environmental organization Conservation International, based in Arlington, Va.
Consider the transportation sector, which contributed 15 percent of human-related greenhouse gas emissions in 2019. Globally, If that surge continues, “electric vehicles offer us the greatest potential [to reduce transportation emissions on land], as long as they’re combined with low or zero carbon electricity sources,” Inger Andersen, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said at the news event.