Climate literacy is sorely lacking

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to improve their climate literacy so as to understand the projected impacts from the expanding climate crisis and how to adapt their workplaces in the face of these impacts.

The recent IPCC AR6 reporting made it very clear what is required for us to attempt to keep global temperatures below 2ºC of heating.

Here it is:

Notice the wording here: rapid, deep and immediate reductions are required. There is nothing ambiguous about this.

Yet in recent research by Potential Energy they found that this was not the sentiment in the general population

As you can see most people feel that gradual step-by-step change is what is required. Nothing could be further from what is required. In fact as noted before we need to make radical far reaching change immediately.

This from the latest UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2023:

The lack of stringent emission reductions means that the required emission cuts from now to 2030 have increased significantly. To reach emission levels consistent with a below 2°C pathway in 2030, the cuts required per year are now 5.3 per cent from 2024, reaching 8.7 per cent per year on average for the 1.5°C pathway. To compare, the fall in total global GHG emissions from 2019 to 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic was 4.7 per cent (UNEP 2022)

A lack of climate literacy is preventing billions of people from understanding the true nature of our predicament.