I'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.

At a recent mitigation/adaptation workshop we used the EnROADS (Energy-Rapid Overview and Decision-Support) simulator to help plot a course of action to limit loss and damage from extreme weather events.

Attendees were able to restrict global heating to just below 2°C that is 1.4°C down from the simulators 3.3°C baseline. This was cause for celebration as it proved to everyone in attendance that we currently have the technology AND know-how to limit loss and damage significantly – every 0.1°C matters A LOT.

But this required aggressive action, for example in this simulation attendees decided to remove ALL coal use from the energy system. For scale there are currently 6,580 operating coal power plants globally, this action requires closing them all.

We also took similar action in the transport, building and agriculture sectors.

Even with all this, in this simulation, we still passed +1.5°C by about 2030 and +1.68°C by 2040. These are the temperature thresholds the group had to prepare for and if there is any doubt as to the very serious challenges this will result in, take a look at the extreme weather report for the week of July 11, 2024

Keep in mind this is all taking place at +1.3°C of heating which is the latest 5-year average.

How ready are you to:

  1. Take serious committed action to decouple from fossil fuel use to avert loss and damage?
  2. Put a robust plan in place to deal with committed temperature rise and the resulting impacts?

This is climate literacy in action.