There is an extraordinary article doing the rounds on social media at the moment by Dr. James Dyke from Exeter University. It is a personal piece about his awakening to just how severe the future looks as our climate and wildlife systems breakdown. More than that it is about the ‘technosphere’ and how it has us trapped on a path to climate and ecological catastrophe. It is worth a read, but please brace yourself.
I’m drawing your attention to this because of a passage that opens the article. Dyke is recalling the moment when the severity of the situation first truly dawned on him; it was a conversation he had with a senior member of the IPCC in 2011 which concluded like this:
“But what about the many millions of people directly threatened,” I went on. “Those living in low-lying nations, the farmers affected by abrupt changes in weather, kids exposed to new diseases?”
He gave a sigh, paused for a few seconds, and a sad, resigned smile crept over his face. He then simply said: “They will die.”
This is why The Glacier Trust does what it does. We know the path we are on is leading us to catastrophe, but we aren’t prepared to just let it play out. The damage climate change will do isn’t fixed, we can slow it down a bit with policy and behaviour change, but we can also adapt to it, so that the ‘abrupt changes in weather’ don’t surprise and disrupt us as much as they might. Yes people will die (they already have), but we can prevent millions of premature deaths if we commit ourselves now to the urgent task of enabling adaptation.
TGT has spent ten years enabling thousands of farmers and their families to adapt to climate change in rural Nepal. As temperatures continue to increase the challenge is going to get harder, but over the next few decades, if we go on developing and scaling our project work, we can save the livelihoods and therefore lives of tens of thousands more people. But, we need your support to make that possible.
As Dyke and plenty of others point out, the future does look scary, let’s make it less scary for those suffering abrupt changes in weather right now - they don’t have to die, it is not inevitable, we have proven that and want to go on proving it.
We are calling on you to commit to making regular monthly donations to The Glacier Trust. Please consider doing this today; every donation makes a difference.
Without funding for adaptation work, people will be left to fend for themselves , we can’t let that happen.
Please make a donation to save lives in Nepal.