#mlmillustration

Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I drew this Forest Goddess. It’s just a little drawing on my part, but I did it in the hope it would raise some awareness with regards to an issue that weighs on my mind every day: Climate Change. The scientific consensus, and, indeed, the empirical situation we live in, shows us that climate change is real, and happening real fast - yet so many people still don’t believe it, or don’t think that it affects them. Personally, I am f*cking terrified by it.

Just last June in Europe we witnessed the ‘hottest month ever to be recorded on Earth’. It’s not an hyperbole: the heatwave that invested Italy, France and Spain was 2-3°C hotter than any other heatwave we have on record: this is a huge difference in temperature as it shows practically how much of an impact human made climate change is having on the planet. A group of World Weather Attribution scientists used computer models to show that a similar heatwave would have been averagely 4°C cooler just 100 years ago and reported that Climate Change makes this sort of heatwaves 5 times more likely to happen. These are real life changes we are seeing, and it’s only going to get worse.

Another piece of news caught my eye recently - various articles published by different international media outlets highlighting how the monthly deforestation of the Brasilian Amazon basin has gone up 88.4% compared with a year ago. This prompted me to read a bit more about the impact of forests on the global ecosystem and found out that they’re actually pretty important. On the WWC website your can read all about the beneficial effects of forests, but the bottom line is that by reducing forest loss, we can reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change.

However, in the last 50 years about a fifth of the forest has been cut and burned in Brasil. Scientists have warned that if another fifth of the Amazon basin is cut, it will initiate the feedback loop known as ‘dieback’: the forest will spontaneously start to dry out and burn regardless any attempt of human intervention. This would be disastrous for many reasons, but especially because the Amazon forest helps create a large parte of the Earth’s oxygen (what we breathe), clean fresh water and stores a huge amount of carbon. If the Amazon disappeared, it would release a huge ‘carbon bomb’ into the atmosphere, which would obliterate the basin of water and stop absorbing the sun radiation. This of course would be catastrophic for life on Earth as we know it.

One can easily get discouraged and depressed by reading all this despairing data and seeing how things are quickly deteriorating on the planet, however there are some things we can do in our daily life and to accelerate change! We can

- boycott brands that don’t have a deforestation-free supply chain

- plant trees and care about our immediate environment

- contact and pressure our governments to push climate change to the top of their agenda (get in touch with your local representatives or take part to grassroots movements and demonstrations, there are many options out there!)

- read, read, READ! Information is key. When the sky comes down on us it won’t do to say ‘Oh, I didn’t know about that’

Most of the info in this post was gathered from multiple media outlets, here’s the main sources I used:

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/06/brazil-amazon-rainforest-indigenous-conservation-agribusiness-ranching/

http://wwf.panda.org/our_work/forests/climate_change_and_forest/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/03/brazil-amazon-rainforest-deforestation-environment

https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/forests-and-climate-change#solutions