“Our children and grandchildren will not judge us by the promises we made, but by what we chose to do.”
King Charles III, COP31
For many people, environmental issues have slipped down the list of priorities. Against a backdrop of war, political instability and a prolonged cost-of-living squeeze, the focus has understandably shifted towards what families can afford today rather than the world future generations will inherit tomorrow.
That is understandable. But it is also deeply concerning.
Because climate change is no longer simply about a distant environmental crisis. It is about the world we are living in now, and the one our children will experience during their lifetimes.
The international ambition agreed in Paris in 2015 was to pursue efforts to limit global temperature rises to 1.5°C. Ten years on, the consensus at COP31 this week, is that progress has simply not been fast enough. The impacts of a changing climate are already being felt across the world and here at home and we will reach 2.8 degree warming by 2100.
For a baby born today, 2100 is not some abstract date in the distant future. It sits within the span of their lifetime. The world they experience in later life could be considerably warmer and less predictable than the one in which we grew up, with more frequent periods of extreme heat and greater disruption from drought, flooding and other extreme weather.
What can sometimes be overlooked is that climate change is not only an environmental issue. It is an economic one. Extreme weather affects harvests and food supplies, infrastructure, energy systems, insurance and international supply chains. Ultimately, those pressures find their way back into household budgets.
That prospect should concern us. But it should not make us give up.
There is an important difference between accepting that some climate change is now unavoidable and believing that nothing we do matters. Every fraction of a degree matters. Every improvement in cleaner energy, transport, manufacturing, agriculture and consumption has the potential to make the future better than it otherwise would have been.
And there is another reason for some optimism: environmental progress does not have to mean asking families to accept a poorer standard of living. Done well, the green transition can be about better homes, cleaner air, less waste, greater energy security and technology that becomes cheaper and more accessible over time. The challenge is to make sustainable choices not simply the morally preferable option, but the easy, affordable and desirable one.
That’s our goal at Mama Bamboo; better quality products, at affordable prices, which also help the planet.
We need to make ‘eco’ a positive word again.
That means giving politicians permission to pursue ambitious environmental policies while also recognising the very real pressures on household finances. Climate policy cannot succeed if people feel it is something being negatively done to them. It has to demonstrate that protecting our environment and improving everyday life go hand in hand.
I am therefore encouraged to hear Burnham talk about stronger environmental leadership and to see him appoint the first Climate Security Chairperson. Those tasked with delivering this agenda will need resilience and anuthority. Environmental policy is increasingly contested, and simple solutions rarely survive contact with the realities of government budgets, public opinion and the media.
But responsibility does not rest solely in Westminster.
Businesses can innovate. Consumers can reward companies genuinely trying to reduce their impact. Communities can push for change. And each of us can make better choices where those choices are realistic and affordable.
None of us will solve climate change by ourselves, and perfection should never become the enemy of progress. A family choosing one more sustainable product, a business redesigning its packaging, an investor backing cleaner technology or a government making one courageous long-term decision may feel insignificant in isolation. But Multiply those decisions across millions of people, businesses and governments, and they become something much more powerful.
That, ultimately, is where the hope lies.
Our children do not need us to have been perfect. They need us to have listened to the evidence, rejected complacency and kept moving forward, even when doing so was difficult or unpopular.
Perhaps the question is no longer whether we can give our children the same world that we inherited. We cannot. The more important question is what kind of world we choose to leave them from here.
And that is still a choice we have time to make.
