Meet Jude.

 

It is August 2022. Jude is 8 weeks old. Already, he has witnessed the hottest day ever in the UK. A summer of extreme drought followed in the UK with hosepipe bans and warnings of a dry winter.

In Pakistan, devastating floods killed thousands and made homeless hundreds of thousands, while in California wild fires raged and in Greenland, the ice cap melt is inevitable, contributing at least 27cm to global sea level rise by 2100.

Sea level rise through all causes is accelerating rapidly. By the time Jude is 8 years old, large parts of the Somerset levels will experience flooding seen in 2013/14 almost annually.

Climate Central climate change global warming sea level risk tool

By the time he is 18, 40,000 homes will have been lost completely.

When he is 28, Glastonbury may be a port again, and  hurricanes in the eastern Atlantic may be a regular weather feature.

A new study shows areas of England where properties are at risk from rising sea levels

In the rest of the world, much of the Maldives will have gone, large parts of Florida, coastal Bangladesh and China,  will be under water permanently, or so devastated by more frequent Hurricanes that they will be uninhabitable.

And by the time Jude is retiring, the major coastal cities including New York, London, Jakarta, Dhaka and Bangkok may be no more.

Much of this change is now committed – we can only stop it getting worse. And does this mean that individuals can do nothing?

In fact our own actions, the pressure we put on decision makers to change and the  choices we make can have world-changing consequences.

Even preventing the loss of our local green spaces to ‘development’ is part of a wider narrative to change our unthinking actions to a general consideration of the world in which we live and our legacy for our heirs.

For Jude and all the other 2022 babies to survive and thrive, we alone must speak, act and deliver.