Climate Clarity: The Biggest Problems, The Best Solution

After reporting from every UN climate conference since the one in Peru in 2014, I have come to realize that the climate problems we face and their solutions have crystallized for me in the following way. The three biggest problems are: 1) soon people in the Global South will face the catastrophe of the weather being too hot to work outside; 2) soon farmers in the Global South will face the disaster of being unable to properly grow food because of higher temperatures; 3) soon the world’s oceans will be too acidic for plankton to exist, and therefore for fish to exist.

Fortunately, a solution has also crystallized: reduce the heat-trapping atmospheric overload of carbon dioxide and manage ocean acidification through restoration of the historical health and abundance of ocean plankton. In this article, I will explain in more detail these three main problems and the main solution. When I arrive in Baku, Azerbaijan next month for the 2024 COP29 UN Climate Change Conference, I am hopeful that the lion’s share of the climate movement will become aware of this plankton solution, which presents the most propitious road to a livable world.

Let’s look at the three problems.

Too Hot to Work

First, is it getting too hot for people to work outside in the Global South?

Mulika Oyiza Folorunsho is the program manager for ICCREA, an NGO in Nigeria advocating for climate change solutions and promoting the widespread adoption of renewable energy. She informs me that “soon — within 10 years — the Global South will face the calamity of the temperature being too hot for people to work outdoors. This year the Taraba state in northeast Nigeria experienced temperatures ranging from 40– 45° celsius [104–113°F], making the temperature too hot for people to work outdoors, especially during the afternoon.”

According to a study from Loughborough University in Australia and several universities in the US, the trend started decades ago — between 1991 and 2010 — when agricultural workers were “already feeling the heat, with half the world’s cropland farmers estimated to be working below 86% capacity.”

Matthew Chersich, a research professor at the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute in Johannesburg, South Africa, says, 

Human beings operate in a specific thermal niche, with a set of physiological thresholds — or hard biophysiological limits — that correspond to thermal comfort, heat stress, organ system compromise, and death. Deadly heat arises when conditions of air temperature and humidity surpass the physiological threshold for human adaptability. Core body temperatures can reach lethal levels under sustained periods of apparent temperatures of 35°C or more. 

Yet, as global temperatures continue to rise we are leaving 35°C in the dust. According to an International Monetary Fund report on Africa, “temperatures in fragile states [such as the] Central African Republic, Somalia and Sudan are already higher than in other countries because of their geographical location. By 2040, fragile states could face 61 days a year of temperatures above 35°C.”

The Heat Index is a measure of how hot it really feels when relative humidity is factored in with the actual air temperature. In West Africa, a World Weather Attribution study reports that in 2024 in the Guinea zone along the coast a “combination of high temperatures and relatively humid air resulted in area average Heat Index values of about 50°C, which is classified to be in the ‘danger’ level that is associated with a high risk of heat cramps and heat exhaustion. Locally, values even entered the level of ‘extreme danger’ that is associated with high risk of heat stroke, with values up to 60°C.” And in India this past summer, Delhi was facing not just a deadly 35°C actual air temperature but sustained weeks of 122°F/50°C. 

A recent report from Indonesia, where the heat has “forced farmers in Kampung Baru to change their working hours to morning before 9:30 a.m. and afternoon until night to avoid heat exposure,” adds that last year already “vegetable farmers in East Kalimantan could not farm after 10 a.m. because the temperature was too hot.”

In a 2023 article titled “In India, It’s Getting Too Hot to Farm,” The Nation reported that “heat waves are pushing agricultural workers across a wide swath of India to the edge of survival.” One worker said that after just 20 minutes in the sun, her iron blade was almost too hot to touch. And as “recently the temperature has soared over 104 degrees Fahrenheit… she collapsed in a sugarcane field.” She added, “I collapse almost every 10 days now in this scorching heat. I’ve worked in the fields throughout my life, but such incidents never happened before.”

These reports sound the alarm that the Global South is approaching a new reality where most days will be too hot to work.

Too Hot to Farm

Regarding the second problem, where does the Global South stand with agriculture? Are farms able to properly produce food?

When I was recently in Ghana, a surprisingly large number of people reported with dismay that tomatoes were no longer being grown there because of excessive heat. 

Joel Tchakpeka, an expert in livestock breeding and organic fertilizer production in the West African nation of Togo, predicts that within seven years farms in Togo will be unable to properly produce food due to excessive air temperatures. Speaking in French, he added that these climate changes are noticeable and remarkable throughout the country. “The excessive heat phenomenon has started,” he said. “This year, for example, many farmers did not produce even one bag of crops per hectare due to excess heat and lack of rain.”

Evi Sewa Mawouegnigan Clément, an agroecologist, climate activist and project manager at the Young Volunteers for the Environment (JVE) in Togo, explains that, 

Already 30 years ago, we could hear and see the effects of climate change on the agricultural sector everywhere. In the Global South the situation is alarming: loss of biodiversity, impoverishment of the soil, [and] crop losses following pockets of long drought . . . . It is no longer climate change but rather the Climate Crisis — the situation is serious. It is now the ‘hottest times.’ And now is the time more than ever for farmers to become aware, adopt agroecology, restore degraded landscapes, avoid synthetic mineral fertilizers as well as glyphosate pesticides, and adopt local agricultural techniques that are resilient to the effects of climate change. Now is the time to act.

This anecdotal information is buttressed by a 2022 report by the International Livestock Research Institute, which looked at the impending rise of droughts, floods, and pests due to climate change. “Taken altogether, the future of agriculture and food security in Africa does not look bright. Experts warn that under current climate projections, Africa will only be fulfilling 13 percent of its food needs by 2050.” The report adds that “there are many reasons climate change poses such an immense challenge for African agriculture. Many crops foundational to African diets, such as wheat, maize, sorghum and millet, will struggle to survive rising temperatures.”

In a June 2024 Bloomberg report titled “Drought Gripping Morocco Is Bad Omen for Global Food Supplies,” we learn that “Mohamed Sadiri has farmed the same 3 hectares in western Morocco since 1963, and he’s never seen the land this parched. Wheat yields plummeted last year to 1 ton per hectare (2.5 acres), his smallest harvest ever, as the worst drought period in three decades envelops the North African nation… where the frequency of droughts has quintupled this century.” 

“We haven’t had a good year since 2000, and the last three years were the worst,” Sadiri said. “All we can do now is pray for God’s mercy.”

Too Acidic for Fish

Turning to the problem of ocean acidification, the crux of the looming disaster is that ocean water is combining with carbon dioxide to create carbonic acid (H2O + CO2 = H2CO3). When this acid surpasses a certain threshold, plankton will not survive. Because plankton are the base — at the bottom of the ocean food chain — that means fish also will not survive.

One reason why carbonic acid destroys ocean life has to do with calcium. When acid levels get too high, plankton cannot form their calcium-based shells because it takes too much energy to extract the necessary calcium from the ocean, so they die. The eggs of large fish such as tuna and cod suffer the same fate.

Scottish commercial marine biologist Howard Dryden further informed me that “the entire marine ecosystem depends on a carbonate mineral called aragonite,” which will dissolve “in less than 20 years” because of this same carbonic acid. This means that “most plankton and diatoms [will dissolve and] the food supply for most marine life will be gone. It is possible that all the whales, seals, birds and fish will starve to death, and we will lose the food supply for 3 billion people.”

By 2015 Nature Climate Change had already issued this warning: “The Southern Ocean is acidifying at such a rate because of rising carbon dioxide emissions that large regions may be inhospitable for key organisms in the food chain to survive as soon as 2030.”

The Plankton Solution

Plankton’s natural photosynthesis is the most potent mechanism available on Earth to manage our excess CO2. Its repurposing of CO2 does two things: it takes away enough of our atmospheric greenhouse gas blanket to keep us cool and healthy, and at the same time it eliminates oceanic carbonic acid while also not allowing it to form in the first place, thereby sparing ocean life the acidification brought about by the combination of H2O and CO2.

The two methods plankton have for repurposing CO2 can manage the three problems. Unfortunately, our planet has already lost massive amounts of plankton in the last hundred years.

What caused this tragic loss? Analogous to how farmland depends on rainfall to nourish plants, a plankton ecosystem depends on the “dustfall” from global winds, which pick up nutritional dust from dry land masses and drop this manna into the oceans. But because grass thrives on CO2, dry land masses have become more grassy and more moist from that same extra CO2 that humans have so profusely placed into the atmosphere. More grass growing has meant less dust blowing. And this “dustfall drought” has devastated plankton populations. 

As ecosystems restorer Russ George told me at last year’s UN climate conference in Dubai:

The good news is we can easily provide dust for the ocean….[T]he great John Martin — the ocean scientist who did the work to define how important dust is to the ocean and to phytoplankton, which is the grass of the ocean — said the ocean pasture grass is dying because too little dust is blowing in the wind. And he said this back in 1989. He said global warming is the greatest crisis that the world has ever faced, but the ocean and its phytoplankton can save us from global warming. And all we have to do is to give the ocean back its dust.

In fact, George is developing a swift, inexpensive, and eco-friendly plan called “100 Villages” to replenish the ocean’s missing dust. He told me recently that “the oceans can be restored back to health not by the largest nations or corporations but rather by a mere 100 of the world’s smallest villages. These villages orchestrate ocean restoration enterprises that send their ships to replenish and restore their village ocean. They accomplish this by putting back very small amounts of dust — increasing the concentration of iron in the water by infinitesimal parts per trillion — that is all that is needed to immediately save and restore their ocean plankton pastures.”

If the 100 Villages project succeeds, guided by careful scientific planning, plankton will be safely and sustainably restored to the ocean. Consequently, enough CO2 will be repurposed to bring the greenhouse effect back to a safe level and ocean acidification will be managed properly.

The likelihood of success is shown in this report, which takes data from the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1991 that essentially placed the same material in the ocean that the 100 Villages project would use. The report’s analysis of the CO2 data shows that 20 gigatons (Gt) of CO2 were permanently removed from the atmosphere in the year following the eruption. Given that achieving “climate restoration” by 2050 will require removing or repurposing 60 Gt of CO2 per year, we only need to work with an area of ocean three times that of the Pinatubo event. More good news is that the ocean surface area involved with the Pinatubo eruption was so tiny compared to the total surface area of the ocean that the 100 Villages project can succeed by restoring only 1–2% of the total ocean area. 

Now compare the 100 Villages plan to the omnipresent plan that dominates the climate movement today: fossil fuel CO2 emissions reduction (ER), which would reduce future additions to the lethal dose of CO2 currently sitting over our heads. But even if by some miracle we suddenly stopped all emissions from fossil fuel, which otherwise would be adding about 1% a year to our greenhouse blanket of CO2, it would take thousands of years for today’s blanket of CO2 to go away by itself. Sadly, even that miracle amount of ER would still leave us facing the exact same calamities at essentially the same level of severity.

So, can we implement a plan that leads to an acceptable outcome?

Fortunately, there is a promising ocean restoration movement now emerging in Africa. In August I participated in a press conference in Ghana where the Africa Climate Band Campaign unveiled its plans to support the 100 Villages initiative, among other such efforts on the continent, including an event sponsored by the African Union last year in Madagascar.

Next month, when the UN climate conference convenes in Azerbaijan, we will see if that movement or any similar initiatives point to a paradigm shift away from ER and towards plankton restoration. Will we avert the three biggest problems? We will not succeed if we wait for the lackadaisical leaders currently in power in the First World. Instead, by supporting the leadership of Africans and others in the Global South grappling with the urgency of the situation thrust upon them, we will find the road to a livable future.