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Recorded at	October 10, 2020
Event	Countdown
Duration (min:sec)	07:30
Video Type	TED Stage Talk
Words per minute	164.32 slow
Readability (FK)	53.8 medium
Speaker	Johan Rockström
Country	Sweden
Occupation	hydrologist, professor, economist, agronomist
Description	Swedish hydrologist


1	00:13	(Beeps) [Countdown] (Clapboard claps) Ten years is a long time for us humans on earth.
2	00:23	Ten turns around the sun.
3	00:26	When I was on the TED stage a decade ago, I talked about planetary boundaries that keep our planet in a state that allowed humanity to prosper.
4	00:36	The main point is that once you transgress one, the risks start multiplying.
5	00:41	The planetary boundaries are all deeply connected, but climate, alongside biodiversity, are core boundaries.
6	00:47	They impact on all others.
7	00:50	Back then we really thought we had more time.
8	00:53	The warning lights were on, absolutely, but no unstoppable change had been triggered.
9	00:59	Since my talk, we have increasing evidence that we are rapidly moving away from the safe operating space for humanity on earth.
10	01:07	Climate has reached a global crisis point.
11	01:11	We have now had 10 years of record-breaking climate extremes: fires blaze in Australia, Siberia, California and the Amazon, floods in China, Bangladesh and India.
12	01:22	We're now enduring heat waves across the entire northern hemisphere.
13	01:26	We risk crossing tipping points that shift the planet from being our best resilient friend, dampening our impacts, to start working against us, amplifying the heat.
14	01:37	For the first time, we are forced to consider the real risk of destabilizing the entire planet.
15	01:45	Our children can see this.
16	01:47	They are walking out of school to demand action, looking with disbelief at our inability to deviate away from potentially catastrophic risks.
17	01:57	The next 10 years, to 2030, must see the most profound transformation the world has ever known.
18	02:04	This is our mission.
19	02:06	This is the countdown.
20	02:08	(Clock ticks)
21	02:10	When my scientific colleagues summarized, about a decade ago, for the first time, the state of knowledge on climate tipping points, just one place had strong evidence that it was on a serious downward spiral.
22	02:24	Arctic sea ice. (Water sounds)
23	02:26	Other tipping points were long way off -- 50 or 100 turns around the sun.
24	02:32	Just last year we revisited these systems, and I got the shock of my career.
25	02:39	We are only a few decades away from an Arctic without sea ice in summer.
26	02:44	In Siberia, permafrost is now thawing at dramatic scales.
27	02:48	Greenland is losing trillions of tons of ice and may be approaching a tipping point.
28	02:53	The great forests of the North are burning with plumes of smoke the size of Europe.
29	02:59	The Atlantic ocean circulation is slowing.
30	03:02	The Amazon rainforest is weakening and may start emitting carbon within 15 years.
31	03:08	Half of the coral of the Great Barrier Reef has died.
32	03:11	West Antarctica may have crossed the tipping point already today.
33	03:16	And now, the most solid of glaciers on earth, East Antarctica, parts of it are becoming unstable.
34	03:23	Nine out of the 15 big biophysical systems that regulate climate are now on the move, showing worrying signs of decline and potentially approaching tipping points.
35	03:35	Tipping points bring three threats.
36	03:38	First, sea level rise.
37	03:40	We can already expect up to one meter this century.
38	03:43	This will endanger the homes of 200 million people.
39	03:47	But when we add the melting ice from Antarctica and Greenland into the equation, this might lead to a two meter rise.
40	03:55	But it won't stop there, it will keep on getting worse.
41	03:59	Second, if our carbon stores like permafrost and forest flip to belching carbon, then this makes the job of stabilizing temperatures so much harder.
42	04:09	And third, these systems are all linked like dominoes: If you cross one tipping point, you lurch closer to others.
43	04:18	Let's stop for a moment and look at where we are.
44	04:21	The foundation of our civilization is a stable climate and a rich diversity of life.
45	04:27	Everything, I mean everything, is based on this.
46	04:30	Civilization has thrived in a Goldilocks zone: not too hot, not too cold.
47	04:36	This is what we have had for 10,000 years since we left the last ice age.
48	04:42	Let's zoom out a little here.
49	04:44	Three million years -- temperatures have never broken through the two degrees Celsius limit.
50	04:51	Earth has self-regulated within a very narrow range of plus two degrees in a warm interglacial, minus four degrees, deep ice age.
51	04:59	Now, we are following a path that would take us to a three to four degree world in just three generations.
52	05:07	We would be rewinding the climate clock, not one million, not two million, but five to 10 million years.
53	05:12	We are drifting towards hot-house earth.
54	05:16	For each one degree rise, one billion people will be forced to live in conditions that we today largely consider uninhabitable.
55	05:24	This is not a climate emergency, it is a planetary emergency.
56	05:28	My fear is not that Earth will fall over a cliff on the 1st of January, 2030.
57	05:34	My fear is that we press unstoppable buttons in the Earth system.
58	05:39	What happens in the next 10 years will likely determine the state of the planet we hand over for future generations.
59	05:47	Our children have every reason to be alarmed.
60	05:51	We need to get serious about stabilizing our planet.
61	05:54	Two frontiers will guide this transformation.
62	05:57	The first one is in science.
63	05:59	Here's a new equation for a sustainable planet: planetary boundaries plus global commons equals planetary stewardship.
64	06:08	We need to a safe corridor for humanity to allow us all to become stewards of the entire planet, not to save the planet but to provide a good future for all people.
65	06:20	And the second frontier is in society.
66	06:22	We need a new economic logic based on well-being.
67	06:25	We are now in a position to provide science-based targets for all global commons for all companies and cities in the world.
68	06:34	First task, we need to cut global emissions by half by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050 or sooner.
69	06:42	This means decarbonizing the big systems that run our lives: energy, industry, transport, buildings.
70	06:48	The fossil fuel era is over.
71	06:50	We need to transform agriculture from a source of emissions to a store of carbon, and critically, we must protect our oceans and land, the natural ecosystems that absorb half of our emissions.
72	07:04	The good news is, we can do this.
73	07:07	We have the knowledge. We have the technology.
74	07:10	We know it makes social and economic sense.
75	07:14	And when we succeed, we can all take lungfuls of fresh air.
76	07:18	We will be saying hello to healthy lifestyles and resilient economies in livable cities.
77	07:25	We are all on this journey around the sun together.
78	07:29	This is our only home.
79	07:32	This is our mission: to protect our children's future.
80	07:38	Thank you.
81	07:40	(Lights click off)

Johan Rockström: 10 years to transform the future of humanity -- or destabilize the planet