World Topics

Global environmental news, and the numbers behind the headlines

Environmental news moves fast, but the underlying measurements change slowly and are worth knowing. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has been measured continuously at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii since 1958 — the record known as the Keeling Curve. It has climbed from about 315 parts per million at the start of that record to over 420 ppm today, against a pre-industrial baseline of roughly 280 ppm.

The 2015 Paris Agreement commits its signatories to holding the rise in global average temperature well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. In the same year the United Nations adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals with a target date of 2030; several of them — clean water and sanitation, responsible consumption and production, climate action, life below water, life on land — are environmental in substance and not just in name.

Plastic is the other global figure worth carrying around. World production is now in the region of 400 million tonnes a year, roughly half of it destined for single-use products, and less than a tenth of all plastic ever made has been recycled. That is why so much environmental effort is now aimed upstream at what gets manufactured, rather than downstream at what gets collected.

What actually moves the needle at household scale

• Heating and cooling — the largest single share of most household energy use, which is why insulation and thermostat setbacks matter more than swapping a few light bulbs.
• What you buy — most of a product's footprint is already fixed in its materials and manufacturing before it ever reaches you.
• What goes down the drain — household cleaning chemicals are one of the few pollution sources an individual controls completely.

Useful and Interesting Links

Each of the links below opens in a new browser window, so The-Environment.net stays open behind it. Where two sources disagree, government and university sites (.gov and .edu) are the ones to weigh first — they are not selling anything.

More on The-Environment.net

• Local Topics — the same issues at the scale of a city, a watershed or a beach.
• Science & Technology — how contaminated soil, groundwater and indoor air actually get cleaned up.
• Eco-Friendly Cleaning Products — plant-based, biodegradable options for the home.