"You can find examples of really big environmental problems that we've already solved.” Climate change is solvable, argues Hannah Ritchie.
Doomerism about the state of the planet is widespread right now. Many see climate change as an insurmountable problem that we won’t be able to tackle. But the reality tells a different story, says data scientist Hannah Ritchie. By stepping back to look at the data and at how the world has changed over centuries, you can actually find examples of really big environmental problems that we've already solved. By tracing the evolution of human history, we can see that human progress was often very much in conflict with environmental impact. The more that humans progressed, the more the environment degraded.
Ritchie argues that now, we're in a unique position where these two things are no longer in conflict, thanks to recent technologies that decouple our human wellbeing with our environmental impact.
Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist and science communicator focused on the largest problems that shape our world, and how to solve them. Ritchie's work focuses on environmental sustainability, including climate change, energy, food and agriculture, biodiversity, air pollution and deforestation. Ritchie is a Deputy Editor and Lead Researcher at Our World in Data, and a researcher at the Oxford Martin Programme in Global Development, at the University of Oxford.