As the latest climate science underscores the urgency for collective action, a herd of gigantic animal puppets will make a 20,000-kilometre journey from western Africa to Europe, highlighting the dire impact of climate change on the world’s most vulnerable.
“Climate change is the biggest story we’re facing now,” Amir Nizar Zuabi, a Palestinian artist on the team behind The Herd project, told The Guardian. “It’s often presented in terms of emissions and the Kyoto agreement—people struggle to fathom that.”
“What we hope The Herd becomes, is a visceral engagement with the issue.”
New Territory of Climate Impacts
Millions of people are already experiencing the very real climate impacts of the emissions-driven warming researchers describe, Temperature statistics heralded a milestone that rang alarm bells among scientists this year: for the first time in modern record-keeping, the average global temperature was more than 1.5°C higher than pre-industrial levels for the entire 12-month period between February, 2023 and January, 2024. Although temperatures reached the warming limit marked by the Paris Agreement, experts were quick to note that the landmark climate pact has not yet been breached—because that target was for a 1.5°C rise throughout a multi-year average.
But whether the agreement was violated or not, many people experienced 2023 as an unprecedented year of adverse climate impacts. East Africa grappled with an unparalleled drought, and vast expanses of forest land succumbed to wildfires—with smoke penetrating regions unaccustomed to such consequences. Southwest Africa faced the wrath of the most energy-intensive tropical cyclone on record, claiming 500 lives, while Southeast Asia endured lethal and record-breaking heatwaves.
And further climatic changes will surpass what humans have seen so far, researchers say.
The year 2023 was “mind blowing” for Antarctic ice loss, they note. The area covered in sea ice melted away to a record low during the Antarctic summer last February—and then it regrew very slowly even in the colder months that followed. By the time sea ice should have been reaching its maximum extent in July, an area the size of Algeria was “missing,” making 2023 the second year in a row of record-breaking sea ice loss. The consequences can be devastating for marine-dependent wildlife and ecosystems.
The factors driving Antarctic sea ice loss are complicated and scientists are hesitant to directly link it to climate change. But human emissions are raising Southern Ocean temperatures, and studies have linked ocean warming to low Antarctic sea ice extents, regional climate modeller Dr. Ella Gilbert writes for Carbon Brief.
Ice is also melting in other polar areas, including from Greenland’s massive glaciers. The consequence is that large amounts of freshwater are flooding into the ocean and contributing to the slowing down of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC)—a vast system of ocean currents that circulates heat, carbon, and nutrients between the tropics to the Arctic Circle.
AMOC is a key global climate regulator. Scientists have been aware of its breakdown as a theoretical possibility, with previous studies finding that the current has slowed considerably since 1950 and is possibly in its weakest state of the last thousand years. But a recent study in the journal Science uses new physics-based modelling to project a possible abrupt breakdown—with AMOC reaching a tipping point within the next hundred years.
A collapse of the current would dramatically change how it distributes heat and salt in the ocean, and would cause Northern Hemispheric cooling and slight Southern Hemispheric warming, the researchers say. These changes would be further amplified by atmospheric and sea ice feedbacks and result in a very strong and rapid cooling of the European climate, with parts of the continent changing at more than 3°C per decade—much faster than today’s global warming of about 0.2°C per decade.
“No realistic adaptation measures can deal with such rapid temperature changes under an AMOC collapse,” the study says.
Climate change is also making extreme weather events more frequent and intense, prompting scientists to contemplate adding a new category to classify hurricanes, which “are increasingly surpassing what was once considered extreme,” reports the Washington Post. Researchers make the case for adding a Category 6 to the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale for any storms with winds over 309 kilometres per hour. They say the existing categorization could cause people to underestimate the risk of storms that are now more severe than the baseline 252 km/h wind speeds that define a Category 5 storm.
Some meteorologists say this plan fails to incorporate other storm characteristics like rain or storm surge, which are each responsible for more deaths in hurricanes than wind speed—but the issue does highlight how humans must adapt to new levels of extreme weather.
Climate Deaths Were ‘Twice Preventable’
Back in West Africa, the team behind the Herd of Puppets have chosen their starting point to draw focus on people in the Global South who face the worst effects of climate change. They will embark on their symbolic journey in spring, 2025 with around 30 large puppets and a plan to trek all the way up to Norway. Several more puppets will join the procession along the way.
“The idea is that we’re migrating with an ever evolving, growing group of animals,” said Zuabi.
The project was inspired as a continuation of the Little Amal project, he added. In that past project, puppeteers walked little Amal, a 12-foot-tall effigy of a young Syrian girl, 8,000 kilometres through Europe. Speaking to refugees along the way, Zuabi found they often named drought and climate change as triggers of migration waves.
“We just came back from the United States and Mexico,” he said, after walking Amal 9,500 kilometres through the region on a new journey. “And there, a huge part of the migration crisis is generated by the climate crisis, because of failing crops and lack of income.”
The herd project is still forming, but research has laid bare the scale of the impacts that Zuabi wants to draw attention to. One commentary in the journal Nature Medicine points to devastating effects already taking their toll on humans. It claims as a “conservative” estimate that the total number of people who have died as a result of climate change since the year 2000 will surpass four million this year. With the exception of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of climate-caused deaths exceeds “the combined death toll of every World Health Organization-recognized public health emergency of international concern.”
The commentary states that “while governments wait to act, climate change is becoming deadlier” by increasing the severity of weather, heatwaves, and floods, and by causing excess mortality through famines, conflict, suicides, and dozens of infectious and chronic diseases.
“More than half of those deaths will have been due to either malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, or malnutrition and diarrheal disease in south Asia, and most of the dead are therefore presumed to have been young children,” wrote Colin Carlson, an assistant professor at Georgetown University.
The scale of deaths is revelatory, but the cause is also damning, Carlson states: “Many or most of these deaths were twice preventable, resulting from two overlapping policy failures for which high-income countries and ongoing systems of colonial extraction bear most of the blame: the failure to eliminate fossil fuels; and the failure to make high-quality clinical care, essential medicines, vaccines, sanitation, and the other material components of climate change adaptation available to populations facing unprecedented health risks.”
