Green Six Sigma

Chapter 12Implementation: Making It Happen

12.1. Introduction

When I read the summary of the UK Met Office report on climate change (Kendon et al., 2021) I was thinking of borrowing the title from Tom Clancy's novel, Clear and Present Danger. The report has shown that visible evidence of climate change is already here in the UK and that the twenty-first century so far has been warmer than the previous three centuries. The rate of sea level rise has been over 3 mm per year for the period 1993–2019. There can be no doubt looking at these figures that climate change is happening right now.

This is also reflected by the spate of climate-related disasters in July 2021 in geographical areas as widespread as Western Europe, North America, China and South Asia. In August 2021, a UNICEF report (Carrington, 2021) noted that of the 2.2 billion children in the world, almost half were already at “extremely high risk” from the effects of both pollution and climate change, and that nearly every child alive was at risk from at least one risk, such as disease, drought, or air pollution and extreme weather events such as cyclones, flooding and heat wave. The report highlighted the fact that for those living in the 33 countries that constitute the most endangered areas – including sub-Saharan Africa, India and the Philippines – they face the consequences of at least three events at once.

IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC, 2021) also carries the same urgent message of the ‘clear and present ...