Every year, 400,000 people are estimated to have died due to the effects of climate change. These are children, mothers, fathers, and other people who are in some way crucial to the lives of others. Famine, disease, and weather-related disasters exacerbated by the warming of our planet are pressing issues affecting the lives of millions, but our world leaders are failing to address them effectively, being complacent when faced with pushback.

Climate change is no longer an issue of our future, it is an issue of the now: a harsh reality we’re facing today. The world is hotter than ever before with the global average temperature rising 1.2 degrees Celsius from 1880 to now. These rising temperatures arenít just meaningless low numbers, they have been behind the wildfires that are destroying communities around the world, most recently in the palisades fire which displaced 300,000 different people, and destroyed thousands of homes, and historic buildings in the process. The question is no longer what we can do to combat climate change, but how we can take action to prevent more suffering across the globe.

In the United States, there have been efforts to curb greenhouse emissions with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) which invested over $300 billion into climate initiatives like electric vehicle incentives, and introducing clean energy tax credits. Another international initiative to combat climate change was the Paris Agreement, made in 2015 by the United Nations which was a treaty signed by 196 countries with the purpose of avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change. Their goal was to ultimately change our climate’s current trajectory to prevent earth from hitting 1.5 degrees Celsius, however analysts say that the world is not on track to meet that target, and more efforts are urgently needed. We are desperate for more international action and technological innovation  to prevent climate change, and the clock is ticking.