From global warming to plastic pollution, this was the decade when people learned the planet was facing a climate emergency The decade where the effects of climate change became impossible to ignore

Climate Science

This was the decade when science demonstrated climate change was happening beyond any reasonable doubt. Towards the end of it, the UK recorded its hottest ever temperature, of 38.7°C (101.7°F), in July 2019, at Cambridge Botanic Garden.

This came just five months after Kew Gardens experienced a record high winter temperature of 21.2°C. Those thermometer readings are part of a warming trend that has had every one of the country’s 10 hottest years occurring since 2002 – and five of them in the past decade, according to Met Office records dating back to 1884.

Anecdotally, the UK weather became stranger over the course of the decade with almost every year containing at least one extreme case of flooding, heatwave, storm or cold winter.

In 2018, the United Nations warned that there were just 12 years to take the action needed to save the planet from the climate catastrophe.

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And in November 2019, 11,000 scientists from around the world published a study in the journal BioScience, warning “clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency”.

Plastic

The horrors of plastic pollution began to register with the public, slowly at first but in a big way as the years progressed. Sir David Attenborough’s 2017 Blue Planet II series, in particular, resonated hugely with the public. This featured a mother pilot whale grieving for the death of her calf, which was suspected to have died from waste plastic ingestion.

The public reaction to this, alongside growing media attention, spurred MPs and companies to take the matter more seriously, resulting in proposals such as bottle-deposit schemes and a flurry of pledges from retailers about reducing single-use plastic in their products.

Air pollution

The focus on air pollution has become much more intense because, while pollution levels declined, the evidence of the harm it causes has increased.

Air pollution contributes to 64,000 early deaths in the UK a year, according to a study by the Max Planck Institute in Germany in 2019.

A separate study in the journal Nature Communications last year found tiny particles on the foetal side of placentas. This indicates that unborn babies are directly exposed to the black carbon produced by motor traffic and fuel burning.

Another report, published in the European Respiratory Journal, found that air pollution will prematurely age the lungs of the average British person by more than four years during their lifetime, raising the risk of chronic lung disease.

Although air pollution is gradually being reduced as coal-fired power stations are phased out and restrictions put in place on the most polluting vehicles, large swathes of the UK breached EU air pollution limits throughout the decade and will probably to do so for the foreseeable future.

Biodiversity

The decline in biodiversity which began many decades ago shows no sign of abating. The State of Nature report in October revealed that 41 per cent of UK species have declined since the 70s –much of it in the past decade – as the expansion of farming has sharply reduced the number of suitable habitats and climate change has made conditions tougher.

Ozone layer

It wasn’t all doom and gloom on the environment. In September 2009, the UN declared that the hole in the ozone layer was “on track to heal completely in our lifetime” – and in October Nasa reported that the hole was smaller than at any time since it was discovered in 1985.

Population

The global population grew by nearly a billion in the past decade – to almost eight billion people – putting huge extra pressure on the environment through building, farming and infrastructure, and contributing further to climate change. More people are starting to advocate population control to help protect the planet.