⚡ We’re doing it
Happy Friday! For those who missed yesterday’s newsletter, here it is. We’ll see you at the Global Climate Strike!
Country climate change report card
4 years ago: 196 countries came together, had a party, and negotiated the Paris Agreement. They pinky promised that they’d take steps to limit the increase in global average temperature this century to well below 2 degrees Celsius.
How it works: Each country submits its own plan, sets its own targets for emissions reductions, and points out its own pathways to hit those numbers.
What we learned: Countries break promises. Global carbon emissions increased 1.7% in 2017 and 2.7% in 2018… and of course, the 2019 rate of increase will be the highest ever.
“If all governments meet their Paris Agreement target, we calculate the world would still see 3 C of warming, but that warming is likely to be even higher given most are not taking enough action to meet their targets. We still have a long way to go,” says Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics
Govs, pay your teachers!
The UN wants total literacy across all youth and most adults by 2030. As expected, we are far away from meeting that goal—at the current rate of change, 30% of adults and 20% of children would still be illiterate by the deadline.
Impact across geographies
Africa: half the children under age six in francophone Africa lack basic numeracy and literacy, with the problem worse in SSA.
India: there are major disparities in education across different states—in Kolkata, the average level of education is 14 years, and in others, it’s only 6 years.
Check out statistics on other geographies here.
What can we do? Bill Gates believes that the answer is in primary school teachers.
“Although it’s fine to look at innovative approaches, a well-trained teacher in a country that’s stable, where you’re culturally allowing the girls to go to school as well, you can get extremely high literacy levels.”
So basically, we need to still work on the basics… This formula has worked well in countries like Cuba and Indonesia, with 95%+ literacy rates among people 15+ years.
If you’re passionate about education and/or ed-tech, please send us any innovation you’ve seen recently.
Big, big money wants to go green
More than 500 investors with a collective $35 trillion of assets are calling on governments to get their house in order. They want more done to combat climate change.
“Climate change is such a critical issue for investors’ portfolios and there are so many risks associated with it and also huge opportunities”
What do we need? Clean energy is set to hit $2.6 trillion this decade, but it’s nowhere close to enough. We must invest $2.4 trillion, across the public and private sector, in clean energy every year through 2035 and cut coal-fired power to near 0 by 2050 to avoid getting our teeth knocked out by climate change.
Public companies feeling the pressure
Here are some of the world’s largest companies making moves towards social impact:
Tides are rising: Big investors believe that soon, CEOs will be touting their social impact scores (i.e., their ESG scores) alongside their bond scores. According to Blue Harbour’s Cliff Robbins, these scores will directly impact the valuation of companies.
Samuel Moyn: Human Rights are not enough
What is human rights when inequality is rampant? For the last 40 years, the notion of human rights has spread. Globalization has allowed people to more quickly identify with strangers across borders in the collective identity of humanity.
“Yet at the same time, the liberalization of markets, the reliance on free trade, and the mission of governance to institutionalize [have] both created vast gulfs of inequality.”
Human rights has become our highest moral language, a calling by which we act as if we’re doing good for the world—even as a small population of the world slowly gained more and more power and wealth.
And the costs? “Grievous and spectacular”
“Great advances were made when it came to establishing a sense of global responsibility and status equality, but at the high price of economic fairness at every scale. Human-rights law lacked the norms, and human-rights movements the will, to advocate for a serious redistributive politics. Even in theory, with their focus on ensuring a bare floor of material protection for individuals in a globalized economy, human-rights movements did nothing to prevent the obliteration of a wealth ceiling. With the decline of the welfare state, human-rights movements both failed to attack the victory of the rich and struggled to cope with the poverty of the rest. The political and legal project of human rights became a companion to the rise of inequality, which paved the road to populism and further rights abuses.”
What we should we doing: We need to recognize the limitations of human rights movements—to let them do what they do best: “inform our concepts of citizenship and stigmatizing evil, without purporting to stand for the whole of “global justice.” We must then supplement these movements with other projects to combat the root cause of inequality today.
Snigdha Sur, The Juggernaut
“I started building The Juggernaut partly because I was tired of not seeing myself or people like me represented with nuance. Tired of the doctor, engineer, or taxi driver stereotypes. Tired of the appropriation of South Asian wellness and health practices without respect for the wisdom that has come before. Tired of how my credentials today may make others forget that maybe I, too, have failed or struggled — or have a past separate from the institutions with which I’m affiliated. I was born in Chhattisgarh, India, and didn’t think I would end up at places like Yale or Harvard.
Lean Impact by Anne Mei Chang
Social change is far more complicated than building a new app. It requires more listening, more care, and more stakeholders. To make a lasting difference, solutions must be embraced by beneficiaries, address root causes, and include an engine that can accelerate growth to reach the scale of the needs. Lean Impact offers bold ideas to reach audacious goals through customer insight, rapid experimentation and iteration, and a relentless pursuit of impact.
UNGA Events: Check out all the amazing events happening around the UNGA Assembly in New York City! Many of them are public, so if you have time, we definitely recommend checking them out.
How to Build a Global Community in a World of Nationalism?: What could globalists learn from the powerful sense of belonging that nationalism has created? Faced with the injustices of the world's economic and political system, what should a responsible globalist do?
Digital Global Climate Strike: This September 20th, millions of people will join young climate strikers in a Global #ClimateStrike on the streets and demand an end to the age of fossil fuels. Anyone with an online presence has an opportunity to join in and “go green” with a digital strike.
If you’re in NYC, the strike will start at Foley Square (Centre and Worth) at 12pm EST today. See you there!
If you like what you read, please click on the heart below & continue sharing this newsletter!
Support us by liking our Facebook page and following us on Instagram.
Tomorrow is a daily impact newsletter for changemakers who care about the world. Our purpose is to bring you the news and stories about people making a difference.