How much investment is required to make a drastic change?
The short answer to this great question is: not as much as we’ll need to invest if we don’t make a drastic change! In the past, the cost of changing the way we do things has been used as an argument for not acting on climate change, but there are costs on both sides of that argument (that is, there is a cost to acting but there is also a cost to not acting). Climate change is making disasters like extreme bushfires and droughts more common, and these kinds of disasters already cost Australians a lot (approx. $3 trillion from 2010-2019!). These costs, which relate to damage and lost income, are going to increase a lot if we do not take urgent action on climate change.
Some people have tried to estimate how much money the world would need to spend to stop climate change, and their estimates range from $300 billion (the cheapest option!) to $50 trillion! Both of these amounts are huge and hard to imagine. The big difference between the cheapest and most expensive estimates also show us that working out exactly how much investment is required is a really hard maths problem! It’s hard because the final cost will depend on lots of things, like whether people agree on what to do, who should do it, and when, but also on how quickly we all make the drastic changes that are needed. For example, we know we need to shift from using fossil fuels to renewable energy, but the cost of doing it quickly (which might include governments paying some of the costs for people to install solar power, big batteries and other renewable options at their homes) might be really different from making that change slowly (which might mean that companies and governments waste money building or upgrading fossil fuel buildings that they can’t use because fossil fuels are banned).
Importantly, we need to remember that money we spend now to get ready for the challenges of climate change will benefit young people alive today and all of the people that come after us, as well as natural systems like our coasts and beaches, wetlands and forests. Investing in drastic change is definitely ‘worth it’, because this is an investment for all of us, and for our children’s children, and for the places that we love the most.
