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The urgency of responding to climate change looks very different if you are a drowning island state than if you are a huge nation that stands to find its ports unfreezing in winter, its frozen wastelands becoming fertile and its abundant fossil fuel reserves more accessible.

Over 1% of the world's total GHG footprint could be saved by simple improvements to the way rice is usually grown. This is a big untold story. It has nothing to do with the fossil fuel used by tractors, lorries, boats or any other parts of the supply chain. Specifically, what is needed is more judicious use of fertiliser and not flooding paddy fields22. Paddy field methane is about 6% of all greenhouse gas emissions from the food supply chain. I've seen photos of rivers in China that are bright green from so much excess fertiliser; the yield is probably actually suffering from over application.

it is a stark truth that the sum of all the world's climate action has so far made little or perhaps even zero detectable impact on rising global emissions.

so much carbon has been allowed to accumulate in the atmosphere over the past two decades that now our only hope of keeping warming below the internationally agreed-upon target of 2degC is for wealthy countries to cut their emissions by somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 to 10 percent a year. There is no precedent for those kinds of reductions within an economic model that requires relentless economic growth to survive.4 What all this means is that our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.

Food transport only really becomes a big problem when things get put on an aeroplane. UK examples of this can include grapes and berries from California, fresh tuna from the Indian Ocean, baby vegetables from Africa and, perhaps worst of all, asparagus all the way from Peru. (You can't eat flowers, but many of them also travel on planes so the same rule applies.)

The single most important change will be an amazingly simple dietary shift towards less meat and dairy consumption, with a particular focus on reducing beef.

It is also very possible, perhaps even likely, that at some point we trigger 'positive feedback mechanisms'; vicious circles in which temperature change causes things to happen that in turn trigger more temperature change. This would be likely to provoke a step change in the climate that would probably be unstoppable by human activity. A recent and credible paper looked at five of these positive feedbacks and estimated that the trigger point for a step change could well occur at around 2 degC3

A global temperature rise of 2 degC looks very risky but 1.5 degC much less so