Let's balance out

It isn't as bad as you think. Or maybe it is.

Another week has passed and we're back with the climate updates! This is "Let's balance out" and you'll read one good news and one bad news about the climate crisis. Shall we begin?

So what do you want first? The good news or the bad news?

According to this article by The Guardian, an elite minority of frequent fliers causes most of the climate damage coming from aviation emissions. The situation is this: all over the world there is a small group taking a large number of flights, while there are many people who do not fly at all.

This is data from some countries: "In the US, 12% of people took 66% of all flights, while in France 2% of people took half of the flights, the report says. In China 5% of households took 40% of flights and in India just 1% of households took 45% of all the flights."

We already know that flying is the activity that results in more emissions. To mitigate this behaviour, they have tried to put a tax on flights, but it seems that it's not working. There are a lot of people who need to move to a different country in order to work. The solution could be to work to make aviation more sustainable, as many airlines are doing already.

A single 17-year-old teenager, Shan, wants to find a solution to his home country's food waste problem. He lives in Singapore, where they import 90% of the food, and in 2019 they wasted 744.000 tonnes of it.
Shan wants to know how much of the food actually gets wasted and how they dispose of it. He says that if they knew where the food ends up they would probably waste less of it. Fortunately, there is a food rescuers community in Singapore, whose duty is to rescue all the unwanted food and make it available for the community.

The story of Shan is part of the project from BBC World Service, where they collect stories of 17-year-olds around the world who look at progress regarding the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

Illustrations by Gabriela