The issues that made our year

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We must all change lifestyles

As an environmental journalist, I covered many different topics last year. However, climate change stands out as the most serious issue.

The Oxford English Dictionary declared "climate emergency" the phrase of 2019. For my phrase of the year, however, I chose "climate action".

As the threat from climate change looms larger, the clock for action ticks faster than ever.

According to a UN report, the world is already 1.1 C warmer than at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The world has seen great impact from that change.

"In Greenland alone, 179 billion tons of ice melted in July. Permafrost in the Arctic is thawing 70 years ahead of projections," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told delegates to the UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid, Spain, held from Dec 2 to 13.

"Do we really want to be remembered as the generation that buried its head in the sand, that fiddled while the planet burned?" he asked. His words cross my mind frequently.

If we look around the world, we can definitely see lots of action.

A campaign of civil disobedience, aimed at forcing governments to take rapid action to tackle climate change, went viral around the globe, especially in the Western world.

Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg, who was named 2019 Person of the Year by Time magazine, inspired a school strike movement that mobilized millions of young people on Sept 20.

I don't oppose such campaigns, and I agree with the protestors that governments should do more, but I want to remind them that demonstrations and slogans cannot solve everything. While pressing governments to do more, every one of us is obliged to lead a low-carbon life.

When I went to report on the UN climate change conferences in Katowice, Poland, in 2018, and Madrid last year, I saw that many people were not leading low-carbon lives.

The air-conditioning systems in many restaurants, hotels and shopping malls, for example, were making those venues extremely hot.

At the Madrid conference, I met a Dutch woman who worked for an intergovernmental organization. She told me that demonstrators sometimes leave streets strewn with rubbish in their civil disobedience campaign for climate action.

It's absurd that people participate but don't lead low-carbon lives.

I never demonstrate or shout slogans for climate action, but I didn't use an air conditioner in my home last year, even though the temperature sometimes rose above 40 C during the Beijing summer. I am taking action.

I don't want to dissuade people from the civil disobedience campaign, but may I suggest that all of us, no matter where we come from, act together to lead low-carbon lives and persuade people around us to do that, too?

I don't know if the civil disobedience campaign will force governments to take more action, but I do know we can contribute to the world's climate progress if we lead low-carbon lives.

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