Climate Change Indices Conceptualize Environmental Demise

There are a plethora of contrasting arguments regarding the deterioration of our climate. However, most can agree that our earth has paid the price for the industrialization and extractive technologies of the 21st century. What if we could boil the complex climate change process down into just one figure? The IGBP Climate-Change Index is an effort to do just that. The Index consolidates key indicators of global change: temperature, sea level, sea ice, and carbon dioxide. It tracks the affects of climate change on ice, oceans, land surface, and the atmosphere.

Rising steadily since 1980, the index dips in just three years which all coincide with major natural events. The dip in 1982 corresponds with the El Chichon volcanic eruption in Mexico; the 1992 dip is a result of the Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in the Philippines which affected temperature and sea level globally; the third dip in 1996 was caused by a volcanic eruption on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. The overall increasing direction, a climbing cumulative index, indicates the seriousness of human impact on our environment.

To take a deeper look, I turned to an expert on metrics, Sara Olsen, Co-founder of SVT Group, a consulting firm that specializes in measuring and managing social and environmental impact. Ms. Olsen asserts that "it's helpful for people to have a simple, graphical presentation of the climate's livability to raise awareness and focus discussion and problem-solving." However she thinks a more useful set of indicators would "focus on the impacts that matter most to survivability for humans and other living things, and relate that to the core drivers of those impacts." A better approach, she suggests, would be to plot livability of the climate relative to an index of the behaviors that drive climate change.

One pressing question is how the Index will be used and by whom. With input from numerous respected scientists, the Index is widely accepted as scientifically rigorous. From a financial viewpoint, if the index could make governments and companies more accountable for their environmental detriment, it could incentivize them to make cleaner and greener investments. One has to wonder what great changes the Climate Change Index would inspire if we could monitor and report it as frequently as the ups and downs of the Dow Jones or FTSE Index.