Cordelia Baehr is not exactly a household name. However, she is a person with an education, a career, curiosity, and a desire to make positive changes. In 2015, as a young lawyer in Zurich, Switzerland, she read about the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed an estimated 70,000 people. As she went over the data she noted “that older women died at much higher rates during that disaster, and they are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.” (Nature, p554, Vol 636, 19/26 December 2024 and Photo).
So, this impact of climate change gave her an idea. She could make a case, a lawsuit, that the Swiss government was “violating the rights of older women by failing to take steps to prevent climate change.” The lawsuit, and the 2,500 women she represented, had many ups and downs over the last 8 years, but on April 9, 2024, the European Convention on Human Rights court came to a decision. “The court found that Switzerland had failed to meet its obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ….”
The story is not over yet of course. The Swiss government has challenged the finding, what action it needs to take to satisfy this decision, and it remains a work in progress. This ruling is already having an impact and other courts have cited this case in their deliberations on other climate change issues.
Cordelia Baehr is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.
And then …
Interestingly, just a few weeks ago, this court case was followed by another case and this one was in Montana. In this filing 16 youth from across the state explained how climate change was damaging their lives and health, by breathing wildfire smoke for example.
The Montana Supreme Court in a 6-1 vote, upheld a lower court ruling that the states’ children have a “fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment.” See photo of Montanan court room from 2024.
And, there is more.
Earlier in 2024 the U.S. developed a new program proposed by President Biden in 2021, somewhat like the Civilian Conservation Corps that President Roosevelt established in the 1930’s. This is a national service program and was launched by the Biden Administration in late 2023. See the American Climate Corps logo patch. (Wikipedia).
It is an interagency program that includes Interior, Labor, Agriculture, Energy and others with a focus on climate change prevention. It will include activities like installing solar panels, restoring vulnerable habitats, fire hazard prevention and more. The initial 2,000 openings in April 2024 had more than 42,000 people express interest in participating.
The plan is to add 50,000 people per year by 2031. In April, on Earth Day, the Biden administration promoted the corps as a way for young people to jump-start green careers.
And then we have the new word for the day: Balkonkraftwerke.
See the photo here of a woman on a balcony with the newest in solar panel installations; the German word translates to “Balcony Power Plants”.
Lots of people “don’t have rooftops where they can install solar panels and generate some of the electricity they use.” (CleanTechnica.com/2024/12/21). In Germany, more than 1.5 million people have installed these units. In 2024 alone, Germany added 200 megawatts of balcony solar, and they expect growth in 2025 to continue. The units can be hung from a balcony, cost between $500-$1,000 and can pay for itself in a few years. The units have a microinverter and simply plug into the house wiring. Many people say this gives them a sense of independence and that they are making tangible efforts to take climate action.
And finally, we have a graph from CarbonBrief titled: “The world is on track to install a record 593 GW (gigawatts) of new solar this year.”
This is an enormous amount of power, even if the sun does not shine all day, and is helping to bend the carbon dioxide emissions curve down.
The vertical dark color bars of installed solar start off very low and hardly can be seen until about 2010. This growth has begun to really accelerate over the recent years, and we can see how 2024 was a banner year. That is progress.
But, this is just a start.
And, so it goes.
— The scientific career of Raymond N. Johnson, Ph.D., spanned 30 years in research and development as an organic/analytical chemist; he is currently founder and director of the Institute of Climate Studies USA (www.ICSUSA.org). Climate Science is published the second weekend of every month.