Personal behaviour

These steps are taken from The Future We Choose, by Tom Rivett-Carnac and Christiana Figueres.

Right Now

• Commit to reducing your impact on the climate by more than half of what it is today by 2030. Aim for 60 per cent. Just because right now you don’t know how you will do so does not need to stop you. We are all learning.

Today or Tomorrow

• Choose at least one day of the week to go meat-free, and decide how soon you will add more days to that commitment.

This Week

• Take some actions and stick to them over time – it will give you momentum. Reduce daily energy use, bike instead of driving a car, switch your energy supplier to 100 per cent clean. It’s all good and all needs doing. Consider what else you can do, while remembering there is still much to be done.

This Month

• Enact your commitments: What precisely will you do this year? How will it affect you and your family? How will you begin to apply the changes you plan to make?
• Challenge your consumerism. Look at what you have bought, and ask yourself whether it brings you joy. Question your impulses to buy more, and begin to see how liberating it is to buy less.
• Plant trees. As many as you can. Look for a local group doing tree planting. Get out there when you can, and when you can’t, support others to do so.

This Year

• Be consistent. You may have changed your electricity supply to 100 per cent renewable energy, rethought your commute, changed your air travel habits and altered your diet. If you can sustain your effort for the first year, you stand a good chance of doing so every year. Recognise your accomplishment.

By 2030

• Deliver on your plan to cut your emissions by more than half. Celebrate your achievement.
• Finance others to plant more trees as a symbol of the fact that you still have some way to go. Trees are good, and the world needs more of them.
• Continue to practise the other new habits you have developed.
• Start the plan to reduce your emissions again by more than half over the next decade.

Before 2050

• Be at net-zero emissions, having been part of the generation that chose a better future for all of us.