Climate activists say “1.5 degrees Celsius to stay alive,” but the policies in place right now will lead to more than a 2.8 degrees Celsius raise in global temperatures before the end of the century, according to the United Nations.

What is SPA doing to secure a sustainable future? Where do students fit into this discussion?

Out of seven students surveyed who were asked how much they cared about SPA’s commitment to sustainability on a scale from zero to 10, the average answer was eight. But many students struggled to answer the question of what they thought the school was doing well.

“I don’t really know a lot of SPA’s practices towards sustainability,” junior Saurin Patel said. This statement was true for multiple students.

Most interviewees cited the school’s compost system as a positive effort toward sustainability, although Patel did not mention it.

Senior Nadia Degnan believed that the compost bins were a step in the right direction, but said that “sharing information with the students and [being transparent]” would be helpful for the school in communicating sustainability efforts. Similar to other students, Degnan was unclear on how SPA has made sustainability efforts.

As far as how the Randolph Campus can become more sustainable, Degnan believes that the school could improve its schedule around turning on the AC, because there is no need to have it be “uncomfortable” during the more well-tempered months.

Senior Clare Kimmel cares deeply about the environment. As a student in the Environmental Science elective, she believes that institutional changes have the potential to make a significant impact.
Kimmel mentioned how it is “important for large institutions like schools to be sustainable, because they produce a lot of waste and require a lot of energy.”

In fact, the U.S. Department of Energy reported that schools emit an estimated 72 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.
To offset those emissions would require 85,861,273 acres of U.S. forests, which is 35% of the country’s land.

Kimmel said that it is important for schools to do their part by “modeling sustainability to young people, [because] in places like school, kids will learn sustainable practices that they can implement at home … or after high school.”

From wildfires in Hawaii and Hurricane Idalia in Florida, to a summer of poor air quality in Canada, natural disasters are ravaging the globe.

“Almost every day, we look on the news and see drastic weather effects,” senior Violet Benson said.

The World Meteorological Organization stated in a 2021 report that over a 50-year period between 1970 and 2019, on average, a natural disaster occurred daily. Furthermore, about 115 people were killed and $202 million USD was lost in damages to natural disasters daily. They also found that the number of disasters in the last ten years of the study was five times the number of disasters in the first ten.

According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), climate change is the reason behind this increase.

The 2022 Global Climate Report by the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) found that “the last nine years [rank] as the nine warmest years on record.”

With rising surface and air temperatures, “[Any disaster] that’s affected by air temperature or water temperature is going to be increased,” Environmental Science teacher Rachel Yost-Dubrow said.

More water vapor is evaporating, creating more intense storms, and higher temperatures exacerbate wind speeds in tropical storms.

“We’re seeing more hurricanes this season than we ever have. That’s because ocean temperatures in the Atlantic are warmer than they’ve ever been,” Yost-Dubrow explained.

“If you look at each weather event individually, you can’t claim that [it was caused by climate change] but if you look at the repeated pattern of increased severity in hurricanes or the repeated pattern of increased severity and number of forest fires, then you can attribute that to climate change,” senior Carys Hardy said.

USGS reports that “long-term effects of climate change will include a decrease in sea ice and an increase in permafrost thawing, [and] an increase in heat waves and heavy precipitation.” Changes will vary by region and climate, but it is clear that precipitation, heat waves, and erosion are expected to worsen.

As natural disasters have increased, so too have financial damages.

The World Meteorological Organization found that just as the number of disasters increased fivefold from the first to the last ten years of the study, economic losses in the last ten years were seven times the losses in the first ten.

The impact is also not felt equally: disasters disproportionately affect lower-income countries. According to the United Nations, 91% of deaths from natural disasters took place in “developing economies.”

In the United States, Black families and people of color have been historically redlined into less desirable neighborhoods. These areas were “more prone to flooding and tropical storms,” according to a 2021 report by the Coastal Resilience Center at UNC-Chapel Hill.

In turn, Black communities were left without generational wealth and resources to recover from worsening disasters.

Amidst all the disheartening news, there is some success. The World Meteorological Organization reported that the number of deaths in each disaster has decreased over the 50-year period due to improved disaster warnings and better aid.

Still, as the impacts of climate change are increasingly felt, natural disasters are only intensifying.

“I’m really privileged to be in an area that isn’t necessarily directly affected, like my health hasn’t ever been put at risk or my safety. But that’s definitely not the case for everyone,” Benson said. She added that, “It’s really important to recognize the privilege we have to be in an area that doesn’t take the brunt of all of the world’s collective downfall on taking care of the environment.”