“The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward,” Winston Churchill proclaimed to the Royal College of Physicians in 1944, invoking a much older idea known as “uniformitarianism”.
Coined by geologists James Hutton and Charles Lyell, this is the idea that past processes (like erosion or climate change) that have altered the Earth over time remain similar, so we can analyse them to understand the consequences of future processes – such as how climate change might shape our planet in the years to come.
This principle of looking to the past to see the future still guides the science of palaeoclimatology, or the study of past climates.
For example, the geological record tells us there were palm trees in Antarctica many millions of years ago, when CO₂ was at 1,000 parts per million in our planet’s atmosphere.
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Looking back to this period, when our planet was experiencing naturally high CO₂ levels, helps us study what life on Earth might look like if our attempts to reach net zero emissions fail and greenhouse gas emission rates continue to rise.
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It recognises that peasants and people working in rural areas, including youth and the ageing, are migrating to urban areas due to a lack of incentives and the drudgery of rural life, due to insecure land tenure, discrimination and the lack of access to productive resources, financial services and information. The Declaration is based on a concern that peasants and rural workers are burdened with environmental degradation and climate change and suffer disproportionately from poverty, hunger and malnutrition. This Declaration is an important contribution to the advancement of a paradigm for development where the agency of peasants, indigenous and forest peoples is at its foundation.
CVD 