Watch­ing the palette of the chang­ing leaves that have graced the rolling forests gird­ing the lake where I spend the sum­mer flut­ter down, I found myself think­ing that if the par­tic­i­pants of the upcom­ing COP27 cli­mate change gath­er­ing did the same thing, metaphor­i­cal­ly at least, it would be time well spent.

Shut­ting out the alarm bell-ring­ing, self right­eous hand-wring­ing and emp­ty promis­es to look a lit­tle more close­ly at how Nature works, could help them see and adopt pos­i­tive actions that are like the autumn splen­dour of the leaves; already there, wait­ing to be exposed.

The leaf colours are masked by chloro­phyl, which absorbs ener­gy from sun­light and trans­forms car­bon diox­ide and water into food for the tree. The short­er days and cold­er nights of autumn slow the process until the lack of chloro­phyl allows the colours to show through.
Slow­ing cli­mate change requires look­ing beyond the obvi­ous to encour­age and pro­mote inno­v­a­tive, as much as prof­it-dri­ven, thinking.
Trees dis­card what they no longer need, but not in the heed­less and waste­ful way we humans rid our­selves of what we no longer have use for, or want. Over the course of the win­ter the dead leaves are turned into mulch that will feed the trees from which they fell, and the cycle will continue.
No waste. No noise. No greed. (A les­son on how to deal, for exam­ple, with the rare earth met­als thrown in a land­fill or left use­less in a draw­er every time a cell­phone is replaced).
In 2009, devel­oped coun­tries com­mit­ted to give $100 bil­lion a year, by 2020, to help devel­op­ing coun­tries reduce car­bon emis­sions and pre­pare for cli­mate change; the equiv­a­lent of the rich being the falling leaves. Except the tar­get date is now 2023, with lit­tle rea­son to think that will be hit, either.

                                      TO LEARN IS TO LIVE

  In anoth­er les­son, the crea­tures who live amid the foliage sur­vive by chang­ing themselves.

The soft, tawny brown coat that dis­tin­guish­es the deer in sum­mer evolves with the falling leaves, becom­ing less vis­i­ble in a for­est of main­ly bare branch­es, where colour stands out.

By the time all the leaves are gone, the deer will be a coarse grey, just in time for the start of the hunt­ing season.
The bet­ter the deer adapt to their sur­round­ings, the bet­ter their chances of survival.

It’s a les­son so sim­ple it ought to be obvi­ous even to the herds of bureau­crats in the for­est of COP 27 to take on board, instead of try­ing to dis­guise their lack of true com­mit­ment with hol­low pledges and excuses.

Land­scapes and crea­tures change in many sub­tle ways over the sea­sons, and in doing so, they endure. In a world that seems to be chang­ing for the worse on a month­ly nev­er mind sea­son­al basis, that is a com­fort­ing thought.
Like all of us, I hope the upcom­ing COP sum­mit will pro­duce more change than the last one did.
But I fear we can no more count on that than we can count the falling leaves.

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