"Rio 2016 opening highlighted Brazil’s participation in global science"

Paulo Artaxo, a physics professor at the University of São Paulo, acted as science advisor to the team who produced the climate change video shown during the Rio Olympics opening ceremony

Karina Toledo | Agência FAPESP – The largest science popularization initiative ever seen took place on August 5 in Rio de Janeiro, with an estimated audience of 3 billion. The subject: global climate change.

A two-minute video exhibited during the Rio 2016 Olympics opening ceremony showed how the buildup of man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the atmosphere leads to global warming, melting of the polar icecaps and rising sea levels.

Based on scientific models, the film illustrated what may happen by the end of the century in such places as Amsterdam (Netherlands), Dubai (United Arab Emirates), Florida (USA), Shanghai (China), Lagos (Nigeria) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) if CO2 emissions remain at current levels.

Next it presented tree planting as one of the possible solutions, to help sequester part of the carbon in the atmosphere and fix it in the biosphere. This led to the idea of giving each athlete at the ceremony a tube of soil and a seedling. All 11,000 seedlings were to be planted in Parque Radical, a park built for the Games in the Deodoro Sports Complex. The result will be the Athletes’ Forest. The tree species were chosen according to the athletes’ nationalities, conveying a strong symbolic message.

The movie was scripted and directed by film maker Fernando Meirelles. Artaxo acted as a consultant, alongside fellow-scientist Tasso Azevedo.

Azevedo is a forest engineer, head of Climate Observatory’s Greenhouse Gas Emission Estimation System (OC-SEEG), and executive director of the Institute of Forest and Agriculture Management and Certification (IMAFLORA). He was in charge of the forest theme, while Artaxo was responsible for climate change-related science.

Artaxo is Full Professor of Environmental Physics at the University of São Paulo’s Physics Institute (IF-USP) and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He is also a member of the steering committee for FAPESP’s Global Climate Change Research Program (RPGCC).

In an interview given to Agência FAPESP, Artaxo described how he contributed to the Rio 2016 opening ceremony and how the film helped raise global environmental awareness.

Agência FAPESP – Whose idea was it to address climate change in the opening ceremony and how did you contribute?
Paulo Artaxo – Fernando Meirelles had the idea of including climate change in the opening ceremony. As a film maker he’s highly sensitive to environmental issues. His staff asked me to help make sure the science in the movie was correct. My role was to choose reliable scientific products, including graphics and animations. I looked for the best, most up-to-date references, such as the digital elevation topographical maps produced by the US Geological Survey and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP). Some sources exaggerate the problem of rising sea levels, suggesting the entire planet could be flooded. That’s not going to happen. We needed basic information and reliable models, which isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. We wanted to address the issue with a light touch. After all, it was for the opening ceremony, which is a celebration. At the same time, we wanted to convey the message that the planet urgently needs protecting. The section devoted to climate change was followed by the forest theme, for which Tasso Azevedo acted as consultant.

Agência FAPESP – What’s your assessment of the result of your work and its impact?
Artaxo – The idea was to tell a story as a way of raising the key questions relating to climate change: the rise in global temperatures, its link to emissions of CO2 and aerosols resulting from human activity, and rising sea levels. I found the result very good. It helped to show that Brazil isn’t just about samba, Carnival and Gisele Bündchen but is also seriously involved in global science. In my view, producing good science is important and so is popularizing science so that society can benefit from sound knowledge – society as a whole, not just the academic community and policymakers. The message was conveyed during the opening ceremony in such a way that even people without a scientific background of any kind could understand it. That’s very important.

Agência FAPESP – How can it help combat the adverse effects of climate change?
Artaxo – Since the IPCC’s third report was published about 15 years ago, there have been many unambiguous warnings that global temperatures will rise significantly unless greenhouse gas emissions decrease. But the problem of climate change became much more visible when the IPCC won a Nobel Prize in 2007. The Paris Agreement has now clearly indicated that countries intend to do something to minimize the impact of climate change, although no one knows if the right action will be taken or if it will be taken fast enough. The fact is that politicians generally respond to the demands of the people who elect them, but powerful economic and political interests are also involved. Oil and coal are still among the world’s largest economic sectors. Strong pressure from society is needed as well as effective public policies and coordinated governmental action. Under the Paris Agreement each country has adopted its own national carbon emission reduction target, which is absolutely strategic for the planet. Of course, the commitments announced so far aren’t sufficient to guarantee a stable climate in the decades ahead, but we expect rising commitments and targets as the evidence builds up that the impact can be very significant, not least in economic terms. It’s a complex interplay between public opinion, economics, which makes the world go round, and decision makers. We must act at every level. The film exhibited during the Rio 2016 opening helped us convey crucial information to a wider public and transmit an unequivocal message that action is needed to mitigate global climate change.  

 

Global temperature change 1850-2016	Simulation of global temperature change 1850-2100

Click on images to view animations. GIFs by British climate scientist Ed Hawkins, Reading University, UK.