The Earth Clock
How long it will take to clean the air and the sea, how much faster it goes when more of us join, and where your help fits in.
The air
431 ppm of CO₂ in the atmosphere (280 ppm before the industrial era).
About 2.2 billion tonnes a year, almost all of it thanks to forests. New technologies: about 2 million tonnes. Today, for every tonne we remove, we emit about 19.
Scenarios that limit warming to 1.5 °C need to remove billions of tonnes a year by 2050, combining forests and technologies (State of CDR 2026).
The waste
Between 75 and 199 million tonnes of plastic in the sea (we use the lowest estimate).
25,000 tonnes a year, the record of the largest clean-up project (2025). For every tonne we take out, about 440 go in.
Years to remove 75 million tonnes if no new plastic entered the sea.
Where do you fit in?
How to read the clock: the counters show what we keep emitting and dumping; the scenarios calculate how long it would take to remove what has accumulated IF we stopped emitting and dumping today. They are simplified Movosfera estimates to show the scale of the challenge, not predictions or a countdown. They do not include, for example, the CO₂ the ocean would release back into the atmosphere as the concentration falls. 350 ppm is a reference proposed by Hansen et al. (2008), not an agreed threshold. Sources: NOAA and Met Office (CO₂), Global Carbon Budget 2025 (emissions), State of CDR 2026 (removals), UNEP (plastic in the sea), The Ocean Cleanup (clean-up 2025). Calculation: 1 ppm ≈ 7.8 billion t of CO₂.