By Jake Spring and Andrea Januta and Gloria Dickie
(Reuters) – Climate change is coming and humanity is far from ready, the United Nations Panel on Climate Science warned in a major report released on Monday.
Noting that nearly half of the world’s population is already vulnerable to increasingly dangerous climate impacts, the report calls for drastic action on a massive scale: one-third to one-half of the planet needs to be conserved now to secure future supplies of food and fresh water. Coastal cities need plans to keep people safe from storms and sea level rise. And more.
“Adaptation saves lives,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at the launch of the report. “As climate impacts worsen – and they will – increasing investment will be essential for survival… Delay means death.”
The 3,675-page report is the latest in a series by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that details the global consensus on climate science. This report, however, focuses on how nature and societies are being affected and what they can do to adapt.
British, Spanish and Egyptian officials said the report was a call to action. US climate envoy John Kerry lamented that very little had been done to adapt to climate change and said the report offered a “plan of action”.
“Denial and delay are not strategies, they are a recipe for disaster,” Kerry said in a statement.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that climate change would further threaten global and local stability. “We know the significant risks that climate change poses to our health and security, and we know that the climate plays a decisive role in shaping the trajectory of peace and prosperity in the world,” he said.
In almost every respect, the report makes it clear that climate change is impacting the world much faster than scientists had predicted. Meanwhile, countries have failed to contain the planet-warming carbon emissions that continue to rise.
“Uncontrolled carbon pollution is forcing the world’s most vulnerable on a march to destruction,” Guterres said in a video speech on Monday. “The facts are undeniable. This abdication of leadership is criminal.”
HARD CHOICES
While governments need to drastically reduce their emissions to prevent runaway global warming, they can also work to limit suffering by adapting to conditions in a warmer world, the report says.
This will require a lot of money to fund new technologies and institutional support. Cities can invest in cooling zones to help people during heat waves. Coastal communities may need new infrastructure or relocate completely.
“In terms of transformational adaptation, we can plan and implement it now, or it will be forced upon us by climate change,” said Kristina Dahl of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who was not involved in writing the report.
But in some cases, the report acknowledges, the costs of adaptation will be very high.
The release of the report three months after global leaders met at a climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, highlighted the urgency of efforts to contain global warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial temperatures.
Breaking this limit will cause irreversible damage to the planet, he says. And each increment of heating will cause more pain.
“Adaptation is not a card to get out of prison. There are limits to adaptation,” said Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Center and co-author of the report.
Limiting global warming to about 1.5°C may not prevent losses to nature, societies or economies, but it will substantially reduce them, the report says.
Having already warmed by 1.1°C, the planet is expected to reach the 1.5°C threshold within two decades.
“Our atmosphere today is on steroids, doped by fossil fuels. This is already leading to stronger, longer and more frequent extreme weather events,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization.
PERMANENT DAMAGE
Societies will not be able to adjust well to a warming world if they are not socially inclusive in handling the task, the report warns. Solutions need to consider social justice and include indigenous populations, minorities and the poor, he says.
“It is the poor and most marginalized who are most vulnerable to climate change,” said Timon McPhearson, an urban ecologist at The New School in New York and one of the report’s 270 authors.
Losses and damage from weather-related events such as storms or heat waves are already on the rise.
In the decade to 2020, highly vulnerable people in places like Africa, South Asia and South America were 15 times more likely to die from floods, droughts or storms, according to the report.
Hundreds of species of plants and animals disappeared locally, and some completely from the planet. The Australian rodent Bramble Cay melomys, for example, has been driven to extinction by rising sea levels, said IPCC co-author Brendan Mackey of Australia’s Griffith University. And marine heat waves are killing parts of the Great Barrier Reef.
For people, time is running out to make the necessary transformations across society, warn the report’s authors.
“There is a brief and rapidly closing window to ensure a habitable future on the planet,” said Hans-Otto Portner, co-chair of the IPCC working group that produced the report. “We need to rise to this challenge.”
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