New IPCC report urges 'hope' and climate justice for most vulnerable

INTERLAKEN, Switzerland (AN) — Many options exist to cut carbon pollution and adapt to human-caused climate change but action must start now, the U.N.'s panel of top climate experts said in a major new report.

The latest findings Monday from the United Nations' Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emphasize the world is running out of time to fufill the 2015 Paris Agreement's goal of preventing average global temperatures from rising more than 2° Celsius above pre-industrial levels, or 1.5° C. if possible.

"This has resulted in more frequent and more intense extreme weather events that have caused increasingly dangerous impacts on nature and people in every region of the world," the IPCC said.

But it will take drastic action to turn things around. Almost two-thirds of the world's carbon emissions must be cut by 2035.

"Keeping warming to 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels requires deep, rapid and sustained greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors,"  the IPCC said. "Emissions should be decreasing by now and will need to be cut by almost half by 2030, if warming is to be limited to 1.5° C."

The world has already warmed by almost 1.1° C. As a result, the 1.5° C threshold will probably be reached in the first half of the next decade. But the panel says there's no reason to give up now on reducing heat-trapping greenhouse gases and doing more to adapt to and mitigate global warming.

"Our report is a message of hope," the IPCC's Chair Hoesung Lee told a news conference. "We know that the world has suffered greatly from ongoing climate change problems. We do have technology and know-how and tools to solve for the climate problems."

The solution is to mainstream "effective and equitable climate action" in a way that reduces losses and damages for nature and people, because that will provide wider benefits, he said.

Extreme weather growing more intense

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres was more blunt about the stakes for all. "Humanity is on thin ice – and that ice is melting fast," he said of the new report.

"The climate time-bomb is ticking. But today’s IPCC report is a how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb," said Guterres. "This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts – everything, everywhere, all at once."

Last year, the IPCC reported that half the world's population lives in areas with potentially dangerous climate impacts. In 2021, it said some of the changes to oceans, land and ice cannot be reversed.

The panel's latest synthesis report from its latest round of research conducted since 2015 details the planet's mounting losses and damages – and the consequences of not doing enough to protect the most vulnerable people. Previous rounds of IPCC reports were completed in 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007 and 2014.

“Climate justice is crucial because those who have contributed least to climate change are being disproportionately affected,” said Aditi Mukherji, a co-author of the synthesis report.

“Almost half of the world’s population lives in regions that are highly vulnerable to climate change," she said. "In the last decade, deaths from floods, droughts and storms were 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions."