UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calls today’s 6th IPCC report “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership. Unless global greenhouse gases are immediately curtailed, the report found, there is little wiggle room remaining for adaptation or mitigation efforts to have any viable impact. With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change,” Guterres says.
The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, is the most detailed look yet at the threats posed by global warming. It concludes that nations aren’t doing nearly enough to protect cities, farms and coastlines from the hazards that climate change has unleashed so far, such as record droughts and rising seas, let alone from the even greater disasters in store as the planet continues to warm.
“One of the most striking conclusions in our report is that we’re seeing adverse impacts that are much more widespread and much more negative than expected,” said Camille Parmesan, an ecologist at the University of Texas, Austin, and one of the researchers who prepared the report.
Following the release of last August’s first installment, which focused on the science behind global warming, today’s IPCC 3,600-page report follows how climate change is impacting humans and nature.
Some key takeaways:
- Global warming has already increased temperature by 1.1 degree C
- Globally, sea level has already risen by 9 inches
- Dramatic and immediate action to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C can have a significant positive impact on future loss and damages, but we have passed the point where we can reverse the impacts of climate change
“There has been the assumption that, ‘Well, if we cannot control climate change, we’ll just let it go and adapt to it,’” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a marine biologist in Germany who helped coordinate the report. But given the expected risks as the planet keeps warming, he said, “this is certainly a very illusionary approach.”
“Soft” adaptation limits are scenarios where there may be options to cope with the impacts of climate change, but aren’t available due to cost or technological limitations. “Hard” limits are those where physical changes are so drastic that there is no way to reduce risk.
The natural world is passing some of the hard limits of what it can handle from climate change right now, leading to irreversible changes like extinction of species. “Ecosystems already reaching or surpassing hard adaptation limits include some warm water coral reefs, some coastal wetlands, some rainforests, and some polar and mountain ecosystems,” according to the report. Humans who are dependent on these ecosystems are deeply affected as well. www.vox.com/...
“People are suffering and dying right now from climate change,” said Kristie Ebi, an IPCC author, during a press conference. “The major constraint for adaptation options in health is the insignificant investment in this area.”
Money and Adaptation
Some of the most vulnerable places on the planet still have the ability to make the necessary adaptations to rising temperatures and sea levels but lack the money to make changes. Adapting to climate change in the developing world is estimated to cost about $127 billion each year. Funding for the Green Climate Fund and for loss and damages by the developed world has fallen woefully short.
Fast Company reports yesterday that Rich countries aren’t doing nearly enough to help poor countries face climate change.
Donor countries have three major channels through which they can route climate finance: bilateral agreements among small groups of countries, international funds like the Green Climate Fund, and development banks like the World Bank.
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the U.N.-backed Green Climate Fund is one of the largest and offers universal eligibility. The GCF’s scope is also deliberately broad to allow room for programming based on what countries actually need, rather than what is politically attractive at any given moment.
However, the GCF has received pledges totaling only about $18 billion. Developed countries are more likely to route contributions through their own bilateral channels or major development banks than through climate-focused funds.
The report, representing the work of 270 researchers from 67 countries, stresses the need to reimagine how we live on the planet, and calls for transformational changes in how we interact with nature, build infrastructure, and find and use energy. The end goal must be to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C by 2050.