Cut emissions quickly to save lives, scientists warn in new UN report

The planet is on track for catastrophic warming, but world leaders already have many options to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and protect people, according to a landmark new United Nations report on climate change.

The report was prepared by leading climate scientists and reviewed by delegates from almost 200 countries. The authors hope it will serve as an important guide for policy makers around the world ahead of negotiations later this year aimed at curbing climate change.

According to the report, the planet is facing an increasingly dire situation. Climate change is already disrupting daily life around the world. Extreme weather events, including heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and hurricanes, are killing and displacing people around the world and causing massive economic damage. And the amount of carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere continues to grow.

“Climate change poses a threat to the well-being of people and the health of the planet,” the report says. “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to ensure an acceptable and sustainable future for all.”

But there are many options available to policy makers who want to tackle climate change, the report makes clear.

These options include simple and immediate solutions, such as the rapid introduction of renewable electricity and limiting oil and gas production. They are also more desirable, such as investment in research that will one day enable technology to absorb carbon dioxide from the air.

The authors of the report are not prescriptive. No decision is considered “correct”. Instead, scientists warn that there is neither time nor reason to delay action on climate change. And every potential path forward includes reducing reliance on fossil fuels, a major driver of climate change.

The earth is really hot and getting hotter

The report lays out sobering facts about the state of the Earth’s climate.

The planet is nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was in the late 1800s, and could exceed 5 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, he warns.

Such extreme warming would spell disaster for billions of people as well as critical ecosystems and lead to irreversible sea level rise and mass extinction of plants and animals.

But it is still possible to change the course, the report says. If humans can limit warming to no more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius), some of the most catastrophic effects of climate change could be avoided. Sea levels will rise much less. Heat waves and storms would be less lethal. And many ecosystems on land and in the oceans will be better able to adapt or recover.

To reach that goal, global emissions need to be halved by the end of the decade, which the authors of the report say is still possible if countries around the world quickly move away from fossil fuels. Currently, total global emissions are not falling.

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Cheat sheet for global climate change leaders

Over the past two years, hundreds of scientists working for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have published 3 extensive reports highlighting the disproportionate effects of climate change on poor people, the need to cut emissions quickly, and the policy options available to do so. Each of these documents consisted of hundreds of pages.

This latest report is a summary of all that work: a cheat sheet for policy makers who are facing mounting pressure on global warming.

The timing of its release coincides with an important deadline under the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), ideally 1.5 degrees Celsius. The Paris Agreement requires countries to review their progress towards this goal at climate talks later this year in the United Arab Emirates.

It is hoped that the new report will serve as a common scientific basis for these negotiations, as well as a set of solutions available to world leaders.

“When we talk about climate change, it’s often very easy to focus on the bad consequences, the things that are really scary,” says Solomon Xiang, a climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who has worked with the IPCC.

He says it’s important that politicians and the general public remain hopeful in the face of relentless news of extreme weather and other dangerous effects of global warming. Xiang’s own research has shown that millions of lives and billions of dollars could be saved by reducing global dependence on fossil fuels, in part because the extraction and burning of fossil fuels releases vast amounts of air and water pollution, in addition to environmental damage. climate.

“An investment in reducing emissions is an investment in improving people’s health, education and economic opportunities, and in protecting the people we care about,” he explains.

Poor people most threatened by climate change

Another important takeaway from the report is that people in developing countries and poor people around the world are disproportionately affected by climate change.

“Vulnerable communities that have historically contributed the least to current climate change have been disproportionately affected,” the report says.

For example, “between 2010 and 2020, human mortality from floods, droughts and storms was 15 times higher in regions of high vulnerability compared to regions of very low vulnerability,” the authors write.

According to the report, the most vulnerable communities include people who live in low-income countries, low-lying areas and island nations, as well as indigenous groups around the world.

“We are not all together,” says Patricia Romero-Lancao, a climate researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of Chicago who works with the IPCC. “The poorest and most marginalized communities are the most vulnerable in all cities and in all regions.”

Cutting emissions will help protect such communities now and in the future, Romero-Lancao said.

For example, investing in low-carbon public transportation, designing communities to support walking or cycling, building houses and other buildings that are sustainable, and building cleaner power plants can reduce air pollution and save lives in low-lying and low-income areas. , which is currently suffering disproportionate damage, the report notes.

One of the biggest topics in international climate talks later this year will be how much rich industrialized countries will pay to help poorer countries transition to clean energy and recover from the damage caused by climate change. The industrialized world has historically been the largest source of pollution that climate change is currently causing.

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