Tue, Mar 01, 2022 page7

• UN report catalogs climate misery

  • AFP, PARIS
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  After decades of talking tough on global warming while greenhouse gas emissions rose, the world and its leaders were yesterday confronted by a horrifying “atlas of human suffering,” and the promise of far worse to come.

  Nearly half the planet’s population are highly vulnerable to a devastating array of climate effects, according to a landmark UN report that said time had nearly run out to ensure a “liveable future” for all.

  Species extinction, ecosystem collapse, insect-borne disease, deadly heat waves, megastorms, water shortages and reduced crop yields — all are measurably worse due to rising temperatures, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said.

  

  A person watches wildfires burn through a forest in northern Morocco’s Chefchaouen province on Aug. 15 last year.

  Photo: AFP

  In the past year, the world has experienced a cascade of unprecedented floods, heat waves and wildfires across four continents.

  All these effects are expected to accelerate in the coming decades even if the fossil fuel pollution driving climate change is rapidly brought to heel, the 195-nation panel warned.

  As nations struggle to finally bend the curve of carbon dioxide emissions downward, they must also prepare for a climate onslaught that in some cases can no longer be avoided, the report said.

  For UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it a “damning indictment” of failed leadership, which he described as nothing short of “criminal.”

  “The world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home,” he said.

  Even Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cannot distract from the truths laid out in the 3,600-page report and its all-important “Summary for Policymakers,” those taking part in the virtual, two-week talks said.

  “Ignoring this report, or ignoring climate change, is simply not an option,” said scientist Han-Otto Portner, an IPCC cochair.

  “Climate change is affecting us, it’s haunting us,” he added. “It is an existential threat.”

  Svitlana Krakovska, who headed Ukraine’s delegation, spoke passionately at the conference’s final plenary about the link between conflict and global warming.

  “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots — fossil fuels — and our dependence on them,” she said.

  Among the report’s highlights was the intertwined fates of human and natural systems.

  The report said that climate change cannot be tamed unless degraded forests and oceans that stock carbon are restored and protected; and the ecosystems on which life depends for clean water, air and soil would not survive intact in a world of runaway warming.

  A viable future rests on a knife’s edge, it said.

  Some dire effects are already irreversible, such as the likely demise of nearly all shallow water corals. Others points of no return lie just beyond the Paris Agreement’s aspirational target of capping global warming at 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, the report warned.

  The 2015 treaty enjoins nations to hold the increase in temperatures to “well below” 2°C, but science has left no doubt that a 1.5°C threshold is far safer.

  Even in optimistic scenarios of rapid reductions in carbon pollution, projections of climate impacts are sobering.

  Up to 14 percent of land species face a “very high” risk of extinction with only 1.5°C of warming, the IPCC said, bolstering calls for conservation of 30 to 50 percent of the world’s land and ocean territory.
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