The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most recent report offers a bleak picture that Climate change is already having a profound effect on every corner of the globe, and even more, severe consequences are on the way if we do not halve greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions this decade and swiftly ramp up adaptation.
Working Group II’s contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, which was released on February 28, 2022, drew on 34,000 studies and featured 270 authors from 67 countries. It is one of the most extensive assessments of climate change’s growing effects and future concerns, particularly for resource-poor countries and vulnerable groups. Additionally, the IPCC’s 2022 report analyses the most effective and practical climate adaptation strategies, as well as which groups of people and ecosystems are most susceptible.
The five key takeaways from the report include the following:
1. The consequences of climate change are already more broad and severe than anticipated.
Climate change is already creating severe disruption in every corner of the planet, with only 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming. Droughts, high heat, and record floods already jeopardise millions of people’s food security and lives. Since 2008, each year, terrible floods and storms have displaced more than 20 million people. Crop productivity growth in Africa has slowed by a third since 1961 as a result of climate change.
Today, half of the world’s population experiences water insecurity. In many regions, wildfires are scorching wider areas than ever before, causing irrevocable changes to the terrain (IPCC 2022). Furthermore, rising temperatures aid the spread of vector-borne diseases, including West Nile virus, as well as water-borne diseases like cholera. Climate change is also wreaking havoc on individual species and entire ecosystems. Due to global warming, animals such as the golden toad and Bramble Cays Melomys (a tiny mouse) have become extinct. Other animals, such as the flying fox, seabirds, and corals, are dying in droves, while thousands of others have relocated to higher latitudes and elevations.
2. Risks will increase rapidly as temperatures rise, frequently resulting in permanent effects of climate change.
According to the report, each tenth of a degree of further heat exacerbates hazards to human species and ecosystems. Even limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the Paris Climate Agreement’s worldwide aim, is not safe for everyone. For example, with just 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, many glaciers will either vanish entirely or lose the majority of their mass; an additional 350 million people will confront water scarcity by 2030. In the same way, if global warming goes above 1.5 degrees Celsius, climate change will have much worse and often irreversible effects.
According to the IPCC, these risks will compound as numerous hazards occur concurrently and in the same places. For instance, in tropical climates, the combined impacts of heat and drought can result in abrupt and large reductions in agricultural productivity. Simultaneously, when heat-related mortality increases and labour productivity declines, people will be unable to work harder to compensate for drought-related losses (Collins 2022).
3. Climate change is mostly caused by what people do.
When the IPCC published its most recent climate update, a link between human activity and climate change was established. This time, the group concluded with “high confidence” that people are mostly responsible for issues such as more extreme heat waves, melting glaciers, and warming oceans. According to studies, occurrences such as the 2020 Siberian heat wave and the 2016 Asian heat wave would not have occurred if humans had not consumed so much fossil fuel (Collins 2022). Indeed, the IPCC’s 2022 report states unequivocally: “Human influence has unambiguously warmed the atmosphere, oceans, and land.” That should serve as a sufficient warning to all of us to make the necessary changes in our lives and begin recycling and considering green energy sources to power our homes, such as solar or wind energy.
4. Adaptation efforts are widespread, but they must be accelerated.
While the report articulated the grave concerns posed by climate change, it also emphasized adaptations that have been made or can be implemented to help limit the rate of global warming. Climate change is gaining global attention, and these responses have not gone overlooked. According to the report, at least 170 countries and numerous cities have incorporated adaptation into their climate policies and planning procedures. Adaptation has the potential to boost agricultural productivity, innovation, health, food security, livelihoods, and biodiversity conservation, among other benefits. While greater awareness has prompted numerous governments and countries to act, adaptation globally remains unequal and modest in scale, sector-specific, or centered on planning rather than implementation (Whittington 2022). These activities must be scaled up to reach the global, widespread impact.
5. “Maladaptation” can exacerbate existing problems.
The IPCC provides evidence that adaptation activities can exacerbate existing socioeconomic disparities and result in negative effects, a phenomenon dubbed “maladaptation.” One example would be when a sea wall is constructed to defend a settlement from sea-level rise but instead stops rainwater from draining, creating a new hazard of floods. Regrettably, there is abundant evidence of maladaptation, which disproportionately affects marginalised and vulnerable groups what evidence? (Schipper et al 2022).
Additionally, the IPCC made a special effort to include philosophers, anthropologists, and other authors from a variety of fields that may not be considered typical areas of climate change research in this current edition. This necessitated a greater reliance on qualitative social sciences and a more nuanced examination of issues such as vulnerability and climate justice.
Sources
Collins P. (2020). IPCC climate report 2022 summary: The key findings
https://climate.selectra.com/en/news/ipcc-report-2022
Schipper, L., CastánBroto, V., and Chow, W. (2022). Five key points in the IPCC report on climate change impacts and adaptation
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-key-ipcc-climate-impacts.htmlWhittington, G. (2022).A Rapidly Closing Window’ — Five Takeaways from the 2022 IPCC Report
https://www.triplepundit.com/story/2022/2022-ipcc-report/737976