Monday’s IPCC report is a warning letter to the world. Here’s what you need to know from the more than 3,500-page document.
, the science could not be clearer: Each increment of additional warming brings more devastation, more death — and more dollars spent on coping.“Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health,” the IPCC authors write. “Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.
No place on Earth will be left unscathed by climate change. But the regions that contributed the least to the problem — particularly Africa, Central America, South Asia and small island states — will suffer some of the harshest consequences. Even moderate scenarios for sea level rise would risk inundating coastlines where roughly 90 percent of all Pacific Islanders live. At high levels of warming, small island states and some tropical regions will hit limits on their ability to adapt to flooding and extreme heat. Depending on how much temperatures rise, between 31 million and 143 million people could become displaced in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America.
. This disparity extends to basic information needed for adaptation; just 3.8 percent of funding for climate research has gone to projects focused on Africa over the past three decades.By shifting seasonal weather patterns and intensifying disruptive disasters, human-caused warming imperils almost all forms of life on Earth. Plants and animals are unable to shift their habitats fast enough to keep up with rising temperatures.
Meanwhile, rising temperatures risk unleashing millions of tons of carbon currently stored in vegetation and soil. Projected loss of forests and thawing of permafrost under some of the worst-case warming scenarios would add the equivalent of 15 years’ worth of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. But curbing warming to below 2 degrees Celsius would cut emissions from these ecosystems by more than half.