'Humanity is on thin ice — and that ice is melting fast,' United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. 'Our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all at once.'
BERLIN — Humanity still has a chance, close to the last one, to prevent the worst of climate change's future harms, a top United Nations panel of scientists said Monday.
That date is key because nations soon have to come up with goals for pollution reduction by 2035, according to the Paris climate agreement. After contentious debate, the U.N. science panel calculated and reported that to stay under the warming limit set in Paris the world needs to cut 60% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2035, compared with 2019, adding a new target not previously mentioned in the six reports issued since 2018.
After 1.5 degrees "the risks are starting to pile on," said report co-author Francis X. Johnson, a climate, land and policy scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. The report mentions "tipping points" around that temperature of species extinction, including coral reefs, irreversible melting of ice sheets and sea level rise on the order of several meters .
Guterres insisted "the 1.5-degree limit is achievable." Science panel chief Hoesung Lee said so far the world is far off course. "It is certainly prudent to be planning for a future that's warmer than 1.5 degrees," said IPCC report review editor Steven Rose, an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute in the United States.
If the world is to achieve its climate goals, poorer countries need a "many-fold" increase in financial help to adapt to a warmer world and switch to non-polluting energy. Countries have made financial pledges and promises of a damage compensation fund.
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