12 | New Scientist | 5 March 2022
News
CLIMATE change is already
causing widespread, pervasive
and sometimes irreversible
harm to people and ecosystems
globally, according to a landmark
report warning it has become
increasingly clear there are
limits to how much humanity
can adapt to rising temperatures.
The latest report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) has found
that up to 3.6 billion people live in
areas highly vulnerable to climate
change, largely from extreme
heat, heavy rainfall, drought
and weather setting the stage for
fires. During a press conference,
UN secretary-general António
Guterres called it “an atlas
of human suffering”.
Since the panel’s last assessment
eight years ago, it has increasingly
been possible to pin the impacts
of extreme weather events on
human-made climate change.
A clear message from the report is
that holding warming to the Paris
Agreement’s 1.5°C goal will limit
its impacts and make adaptation
more feasible. Despite the pledges
nearly 200 countries made in
the Glasgow Climate Pact at the
COP26 summit last November,
the world is still on track for
more than 2°C of warming.
The report finds that climate
change is already affecting people’s
physical health and explicitly
mentions mental health too, for
the first time in an IPCC report.
Helen Adams at King’s College
London, an IPCC lead author, says
the main mental toll is from
extreme weather impacts, such as
dealing with flooded homes, but
also through “eco-anxiety”.
Climate change’s burdens are
falling unequally, with the world’s
most vulnerable people mostly
in low-income nations, says
the report. Deaths from floods,
droughts and storms in suchplaces were found to be 15 times
higher than the least vulnerable
areas, mostly high-income
nations, between 2010 and 2020.
Overall, the economic impact
of a rapidly warming world has
been adverse, according to the
report. But there have been
economic positives regionally,
including for farming and tourism,
and in lower energy demand.
The IPCC highlights the impact
on cities, now home to more than
half the global population. Urban
areas are increasingly being
hit by heat, floods and storms
affecting energy and transport,
and aggravating air pollution.
The 2030s and 2040s will bring
an unavoidable rise in hazards
for people worldwide because
there is already 1.5°C of warming
baked in by our past greenhouse
gas emissions. By mid-century,
around a billion people will be
at risk of coastal impacts such as
flooding, including those in small
island states, some of which facean “existential threat” later
this century. If the world warms
by 2°C, that will endanger food
security, leading to increased
malnutrition in some regions.
It isn’t only humans bearing
the brunt: climate change is
thought to be responsible for at
least two species’ extinctions. If
global average temperatures rise
by 1.5°C, up to 14 per cent of species
on land will be likely to face a very
high risk of extinction in future. At
3°C, the figure is up to 29 per cent.
However, Adams cautions
against being fatalistic in the face
of dire projections, because they
hinge on how much societies cut
their emissions and how much
they adapt. “Yes, things are bad.
But actually, the future depends
on us, not the climate,” she says.
The report finds that holding
warming to 1.5°C “substantially”
cuts the losses and damages
from climate change, but
“cannot eliminate them all”.
Attempts to adapt to a warming
world, such as building flood
defences and planting different
varieties of crops, have made
progress since the last assessmentin 2014. But they fall far short of
what is needed, they are uneven
globally and there is growing
evidence that adaptation
can have negative side effects,
such as sea defences causing
knock-on erosion along coasts.
“Most observed adaptation
is fragmented, small in scale,
incremental”, says the report.
The report was published
on the fifth day of the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, and one
of its authors says the war risks
derailing focus and action on
climate change. “If we’re going
back into a world of a cold war,
thinking about climate change
is something which we then don’t
do with the urgency with which
we need,” says Daniela Schmidt
at the University of Bristol, UK.
On 27 February, during final
approval of the report, which
governments sign off line by line,
the head of the Russian delegation
reportedly told colleagues that
“this [war] is not the wish of all the
Russian people and the Russian
people were not asked”. The
Ukrainian delegation askedcolleagues to continue and
expressed how upset they
were the war “will detract from
the importance” of the report,
Climate Change 2022: Impacts,
adaptation and vulnerability.
The assessment, part of the
sixth round of reports by the IPCC
since the first in 1990, closes with
an urgent message: “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 liveable
and sustainable future for all.” ❚Climate changeAdam VaughanDONWILSONODHIAMBO/SOPA^ IMAGES
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GHTR
OCKE
T^ VIA^
GE
TT
Y^ I
MAGESIt will be increasingly difficult to adapt
to a warming world, but it’s not too late
There was a water
shortage in Nairobi,
Kenya, in January“ Any further delay in action
will miss a brief window
of opportunity to secure
a liveable future for all”