On Monday, the United Nations released a landmark report on climate change, a comprehensive assessment of the current state of climate change. Here are three big takeaways.
, a comprehensive assessment of the current state of climate change. The report, created by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was years in the making and is considered the gold-standard synthesis of all available scientific evidence.Previous reports established 1.5 degrees of warming as a critical guardrail.
So is it too late? Short answer: we still have time, but not a lot. By the end of this decade — seven years from now — the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions by almost half. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Monday that the world needs to reach zero emissions by 2050, but rich countries should get there sooner — by 2040.
If we can achieve this rapid transformation, the planet will almost certainly get 1.5 degrees hotter some time next decade, and possibly creep beyond that. But if action is taken now, the dial will start to come back down — and fairly quickly, with noticeable changes in just a couple decades, the authors said.
But the word “finance” is mentioned 36 times in the 37-page summary for policymakers, and that’s because it lays out the case that much, much more money needs to be thrown at the climate crisis to accelerate change — approximately three to six times the funding that is currently available. There is enough liquidity and capital in the world to do this, but more money is currently flowing to fossil fuels than to climate adaptation, from both public and private coffers. That has to change.
But vulnerability exists within countries, the report makes clear. People in the Arctic, Indigenous people globally and low-income households are all among the communities experiencing the largest adverse impacts, the report says.
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