IPCC Climate Report: “A Clarion Call for Help” 

PUBLICATION of the IPCC report, Climate Change 2022 has called into question strategies to protect against the consequences of climate change.

The IPCC report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability has identified a funding shortfall as 80% of the money for global climate change is applied to what is called mitigation -the actions and programmes to lessen carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions.

Only 20% of climate change funding is applied to Adaptation – the measures taken to protect our society from the effects of climate change that are already taking place.

The report’s conclusions are that we now are at a point where these effects are already inevitable and irreversible.

As the report was published, on the same day, the worst floods ever recorded in Australia were suffered in Queensland and New South Wales, killing 8 people, and displacing countless others.  The cost of climate change in human and financial terms is enormous.

IPCC Report

The IPCC report is produced by Working Group II as a contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report.  This report concludes that +1.5 degree rise is inevitable (we currently stand at +1.1 degrees). It says the consequences are already with us and cannot be reversed. Even if we manage to return to temperatures below this level by the end of the century, we will not be able to restore the conditions we are losing now.

“The world we live in now will not be the same as the world we live in, in as little as five years’ time, certainly ten or fifteen years from now,” says Working Group Co-Chair, Professor Debra Roberts.

Maladaption

The need now is for adaptation measures.  If we had spent more time working on these, the floods in New South Wales would have done less damage.  We would have prepared for them.  A new term is appearing in this IPCC report: “maladaptation”.  We are adapting ourselves for the future in the wrong way.

“As we digest this chilling report, the need to develop new technologies and integrate them within our established systems for living is greater than ever,” comments Nick Lyth, President of Green Angel Syndicate, a network of specialist investors fighting climate change.

“This is a clarion call for help, for all of us to find the technologies that are going to innovate and change the way we all access the requirements for our own lives, and more particularly the requirements for those in the worst-threatened regions of the world,” says Lyth.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. It was established in 1988 to provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments on the current state of knowledge about climate change. Scientists from 67 countries are members of the IPCC.

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