NEW YORK: UN chief Antonio Guterres says a major new report on climate change is a “survival guide for humanity”.

Clean energy and technology can be exploited to avoid the growing climate disaster, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report says.

But at a meeting in Switzerland to agree their findings, climate scientists warned a key global temperature goal will likely be missed.

Their report lays out how rapid cuts to fossil fuels can avert the worst effects of climate change.

In response to the findings, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres says that all countries should bring forward their net zero plans by a decade. These targets are supposed to rapidly cut the greenhouse gas emissions that warm our planet’s atmosphere.

“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the report states.

Governments had previously agreed to act to avoid global temperature rise going above 1.5C. But the world has already warmed by 1.1C and now experts say that it is likely to breach 1.5C in the 2030s.

The UK government responded that the report makes it clear that countries must “work towards far more ambitious climate commitments” ahead of the UN climate summit COP28 in November.

“The UK is a world leader in working towards net zero, but we need to go further and faster,” a spokesperson said.

The report from the IPCC – the scientific body that advises the UN on rising temperatures – is agreed on by all governments involved.

Their new study aims to boil down to one slim volume several landmark findings on the causes, impacts and solutions to climate change that have been released since 2018.

It outlines the significant impacts that climate change is having on the world already, and explains that these will get much worse.

By 2100 extreme coastal flooding that used to happen once a century is expected to occur at least annually in half of the world’s tidal gauge locations – places where sea level recordings are made.

Concentrations of the warming gas CO2 in the atmosphere are at their highest in 2 million years. The world is now warmer than at any time in the past 125,000 years – and will likely get warmer still over the next decade.

“Even in the near term, global warming is more likely than not to reach 1.5C even under the very low greenhouse gas scenario,” the report states.

Source- RNZ

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