The new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) again warns of the “red lights” of the current climate crisis. If it is exceeded, the earth threatens to become an uninhabitable planet in the future. According to the co-leader of the IPCC working group, Hans-Otto Pörtner, the “gap in implementation” is still the problem. The second part of the status report shows not only the consequences and risks of global warming, but also ways of dealing with them.
“This report is an urgent warning of the consequences of inaction,” said IPPC Chairman Hoesung Lee. The Paris climate agreement specifies what needs to be done, namely reducing CO2 emissions overall so that global warming remains below 1.5 degrees by 2050. But the first part of what is now the sixth status report, published in August 2021 and containing the scientific basis of climate change, contained an alarming statement: With current developments, the earth will be 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer by 2030 compared to the pre-industrial age – ten Years earlier than forecast in 2018. Without a rapid and drastic reduction in emissions, the scenario threatens increasing loss of life, biodiversity and infrastructure.
“Any further delay in globally concentrated action will miss a short and rapidly closing time window,” quoted Georg Kaser, IPCC Review Editor from the University of Innsbruck, one of the core statements of the new report and therefore summed up: “So the situation is dramatic”. The evidence of damage and losses in Europe has hardened, explained Birgit Bednar-Friedl from the University of Graz when presenting the report at a press conference of the Austrian climate research network CCCA in Vienna. She was involved in the IPCC report on the “Europe” chapter. For the first time, evidence has also been provided regarding the economic consequences of climate change, and the strongest effects can already be seen today, for example in the Mediterranean region.
The second part published today, Monday, is also “a reinforcement of the messages” of its predecessor, said Pörtner in a background discussion of the German Science Media Center (SMC). The report focuses on the mutual effects between three systems: climate, the ecosystem and its biodiversity, and human society, which serve as the basis for the risks arising from climate change. Thinking about these interactions has not really arrived in politics, if you manage to combine the view on biodiversity and climate protection with the progress report, then you would have achieved something.
Changes, crises and problems in one of the three areas cause effects in other areas: “Poor people often have an exceptionally high level of vulnerability in several of the dimensions mentioned above. People with little economic scope often live in a particularly damaged environment, which continues to is strongly affected by climate change. This corresponds to our empirical observations and is very well worked out in the report,” says the German expert for social systems and ecological economics, Achim Schlueter, from Jacobs University Bremen.
The scientist Pörtner, who works as a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, emphasizes that the “overexploitation” of the ecosystem increases its sensitivity to the climate crisis. “Nature adapts to climate change, it always had to in the course of the earth’s history,” says Pörtner. However, it has always been shown that there are limits to adaptation that, when exceeded, result in mass extinction. For the status report, the framework conditions were defined as to how this downward spiral can be ended. And it is precisely in the protection and strengthening of nature that there is a key to a future worth living in and to adapting to the climate crisis.
The opposite is still the case, because “increasing heat waves, droughts and floods are already exceeding the tolerance threshold of plants and animals and are leading to a mass death of trees and corals,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced on Monday. These weather extremes occur simultaneously and with increasingly difficult-to-manage impacts. Millions of people, especially in Africa, Asia, Central and South America and on small islands, are already facing acute food and water insecurity.