UN study urges unprecedented action to halt climate change

SOCIETY must enact “unprecedented” changes to how it consumes energy, travels and builds to meet a lower global warming target or it risks more heatwaves, flood-causing storms, drought and the loss of species, a UN report said yesterday.

Keeping the Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5C (2.7F) rather than the 2C (3.6F) target agreed to at the Paris Agreement talks in 2015 would have “clear benefits to people and natural ecosystems,” the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said.

The IPCC said at the current rate of warming, the world’s temperatures would reach 1.5C between 2030 and 2052 after an increase of 1C above preindustrial levels since the mid-1800s.

Keeping the 1.5C target would keep the global sea-level rise 0.1 metre (3.9in) lower by 2100 than a 2C target, the report states. That could reduce flooding and give the people that inhabit the world’s coasts, islands and river deltas time to adapt to climate change.

The lower target would also reduce species loss and extinction and the impact on terrestrial, freshwater and coastal ecosystems, the report said.

To contain warming at 1.5C, manmade global net carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions would need to fall by about 45 per cent by 2030 from 2010 levels and reach “net zero” by mid-century.

The effects of not meeting the 1.5C target would mean huge changes to the world. The lower level would leave the Arctic Ocean free of sea ice in summer only once per century, and not at least once a decade under the higher target.