The breakneck speed of global warming exceeds the pace of efforts to protect billions of vulnerable people, according to a new report released Monday by the world’s top climate scientists. The report warns of a growing mismatch between rising temperatures and slow, fragmented efforts to adapt, leaving little time for catching up before “a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity” is sealed shut.

“With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres, calling the 3,500-page document “an atlas of human suffering” and an indictment of a “criminal” “abdication of leadership.” To underscore the challenges to global cooperation, Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine will likely overshadow the first major report in nearly eight years on climate vulnerability.

This is the second doorstop document released in less than six months from the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with two additional reports expected before the end of the year. Researchers in the latest volume focused on the unpreparedness of nations to cope with climate instability and compounding stressors from higher temperatures, now at 1.1° Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Among the findings in the new report:

  • The effects of melting glaciers and thawing permafrost in some areas are “approaching irreversibility.”
  • Half the world is already living with “severe water scarcity” during part of the year.
  • A worldwide rise in heat-related illness and death, with more food-borne and infectious disease, can be expected without adaptation.
  • Agricultural productivity growth has slowed, and weather extremes have put millions of people’s food security at risk.
  • In land ecosystems as many as 14% of animal species studied will likely face a “very high” risk of extinction at a warming level of 1.5°C.

Choices made in the next decade will determine how much hardship can be avoided. Warming beyond that level “would cause unavoidable increases in multiple climate hazards,” the authors write. Clawing temperatures back down after passing 1.5°C — an extremely tall task — would still leave potentially irreversible damage.

50 Years of Heat

Emissions have warmed the atmosphere about 1.1°C since the 19th century

Source: NASA GISS

The war in Ukraine unexpectedly pushed into the two-week meeting at which national delegates to the IPCC from 195 countries approve a 36-page summary. Near the end of the painstaking process on Sunday, Oleg Anisimov of the Russian delegation apologized for the ongoing invasion by his country into Ukraine, according to a person familiar with the proceedings. The apology came after remarks by the head of the Ukrainian delegation, Svitlana Krakovska, about the impact of the war.

“Human-induced climate change and war against Ukraine have direct connections and the same roots. They are fossil fuels and humanity’s dependence on them,” said Krakovska, a senior scientist at the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute, in her remarks on Sunday to IPCC colleagues.

A group of more than 270 scientists and 675 contributors from around the world examined every major natural and human domain, including freshwater, coasts, cities, agriculture, health, and poverty. Their consensus findings assert that severe consequences of climate change are already visible across the board in unprecedented heat waves, rising sea levels, and record-breaking wildfires. They also show that strategic adaptation can save lives. A substantial change since the last version of this report, released in 2014, is that many projections about how climate change will unfold have been subsumed by observations about how it already has.

“We are so used to talking of climate change in the future tense,” said Aditi Mukherji, principal researcher at the International Water Management Institute and co-chief author of the IPCC’s chapter on water. “All of us need to stop talking of climate change in a future tense. You have to say climate change has happened.”

New research published over the past several years has allowed the IPCC in this report to better understand how the fundamental health of societies can impede or enhance climate adaptation. Taken together, non-climate factors like consistent laws and policies, economic conditions, finance and people’s access to basic resources are likely to play as critical a role in the impact of climate change as the direct effects of warming itself.

That’s because the same amount of warming will have different consequences depending on how well prepared people are to face it. What might the world look like after 2°C of warming above pre-industrial levels, the higher limit that nations agreed to in the Paris Agreement?

“I say, it depends,” said Brian O’Neill, director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute in Maryland and a chief author of the IPCC’s chapter on future risks. “That question can’t be answered unless you also tell me, well, what are we assuming about the condition of society?”

Current national policies put the world on track for an average estimate of 2.7°C warming by 2100, according to Climate Impact Tracker. That projection goes down to 2.4°C if countries meet their official goals and even lower — but still too high — if pledges to zero out emissions by mid-century are met. But those climate outcomes will be shaped by the ability of leaders to implement agreements. If the world is awash in nationalism and military conflict, or racked with poverty and inequality, “that’s a big problem,” O’Neill said. “And if we’re doing really well in all those aspects of development, then the risks are a lot lower.”

Finance, business and trade enriched the industrialized world and continue to lift millions from poverty. But without transformation at a scale never before seen, the engines of economic growth will also drive ever-more dangerous global heating, eroding many decades of gains. The scientists are newly confident that an increase of more than 1.5°C would undercut the potential for many kinds of successful adaptation, and open up a new world of risk for every fraction of a degree beyond it.

To avoid what the IPCC terms “cascading and compounding” damages to human and natural systems, the world must move from sluggish, piecemeal adaptation measures to a sweeping program of anticipatory, resilient planning and development. This requires cooperation across sectors of society and at every level of governance — and very quickly, before the world exceeds temperature limits. In the near term, the report stated, climate risks are more closely tied to vulnerabilities built into social systems than to what emissions trajectory the world follows.