‘Relentless climate change’ requires immediate global action, major UN report warns

WMO aims to pile pressure on governments with dossier of damning and concerning environmental findings ahead of this year’s Cop26 climate summit, writes Harry Cockburn

Wildfires broke out in Australia when heat records were broken in early 2020 (Getty )

The cost of failing to adapt to our warming world is rising, and despite a dip in emissions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, “relentless, continuing climate change”, is resulting in more extreme storms, floods and droughts, a United Nations report on the state of the climate has warned.

During 2020, people around the world were widely impacted by the “double blow” of extreme weather and the coronavirus crisis, but the economic slowdown failed to put a brake on the human activities driving the climate crisis, according to the new State of the Global Climate report compiled by the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

2020 was one of the three warmest years on record, despite a cooling La Niña event, the report said, and the global average temperature was about 1.2C above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) level.

The extreme weather hindered disaster recovery efforts and worsened food insecurity around the world, the report said, and ahead of the UN’s Cop26 climate summit in the UK in November, the organisation urged world leaders to act immediately to curb emissions of greenhouse gases.

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said: “This report shows that we have no time to waste. The climate is changing, and the impacts are already too costly for people and the planet.

“This is the year for action. Countries need to commit to net zero emissions by 2050. They need to submit, well ahead of Cop26 in Glasgow, ambitious national climate plans that will collectively cut global emissions by 45 per cent compared to 2010 levels by 2030.

“And they need to act now to protect people against the disastrous effects of climate change,” he added.

The climate plans each country must submit, known as “nationally determined contributions” or NDCs, will chart a course for how the world can massively reduce emissions of carbon, methane, ozone and other greenhouse gases, but will depend on major societal and economic changes, in order to achieve the near-total phase out of fossil fuels.

The warning comes just days ahead of a virtual US climate summit hosted by Joe Biden’s administration, at which the US is expected to unveil an ambitious NDC, which it is hoped will spur impactful climate policy from other countries.

Over the weekend leaders from the world’s two biggest polluters – the US and China – agreed to cooperate with one another and work with other countries to reduce emissions in a move which will also put pressure on the international community to take the upcoming summits seriously.

The report described the coronavirus pandemic as an “unwelcome dimension”, with cascading impacts which made responding to existing climate problems more difficult, resulting in impacts on human health and wellbeing.

“Mobility restrictions, economic downturns and disruptions to the agricultural sector exacerbated the effects of extreme weather and climate events along the entire food supply chain, elevating levels of food insecurity and slowing the delivery of humanitarian assistance,” the authors said.

This can then worsen existing inequalities and add potential feedback loops which threaten to perpetuate the causes of the crisis.

The report also highlights the “robustness” of the scientific consensus on how human activity is driving the climate crisis, said WMO secretary-general Professor Petteri Taalas.

He said: “It has been 28 years since the World Meteorological Organisation issued the first state of the climate report in 1993, due to the concerns raised at that time about projected climate change.

“While understanding of the climate system and computing power have increased since then, the basic message remains the same and we now have 28 more years of data that show significant temperature increases over land and sea as well as other changes like sea level rise, melting of sea ice and glaciers and changes in precipitation patterns.

“This underscores the robustness of climate science based on the physical laws governing the behaviour of the climate system.”

The report warned:

The six years since 2015 have been the warmest on record, while 2011-2020 was the warmest decade on record

• Concentrations of the major greenhouse gases continued to increase in 2019 and 2020, hitting a global average of 410 parts per million (ppm) and could exceed 414 ppm in 2021
• Emissions mean ocean acidification and deoxygenation have worsened, impacting ecosystems, marine life and fisheries
• Since the mid-1980s, Arctic surface air temperatures have warmed at least twice as fast as the global average
• Each year the Antarctic ice sheet is now losing more than twice the annual discharge of the River Rhine in Europe
• Heavy rain and flooding affected much of the Sahel and the Greater Horn of Africa, triggering a desert locust outbreak
• Australia broke heat records in early 2020, including the highest observed temperature in an Australian metropolitan area – western Sydney – when Penrith reached 48.9C
• Severe drought hit parts of South America in 2020, with estimated agricultural losses near US$3bn in Brazil, with additional losses in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay
• Temperatures in the Siberian Arctic in 2020 were more than 3C above average, with a record temperature of 38C in the town of Verkhoyansk
• Nearly 690 million people, or 9 per cent of the world population, were undernourished
• Over the past decade (2010–2019), weather-related events triggered an estimated 23.1 million displacements of people on average each year, most of them within national borders

The WMO’s s Professor Taalas said: “All key climate indicators and associated impact information provided in this report highlight relentless, continuing climate change, an increasing occurrence and intensification of extreme events, and severe losses and damage, affecting people, societies and economies.

He also urged governments to invest in the technology and services to predict and warn of extreme weather events.

“Several less developed countries have major gaps in their observing systems and are lacking state of the art weather, climate and water services,” he said.

The climate is changing, and the impacts are already too costly for people and the planet

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres

Responding to the report, Chris Rapley, a professor of climate science at University College London, said: “The way we have organised and are running human affairs is destabilising the climate system, with predictable and increasingly dire consequences.

He added: “It’s time for an uprising of concerted action to fix politics – managing the climate crisis will follow.”

Richard Allan, professor of climate science at the University of Reading, said: “In addition to the many extreme weather events in 2020 documented by the WMO report, what is notable is an emerging picture that climate change is gathering pace: mountain glaciers and polar ice sheets are melting more quickly and heat is accumulating more rapidly in the ocean, with both effects driving an acceleration of sea level rise, while carbon dioxide increases, that are driving these changes, are becoming progressively larger over time.”

Prof Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London, said the impacts of climate change were not the only thing the report highlighted.

He said: “While rightly noting the continuing, overwhelming evidence for human-caused climate change, the report also does well in moving away from climate change to explain 2020’s disasters and displacement.

“As the report notes, most of the people worst affected by disasters and displacement were already among the most vulnerable, meaning that these pre-existing conditions gave them few options to deal with 2020’s weather.

“Extracting climate change’s signal within these disaster and displacement complexities is hard. In 2020, central America was pummelled by hurricanes which were likely intensified by climate change. Yet the immediate death toll remained well below past hurricane catastrophes in the region.

“Similarly, the report describes the terrible locusts in east Africa in 2020 while noting that it was worse 25 years ago. All the adverse impacts in 2020 were exacerbated by the livelihood and health consequences of Covid-19, as the report highlights.”