This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its new report that provides a five-year analysis on global temperature rises, fossil fuel emissions and climate impacts. This new synthesis report on climate change calls for more ambitious action and more effective policies on climate mitigation to limit the global average temperature below 1.5°C.

IPCC’s report underlines the urgency of the climate crisis, presents its causes, and lists its direct impacts on populations and biodiversity. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel stressed the unprecedented scale of the crisis. While progress in adaptation planning and implementation has been observed in 170 countries since 2018, current data shows that global warming will continue to increase in the near term, and projected long-term impacts will escalate with every increment of warming. Scientists explain that effective and feasible solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are available, and that securing a liveable and sustainable future will depend on the actions that countries will take in the next ten years:

“Adaptation options that are feasible today will become constrained and less effective with increasing global warming. With increasing global warming, losses and damages will increase and additional human and natural systems will reach adaptation limits. Maladaptation can be avoided by flexible, multi-sectoral, inclusive, long-term planning and implementation of adaptation actions, with co-benefits to many sectors and systems.”

IPCC’s report underlines that the impacts of climate change will only get worse if deep, rapid and sustained actions are not implemented in this decade. Governments, companies, and civil society need to work together to transition to a sustainable system.

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