By Business India Editorial

Further delay in efforts to mitigate climate change means death, said the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as the global agency’s climate science panel warned the world of an impending climate crisis.

Climate change is upon us and humanity is far from ready, the United Nations climate science panel warned in a major report on Monday.

Noting nearly half the world’s population was already vulnerable to increasingly dangerous climate impacts, the report called for drastic action on a huge scale. Climate change is likely going to make the world sicker, hungrier, poorer and way more dangerous by 2040 with an “unavoidable” increase in risks, and there remained only “a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”, said the report.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) study said if human-caused global warming was not limited to just another couple tenths of a degree, an Earth now struck regularly by deadly heat, fires, floods and drought in future decades will degrade in 127 ways – with some being “potentially irreversible”.

“Adaptation saves lives,” Guterres said with the report’s release. “As climate impacts worsen – and they will – scaling up investments will be essential for survival… Delay means death.”

The 3,675-page report is the latest in a series by the IPCC detailing the global consensus on climate science. The report, however, focused on how nature and societies are being affected and what they can do to adapt.

Children today who may still be alive in the year 2100 are going to experience four times more climate extremes than they do now even with only a few more tenths of a degree of warming over today’s heat.

But if temperatures increase nearly two more degrees Celsius from now, they would feel five times the floods, storms, drought and heatwaves, according to the collection of scientists at the IPCC.

Already, at least 3.3 billion people’s daily lives “are highly vulnerable to climate change” and 15 times more likely to die from extreme weather, the report said.

Large numbers of people are being displaced by worsening weather extremes. And the world’s poor are being hit by far the hardest, it said. More people are going to die each year from heatwaves, diseases, extreme weather, air pollution and starvation because of global warming, the report added.

“Climate change is killing people,” said co-author Helen Adams of King’s College London. “Yes, things are bad, but actually the future depends on us, not the climate.”

By 2050, a billion people will face coastal flooding risk from rising seas, the report said. More people will be forced out of their homes from weather disasters, especially flooding, sea level rise and tropical cyclones.

If warming exceeds a few more tenths of a degree, it could lead to some areas becoming uninhabitable, including some small islands, said report co-author Adelle Thomas of the University of Bahamas and Climate Analytics.

And eventually in some places it will become too hot for people to work outdoors, which will be a problem for raising crops, said report co-author Rachel Bezner Kerr of Cornell University.