The climate continues to change, causing fiercer wildfires, stronger storms and displacing coastal and island communities all over the world. Dr Anjani Ganase reviews the IPCC 6th Assessment Report and looks at the slippery slope that we on small islands face. The world as we know it is changing rapidly.
The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (IMO) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for the purpose of reviewing and compiling climate-related research to advise governments on the impacts of climate change. Considering the global impact of climate change, the IPCC body consists of 193 global members and thousands of contributing scientists across many countries.
The IPCC scientists volunteer their time to collate all information on the drivers of climate change, future projections, understanding the global and regional impacts, as well as studies on mitigation and adaptation strategies. The report requires a transparent review process where experts and governments can review and work towards a scientific consensus with global acceptance.
In 1990 the first assessment report was released; 30 years later, the IPCC released its 6th assessment report, Working Group 1 - which focuses on the physical science of climate change. The other two working groups include Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, which assesses the vulnerability and adaptability of natural and human systems to climate change, and Mitigation and Climate Change where scientists review the methods for reducing and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Both working groups will be released next year
In this report, the IPCC is now able to present observable changes in the climate over the past 40 years to validate previous climate projections and fine-tune future projections. Scientists can now pin-point the timeline of climate change impacts and determine when human activities began to significantly alter our climate. We can also track our progress, or the lack thereof, based on the pledges made by global leaders during the Paris Agreement in 2015. Leaders from around the world pledged to curb the emissions of greenhouse gases in order to limit global warming to below 1.5 to two-degree temperature rise above industrial levels by the end of the century. Six years later, our current policies have us on track for a three-degree global temperature rise by 2100 and we are already one degree-Celsius above the preindustrial conditions with visible environmental consequences.
In this report, it is very clear that the hopes to limit to a 1.5 C temperature rise seems in vain, unless there is a radical reduction to a global net zero of greenhouse gases by 2050. Considering that the world's economies are reeling from the covid19 pandemic with no large-scale climate adaptation mechanisms in sight for TT, this is a major concern. This is especially dire for small island nations, who will already suffer significantly at 1.5 C above, as highlighted by
