We are at a critical juncture in the fight against the climate emergency. According to the final report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report released on Monday, the world has only a few years to drastically reduce carbon emissions enough to avoid the worst effects of warming. The report calls on countries to step up their commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to reduce global emissions by 60 percent by 2035.

“The rate of temperature rise over the past half century is the fastest in 2,000 years. The concentration of carbon dioxide has reached its highest level in at least two million years. The climate time bomb is ticking,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video message shown at a press conference for the release of the report. “But today’s IPCC report is a guide to disarming the climate time bomb. This is a survival guide for mankind.”

Every six to seven years, the IPCC assembles thousands of peer-reviewed studies of the latest findings in climate science to draw conclusions about what is known about the causes of climate change, what its impacts will be, and how to mitigate and adapt to them. . This final part of the Sixth Assessment Report summarizes the scientific data detailed in previous installations that have been released over the past few years. It provides a starting point for negotiators seeking to implement the landmark Paris Climate Agreement. Under this treaty, countries agreed to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century and, ideally, limit it to below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Among the conclusions of the overall report is that scientists “can categorically show that the Earth has warmed by about 1.2 degrees.” [C] since pre-industrial times,” said Piers Forster, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds in England and author of the IPCC, at a webinar hosted by the World Resources Institute (WRI) last week. The report says the warming is “clearly” caused by human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels.

Similarly, climate scientists can clearly link this rise in temperature to more frequent and intense heatwaves, floods, droughts, and other climate extremes. These extreme events contribute to biodiversity loss, increased tree mortality, increased wildfires, and carbon loss from natural systems such as permafrost. “All these processes have already been affected by climate change,” Jofre Carnicer, an environmentalist at the University of Barcelona and an IPCC author, said at the WRI event.

“These extremes will get worse as temperatures continue to rise,” Forster said at the webinar. More than three billion people already live in places highly vulnerable to climate change, according to the report. And the more the temperature rises, the more expensive and less feasible it will be to adapt.

While our current trajectory — with greenhouse gas concentrations continuing to rise — means that “no matter what we do, we will see temperatures rise from where we are now,” Forster said, the future is largely in our hands. If people can curb emissions on an ambitious scale, we can avoid ever-increasing extremes.

At current emission levels, the world will pass the 1.5 degree Celsius mark sometime in the 2030s. To avoid this, “emissions need to peak almost immediately,” Taryn Fransen, senior fellow at the World Resources Institute and co-author of another UN report on the gap between current emissions and reductions needed to prevent warming, told the webinar. .

With existing emission reduction commitments by 2100, the world will warm 2.4 to 2.6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. 2.8 degrees by the end of the century.

Guterres called on countries to commit to achieving zero global emissions by 2050, challenging the developed countries that have contributed the most to climate change to do so by 2040.

Some form of carbon removal, whether natural (such as in the form of trees) or technological, will be required to achieve the goals set under the Paris Agreement, Fransen said. It will also require a rapid phase-out of fossil fuel infrastructure. According to Fransen, the existing and planned infrastructure will “destroy the remaining carbon budget” or the amount of carbon emissions that can be released before we reach 1.5 degrees Celsius. This infrastructure alone is 67 percent over our budget, and that’s not counting any other emission sources, she added.

Significant financial investments will be required to achieve the necessary emission reductions and provide the population with sufficient resources to adequately adapt to the inevitable changes. This will mean shifting investment away from fossil fuels towards clean energy and climate-related projects, although there are currently many political and social barriers to doing so.

“This report is a resounding call for a massive acceleration of climate change efforts by every country, every sector and in every time frame,” Guterres said in a video at a recent press conference. “In short, our world needs to fight climate change on all fronts – everywhere, everywhere and all at the same time.”