Clean energy and technology can be exploited to avoid the growing climate disaster, a major new report on climate change says. The United Nations chief, Antonio Guterres, has said the new report is a survival guide for humanity as climate scientists warned a key global temperature goal will likely be missed. Their report lays out how rapid cuts to fossil fuels can avert the worst effects of climate change. ALSO READ: Commonwealth Secretary-General urges immediate action on climate change, loss of biodiversity Guterres said that all countries should bring forward their net zero plans by a decade. There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all, the report states. Governments had previously agreed to act to avoid global temperature rise going above 1.5C. But the world has already warmed by 1.1C and now experts say that it is likely to breach 1.5C in the 2030s. The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific body that advises the UN on rising temperatures, is agreed on by all governments involved. Their new study aims to boil down to one slim volume several landmark findings on the causes, impacts and solutions to climate change that have been released since 2018. It outlines the significant impacts that climate change is having on the world already, and explains that these will get much worse. By 2100 extreme coastal flooding that used to happen once-a-century is expected to occur at least annually in half of the world's tidal gauge locations - places where sea level recordings are made. As noted, human activities, mainly through emissions of greenhouse gases, have equivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1 degrees Celsius above 1850-1900 in 2011 to 2020. Global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase, with unequal historical and ongoing contributions arising from unsustainable energy use, land use and land-use change, lifestyles and patterns of consumption and production across regions, between and within countries, and among individuals. By and large, the IPCC highlighted rich nations’ failure to help the developing world adapt to climate change. Vulnerable communities disproportionately affected by global warming are being given ‘insufficient’ funds to help adapt to extreme climate impacts, the reports. “Current global financial flows for adaptation are insufficient for, and constrain implementation of, adaptation options, especially in developing countries,” the report says. Wealthy governments have failed to provide $100 billion of climate finance a year they promised to developing countries by 2020, with the US responsible for the vast majority of the shortfall. Finance for adapting to climate change – rather than cutting emissions – has been particularly low. At Cop26 in 2021, all countries agreed that developed nations would double their adaptation finance by 2025 on 2019 levels and a group of self-proclaimed “champions” has been set up to try to implement this.
