Opinion Burden of action
IPCC synthesis report underscores the need for a global climate change agreement.
Climate scientists must feel like broken records. Every few months, they issue a new and dire report on climate change and explicate the urgency with which the world must act to contain its impact.
After a brief period of public panic, governments pay lip service to the notion of cutting emissions, and move on to square one. On Sunday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) synthesis report, which summarises the UN panel’s previous three major reports on global warming, warned that climate change will have “severe, widespread and irreversible impacts” on people — and India is among the 20 countries judged most at risk from extreme climate events.
The report frames the challenge in stark terms: though some anthropogenic climate disruption has already been made permanent, if emissions are not cut by 40-70 per cent by 2050 to keep global warming at under 2 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels, the world is looking at potentially catastrophic outcomes, with ever more frequent crop failures, deadly heat waves and water shortages. As the IPCC suggests, this is a critical moment for climate action, with the UN-sponsored Lima round of negotiations looming in December, ahead of the crucial 2015 conference of the parties in Paris, where countries face the tough task of hammering out a global deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
Previous attempts have been stymied by the inability to resolve key political questions on how the burden of action must be shared between developed and developing nations, and concerted and coordinated mitigation efforts stalled by a demand for equity and the development imperative of countries like India and China.
The good news is that the IPCC paints the requisite reduction in fossil fuel use, and the switchover to renewables, as technologically and economically feasible, even if it remains politically difficult. The difference is that with the increasing frequency of extreme weather events around the world, the costs of delaying action are becoming all too clear.
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