Worse and worse impacts but solutions under our noses. Nearly nine years after their last synthesis, UN climate experts gathered in Switzerland on Monday deliver the latest scientific consensus on global warming and on humanity’s urgent response to this existential challenge.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due to publish at 2 p.m. the synthesis of its 6th assessment report, a summary of the more than 10,000 pages of work it has published since its previous synthesis at the end of 2014.
In nine years, the scientific community has established that global warming caused by human activity is occurring faster and stronger than expected. And highlighted the risk of reaching “tipping points”, synonymous with major irreversible impacts, even runaway.
“Summary for Policymakers”
After a week of meetings in Interlaken (Switzerland), the representatives of the member states of the IPCC approved on Sunday the “summary for decision-makers”, some thirty pages summarizing the state of science and the panorama of possible solutions, in a understandable by all.
This highly political document had to be approved line by line by the delegates of the countries represented in all 195 Member States. “We are approaching the point of no return, of exceeding the maximum warming threshold of 1.5 degrees,” UN chief Antonio Guterres recalled in a video message at the opening of the session on March 13. . “Leaders need sound, frank and detailed scientific guidance to make the right decisions (…) and accelerate the exit from fossil fuels and the reduction of emissions,” Guterres said. ;
The “summary for decision-makers” will be a major point of support for civil society, which has its sights set on the meeting of COP28, in December in Dubai, where a first global assessment of the countries’ commitments to meet the objectives of Paris is expected.
In addition to the “summary for decision-makers”, the final synthesis of this 6th report also includes a technical document of around 70 pages, constituting the summary of all the work: the three main sections published in 2021 and 2022 – on the physical evidence of the warming, on its impacts, and finally on mitigation measures – and three special reports (on the consequences of a warming of +1.5°C, on the oceans and the cryosphere, and on the emerged lands).