Running out of time The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report on climate change confirms many impacts of global warming are locked in. The battle now is to avoid an even worse future By Andy Swales
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he latest report from the United Nations’ cohort of leading climate scientists makes unsurprisingly grim reading for the world. To sum up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most indepth examination to date: the planet is heating at an unprecedented rate, humans are certainly to blame and the best we can do is act immediately on carbon emissions to limit the damage. The key word there is “limit”, because the impacts are already upon us. And having watched vast areas of the south-east burn in 2019-20, Australians – barring, it often seems, some in Canberra’s corridors of power – know that only too well. Roshanka Ranasinghe, a climate change expert at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education and Deltares in the Netherlands, and co-ordinating lead author of the IPCC report’s regional chapter on Australasia, tells Insurance News Australia “is already facing several climate change-related hazards”. “There is high confidence that, over the
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October/November 2021
next 30 years, several climatic impact drivers assessed in this report will change noticeably all over Australia.” The report finds greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are responsible for about 1.1 degrees of warming since the industrial revolution, and over the next 20 years we are expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees – the limit targeted by world leaders in the Paris climate accord of 2016. “Stabilising the climate will require strong, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and reaching net zero carbon dioxide emissions. Limiting other greenhouse gases and air pollutants, especially methane, could have benefits both for health and the climate,” IPCC climatologist Panmao Zhai says. Without such action, we can forget about limiting warming to 1.5 or even 2 degrees. Emeritus Professor Will Steffen, a climate scientist at the Australian National University who contributed to five previous IPCC assessments and special reports, tells
Insurance News he was “somewhat surprised by the direct and forceful nature” of the Sixth Assessment Report. “It didn’t leave any doubt about what the science is saying, and it didn’t shy away from some difficult issues, like breaching the 1.5-degree goal and providing more evidence for the high-end risks of climate change if we don’t rapidly and deeply reduce our emissions.” The report’s detailed analysis of impacts in Australasia shows land areas have already warmed by about 1.4 degrees in Australia and 1.1 degrees in New Zealand since 1910. Heat extremes have increased, cold extremes have decreased, and these trends are projected to continue. “Australia has significant vulnerability to changes in temperature and precipitation projected for the next 50 to 100 years… because it already has extensive arid and semi-arid areas and lies largely in the tropics and subtropics,” the IPCC report says. Relative sea level has risen at a greater
