The call to action comes as the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released the State of the Global Climate 2020 report on Monday., according to Phys.org.
The 56-page flagship annual report highlights the latest climate system indicators, based on 28 years of record-keeping, including greenhouse gas concentrations, increasing land and ocean temperatures, sea-level rise, melting ice and glacier retreat, and extreme weather.
The report also highlights the impacts on socio-economic development, migration and displacement, food security, and land and marine ecosystems. WMO chief Petteri Taalas said: “All key climate indicators and impact information provided in this report show relentless, continuing climate change, an increasing occurrence and intensification of high-impact events and severe losses and damages affecting people, societies, and economies.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the report showed 2020 was a year of “extreme weather and climate disruption, fuelled by anthropogenic climate change, affecting lives, destroying livelihoods and forcing many millions from their homes.”
High-impact events in 2020
The WMO notes that globally, 2020 was one of the three warmest years on record, despite a cooling La Niña event. During this period, the global average temperature was about 1.2° Celsius above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) level, while the six years since 2015 have been the warmest on record. Going one step further, 2011-2020 was the warmest decade on record.
Besides the planet getting warmer by the year, there are other climate-related impacts that affect us directly and indirectly. Climate-related events already pose risks to society through impacts on health, food, and water security, as well as human security, livelihoods, economies, infrastructure, and biodiversity.
These climate-related events also have significant environmental repercussions as well. Extreme weather events impact negatively, including flooding along coastlines and further inland, droughts, wildfires in forest and peatland areas, land degradation, sand and dust storms, and desertification.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had wide-ranging impacts on health and well-being, livelihoods, businesses, and economies across the world. While countries and communities worldwide responded to the specific risks and impacts of the pandemic, the impacts and risks of a changing climate did not go away.
Prof. Tom Oliver, Professor of Applied Ecology, University of Reading, said: “This latest WMO report is grim reading showing clearly how Covid-19 has compounded climate change impacts. In 2020, it led to reduced capacity to deal with plagues of locusts in East Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan; it has slowed the delivery of humanitarian assistance to the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by cyclones in the Pacific Islands, hurricanes in Central America and wildfires in the US. Animal-borne diseases like Covid have themselves been linked strongly to land use degradation, so we are seeing in real-time how threats from environmental disasters combine and multiply.”
“We are entering a dangerous new of era of interlinked environmental threats that will severely strain the moral fibres of our humanity. Only through a renewed focus on international cooperation and solidarity can we guide humankind through these coming decades with the least suffering.”
