A new report on the impacts of climate change will likely be the most worrying assessment yet of how rising temperatures affect every living thing.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released its second of three major climate reports, its first report after the COP26 Climate Conference which took place in November 2021.
This report will focus mainly on regional climate change impacts as well as impacts on cities and coastal communities with researchers to publish the official results on Monday, 28 February 2022.
Large-scale reviews such as these are conducted by the IPCC, on behalf of governments, every six to seven years. There are three working groups comprised of researchers who sift through data, looking at the basic science, the scale of the impacts and the options for tackling the problem. This group is simply called Working Group II, no need to complicate things.
The IPCC Working Group II (WGII) assesses the impacts of climate change, from a worldwide to a regional view of ecosystems and biodiversity, and of humans and their diverse societies, cultures and settlements.
It considers their vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of these natural and human systems to adapt to climate change and thereby reduce climate-associated risks together with options for creating a sustainable future for all through an equitable and integrated approach to mitigation and adaptation efforts at all scales.
Working Group II is led by two Co-Chairs and eight Vice-Chairs who form the WGII Bureau. WGII is supported by a Technical Support Unit (TSU) located in Bremen, Germany, and Durban, South Africa.
Working Group II authors were selected based on their collective expertise in the following areas:
◉ Co-benefits, risks and co-costs of mitigation and adaptation, including interactions and trade-offs, technological and financial challenges and options.
◉ Ethics and equity: climate change, sustainable development, gender, poverty eradication, livelihoods, and food security.
◉ Perception of risks and benefits of climate change, adaptation and mitigation options, and societal responses, including psychological and sociological aspects.
◉ Climate engineering, greenhouse gas removal, and associated feedback and impacts.
◉ Regional and sectorial climate information.
◉ Epistemology and different forms of climate-related knowledge and data, including indigenous and practice-based knowledge.
The upcoming report will look to highlight that tackling climate change is not just about cutting carbon emissions and hitting net zero sometime in the future, but about dealing with far more short-term threats.
The volunteer scientists and researchers working on the report collectively review thousands of scientific papers to compile a summary of the most recent findings.
Under the umbrella of the IPCC, scientists working on the report, who all volunteer for this work, review and write up thousands of papers to summarise the latest findings.
The group then meets with government representatives to go through their findings page by page and, upon reaching consensus, a summary of their findings is published.
The report will outline important "tipping points" that are likely to be passed as the world warms. Some of these tipping points are irreversible such as the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet and the decimation of coral reefs around the world.
The report will also look at some of the technological solutions to climate change but is likely to be quite dismissive of efforts to manage solar radiation or even to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Mark Watts, the executive director of the C40 group, a network of around 100 major cities that are collaborating to tackle climate change, told the BBC that “it is always the immediate, that takes precedence. So, if you’ve got to deal with a big influx of migrants or a massive flood event, that’s where the focus is going to be.”
“In the global south, there really aren’t any city climate programme funds at the moment. Of those that exist, almost none of them are about adaptation. They’re all trying to get poor countries that have relatively low emissions, to reduce their emissions further, not about adapting to the impacts that they’re already feeling,” said Watts.