UN report on climate change: Here’s what you may want to know

A report of the United Nations has urged governments across the world to undertake urgent course corrections to deal with the climate emergency, saying current plans are worst and warned that it was suicidal to avoid.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that the unprecedented challenge of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius below pre-industrial levels has become even more acute in recent years due to the relentless rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.

According to the report, this is making extreme weather events more frequent and intense, with increasingly dangerous impacts on nature and people in all regions of the world.


Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will require significant, rapid and sustained cuts in greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors, the report said, with global emissions already falling and will need to be cut in half by 2030.

A temperature threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius is widely seen as significant, as so-called tipping points are more likely to exceed this threshold. Tipping points are thresholds at which small changes can lead to dramatic changes across the planet's life support systems.

United Nations's Secretary General remarked, "In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts - everything, everywhere, all at once."

The IPCC Synthesis Report provides world leaders with a summary of the gold standards of contemporary climate science. This is the UN Climate Panel's first comprehensive report since the 2015 Paris Agreement and marks the final chapter of the group's sixth assessment cycle.

Extracted from over 10,000 pages of research across six assessment reports, the findings are intended to serve as a handbook for addressing the climate emergency.

FAQs

Where is United Nations HQ?
New York City

When was the UN founded?
October 24, 1945