IPCC issues final warning on 1.5C – governments and businesses to act now, or it will be too late.
At a glance
Climate change is affecting every region across the globe and exacerbating weather extremes. Adverse impacts and related losses and damage to nature, people and businesses continue to grow. Limiting human-caused global warming to a Paris Agreement aligned 1.5C pathway requires net zero CO2 emissions, however projections suggest that warming will exceed 1.5C during the 21st century.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report made a final and urgent call for climate action before the window to avoid more catastrophic impacts shuts for good. Delayed mitigation and adaptation measures will only embed high-emissions infrastructure, raise risks of stranded assets and cost escalation, reduce feasibility, and serve to increase losses and damages.
The directive is clear. We need to move from action setting to action getting.
Rapid and far-reaching energy transitions are needed across all sectors and systems. The report notes that the methods and measures to reduce emissions “are available now” but that the pace and scale of what has been delivered so far are “insufficient”.
Moving towards effective climate action requires political commitment, including transparent and consistent regulation with incentive schemes, investment in renewable energy and technologies that capture and store carbon dioxide and restore nature. Enhanced access to finance also forms part of the solution. A new report from the Energy Transitions Commission has spelled out the need to increase annual capital investment in the low-carbon economy from $1trn now to at least $3.5trn by 2050 to reach a net-zero world.
This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”
How organisations can accelerate decarbonisation and improve long-term resiliency against a changing climate.
In partnership with Reuters, GHD’s whitepaper: Progress paralysis: accelerating the energy transition, details an implementation roadmap that the private and public sector can follow to accelerate a holistic, integrated and viable net zero journey. The takeaways focus on prioritising simple, speedy actions, turning strategies into credible action plans and considering every aspect across the E.S and G.
As the IPCC findings and recommendations continue to influence policies and discussion at the next UN Climate Change Summit, COP28 later this year, already we are seeing more governments and businesses revisiting targets and translating these into action through commercially resilient decarbonisation pathways and transition plans.
Shifting gears towards tangible progress and execution will inch us closer to the positive outcomes the world so desperately needs.