PARIS: Diplomats from nearly 200 nations and top climate scientists began a week-long huddle in Switzerland on Monday to distil nearly a decade of published science into a 20-odd-page warning about the existential danger of global warming and what to do about it.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s synthesis report — to be released on March 20 — will detail observed and projected changes in Earth’s climate system; past and future impacts such as devastating heatwaves, flooding and rising seas; and ways to halt the carbon pollution pushing Earth towards an unliveable state.

“It’s a massive moment, seven years since the Paris Agreement and nine years since the last IPCC assessment report,” Greenpeace Nordic senior policy advisor Kaisa Kosonen, an official observer at IPCC meetings, said.

Since its creation in 1988, the IPCC — an intergovernmental body staffed by hundreds of scientists who work for it on a volunteer basis — has released six three-part assessments, the most recent in 2021-2022. “It is scientists telling governments how they are doing during these crucial defining years,” Kosonen said.

The report card is not good. Global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to grow, even as science has cautioned that deadly consequences are coming sooner and at lower levels of warming than previously thought.

Since the late 19th century, Earth’s average surface temperature has risen more than 1.1 degrees Celsius, enough to amplify a crescendo of weather catastrophes on every continent.

Carbon budgets

This warming, the IPCC has concluded, is overwhelmingly caused by burning oil, gas and coal. In a video message on Monday UN secretary general Antonio Guterres urged world leaders who will gather in December at the COP28 climate summit “to accelerate the phasing out of fossil fuels”.

Under the 2015 Paris treaty, nations promised to collectively cap the rise in the planet’s average temperature at “well below” 2C, and at 1.5C if possible.

An IPCC special report in 2018 made it alarmingly clear that the more ambitious aspirational goal — since adopted by governments and business as a hard target — was a better bet for a climate-safe world.

But an already narrow pathway has become a tightrope. Humanity’s “carbon budget” for staying under the 1.5C barrier is less than 300 billion tonnes of CO2, barely seven times current yearly emissions, according to the IPCC.

Two other special reports — one on oceans and Earth’s frozen zones, the other on forests and land use — will also be covered in the summary for policymakers under review in Interlaken.

“The synthesis report matters because it will be the last IPCC product for some years, and one of the major sources of knowledge to be considered in the first global stocktake under the Paris Agreement,” Oliver Geden, one of report’s lead authors and a senior fellow at the German Institute for International Security Affairs, said.

Published in Dawn, March 14th, 2023