Climate Change: UN report to show true scale of impacts

A new UN report on the impacts of climate change is set to be the gravest assessment yet of how rising temperatures are affecting every living thing.

The study, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), summarises several years of research.

The report will likely say that the world is fast approaching the limits of adapting to climate change.

But rapid political action can avoid the worst impacts.

This assessment, to be published later, will be the second of three major reports from the IPCC and its first since November's COP26 summit.

The IPCC carries out these large-scale reviews of the latest research on warming every six or seven years on behalf of governments. This set of three is their sixth assessment report.

Researchers are formed into three working groups that look at the basic science, the scale of the impacts and the options for tackling the problem.

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.

They then meet with government officials to go through their findings line by line until they reach consensus.

Monday's publication is a short, 40-page summary of their findings.

There will be quite a big focus on regions and cities.

For many major urban areas and developing countries, the report will highlight that tackling climate change is not about cutting emissions and hitting net zero sometime in the future, but about dealing with far more short-term threats.

"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," said Mark Watts, executive director of the C40 group, a network of around 100 major cities collaborating to tackle climate change.

"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."

The study will also outline key "tipping points" likely to be passed as the world warms - some of which are irreversible like the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet.

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.

Overall it will have a much broader focus than just the science of what we can do about climate change.