London, Europe Brief News – A new report on the impacts of climate change is expected to be released next week.
The report will be the most worrying assessment yet of how rising temperatures affect every living thing.
This will be the second of three major reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It will be the first since November’s COP26 summit.
Scientists and officials will publish their conclusions on 28 February.
The study will focus heavily on regional impacts as well as on cities and coastal communities.
The IPCC carries out these large-scale reviews of the latest research on warming every six or seven years. 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.
For many major cities 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, the executive director of the C40 group, a network of around 100 major cities that are 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.”
