Adam Vaughan is a writer.
After a dramatic change in the weather, pastoralists in the country found the bodies of sheep and goats that had died.
Tony Karumba is pictured.
According to a landmark report warning that there are limits to how much humanity can adapt to a warming world, climate change is alreadywreaking widespread, pervasive and sometimes irreversible impacts on people and ecosystems globally.
According to the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, up to 3.6 billion people live in areas that are highly vulnerable to climate change due to extreme heat, heavy rain, and weather setting the stage for fires. The UN secretary general called it an atlas of human suffering during a press conference.
The last assessment by the panel eight years ago was the last time it was possible to pin the impacts of extreme weather events on human-made climate change. The 35-page summary for policy makers states that holding warming to the Paris Agreement goal will limit the impacts and make adaptation more feasible.
Join us for a mind-blowing festival of ideas and experiences. New Scientist Live is going hybrid, with a live in-person event in Manchester, UK, that you can also enjoy from the comfort of your own home, from 12 to 14 March 2022. Find out more.Rachel Warren, a lead author on the report, says that there are limits to adaptation.
The world is still on track for more than 2 degrees of warming despite the commitments made in the Glasgow Climate Pact.
Climate change is already affecting people's physical health and mental health, for the first time explicitly in a report, according to the report. Helen Adams at King's College London is a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The report says climate change's burdens are falling on the poor. Most of the world's most vulnerable people are in low-income nations in West, East and central Africa, South Asia and South America. Between 2010 and 2020, floods, droughts and storms in those regions were found to be 15 times higher than the least vulnerable areas of Canada and the UK.
Inger Anderson of the UN Environment Programme said during the press conference that the report showed impacts are here now, not just in the future.
According to the report, the economic impact of a rapidly warming world has been negative. Farming, tourism, and lower energy demand have been economic positives.
More than half of the world's population can be found in cities. Urban areas are being hit by heat, floods and storms that affect energy and transport.
Warming baked in by our past greenhouse gas emissions will cause an unavoidable increase in hazard for people worldwide in the 20th century. Around a billion people will be at risk of coastal impacts such as flooding by mid-century, and some of them will face an existential threat later this century. If the world warms by 2 degrees, it will endanger food security in some areas.
Climate change is thought to be responsible for at least two species extinctions. Up to 14 per cent of species on land will face a high risk of extinction in the future if global average temperatures rise. The figure is up to 29 per cent at 3.
Adams cautions against being fatalistic in the face of dire projections because they depend on how much societies cut their emissions and how much they adapt. She says that the future depends on us, not the climate. The report shows that holding warming to 1.5 degrees C cuts the losses and damages from climate change, but cannot eliminate them all.
Since the last assessment in 2014, attempts to adapt to a warming world, such as building flood defences and planting different varieties of crops, have made progress. Most observed adaptation is fragmented, small in scale, and there is growing evidence that adaptation can have negative side effects.
One of the report's authors says the war risks derailing focus and action on climate change.
The head of the Russian delegation told his colleagues that the war was not for the Russian people. The Ukrainian delegation asked colleagues to continue and expressed how upset they were about the war, which will detract from the importance of the report.
Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable.
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