The world has less than three years to stop the rise of planet-warming carbon emissions and less than a decade to slash them, UN climate experts said Monday.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made clear that current policies are leading the planet towards catastrophic temperature rises.
They said that the world's nations are taking our future into their own hands.
The 2,800-page report is the most comprehensive assessment of how to halt global heating ever produced.
Some government and business leaders are saying one thing but doing another. They are lying. The results will be catastrophic.
The first two installments of a trilogy of mammoth scientific assessments covering how greenhouse gas emissions are heating the planet and what that means for life on Earth have been published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
What we can do about it is outlined in this third report.
The decisions we make now can secure a future. We have the know-how to limit warming.
The tools are within our grasp and the nations of the world must be brave enough to use them.
The solutions touch on virtually all aspects of modern life and require significant investment and immediate action.
The first item on the global to-do list is to stop greenhouse gas emissions from rising.
It is necessary to keep within the Paris Agreement's less ambitious warming target of two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
A surge of deadly extreme weather across the globe has been caused by barely 1.1C of warming so far.
The cost of failing to limit warming will be more expensive than the cost of cutting emissions, according to the report.
Scientists warn that a rise above 1.5C could cause the collapse of the ecosystems and cause irreversible shifts in the climate system.
The report said that by mid-century, carbon emissions need to drop by 84 percent.
Jim Skea, a professor at Imperial College London and co-chair of the working group behind the report, said that limiting global warming to 1.5C is now or never.
Without immediate and deep emissions reductions, it will be impossible.
The world needs to drastically reduce the fossil fuels behind the emissions.
In order to keep within the Paris goals, the world should stop burning coal completely and cut oil and gas use by at least 60 and 70 percent.
Reducing emissions is not enough according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Not yet operating to scale, technologies to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere will need to be increased enormously.
Government policies, investments, and regulations will propel emissions cuts, but individuals can also make a difference.
Cutting back on long-haul flights, changing to a plant-based diet, climate-proofing buildings, and other ways of cutting consumption that drives energy demand could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 70% by the year 2050.
The report said that those with the most pollution are also the most polluted.
Two thirds of households in developed countries have incomes in the top 10 percent.
Individuals with high socio- economic status contribute disproportionately to emissions and have the highest potential for emissions reductions.
If energy consumption is included, the industry accounted for 34 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.
The report will feed into high-level UN political negotiations, which will resume in November in Egypt.
The report warned that the updated national climate pledges still put the 1.5C target beyond reach.
Observers said the report should make nations focus on climate commitments because of the war in Ukraine.
Olha Boiko, an activist from the Climate Action Network, based in Ukraine, said that it was heart-breaking to be living through a war that has fossil fuel money at its core.
The money that we begged not to invest in dirty energy is now flying over our heads in the form of bombs.
Agence France-Presse
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