IPPC Report Offers Solutions to Prevent 1.5°C Threshold Breach

It’s official — 2023 is the hottest year on record, accompanied by extreme air and sea surface temperatures, record-low Antarctic sea ice, and severe weather conditions that caused death and devastation.

Calculations from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS), the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) show that average temperatures last year reached 1.48°C higher than the pre-industrial period (Baker, 2024).

Scientists have warned that exceeding this temperature will mean more extreme events, such as storms, droughts, extreme heat, and flooding, that will devastate the ecosystem, communities, and livelihoods.

The World Resource Institute provides a summary of the latest IPCC report, the AR6, a nearly 8000-page-long document released on March 2023, of how increasing GHG emissions, which is already underway, will impact the planet. Though the earth will likely surpass the temperature limit, with some calculations placing it within five years or before 2030, there is still a narrow path that we could avoid the breach.

Impacts of breaching the 1.5°C and growing GHG emissions

The visual below from the WRI shows how climate change impacts worsen with every degree of warming, but overshooting the 1.5°C can result in “severe and irreversible consequences” to the planet.

Reducing climate change impacts

The article highlights the importance of eco-based adaptation to reduce the impacts of climate change, but these need to be scaled up.

Establishing a fund to pay for loss and damages from climate change and extreme natural events, particularly in hard-hit and vulnerable countries, is also one of the solutions that could help them recover and build resilience. Developed countries from the EU and the US have initially pushed back on setting up the Loss and Damage fund in previous COP summits; during the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023, parties have finally agreed to establish the fund, which the World Bank will administer.

Rapid shift from fossil fuel with carbon removal and systemwide transformations

In a world that limits warming to 1.5°C, global use of coal would need to be slashed by 95% by 2050, oil by about 60%, and gas by 45%; estimates assume that carbon and capture storage is applied significantly. Otherwise, the reductions needed will be much steeper, the article says.

The world has an ambitious task to do to keep on track with the 1.5°C warming, and it involves a combination of strategies such as phasing out of fossil fuels, scaling up renewable energy, application of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies, increase use of public transport, and many others.

Read the article to learn more: 10 Big Findings from the 2023 IPCC Report on Climate Change