On Sunday, June 6, on the occasion of World Environment Day, President Dr Irfaan Ali – while highlighting the dangers of climate change and the risk to the natural environment – again urged the developed world to honour their promises on environmental preservation. As he noted, the issue of climate change, mitigation and adaptation affects the entire world. This is a fundamental truth that there is no escaping – we live on a single planet and there is no emergency parachute or second home in the stars.
From the unprecedented increase in the scope and persistence of flooding in our homeland to lakes becoming deserts in other countries to unprecedented forest fires, loss of polar ice, storms, and disappearance of whole islands, the effects of climate change are devastating a planet already beset by multiple crises.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2022 report, “Human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events, has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people, beyond natural climate variability. Some development and adaptation efforts have reduced vulnerability. Across sectors and regions, the most vulnerable people and systems are observed to be disproportionately affected. The rise in weather and climate extremes has led to some irreversible impacts as natural and human systems are pushed beyond their ability to adapt.
“Widespread, pervasive impacts to ecosystems, people, settlements, and infrastructure have resulted from observed increases in the frequency and intensity of climate and weather extremes, including hot extremes on land and in the ocean, heavy precipitation events, drought and fire weather. Increasingly, these observed impacts have been attributed to human-induced climate change, particularly through increased frequency and severity of extreme events. These include increased heat-related human mortality, warm-water coral bleaching and mortality, and increased drought-related tree mortality. Observed increases in areas burned by wildfires have been attributed to human-induced climate change in some regions. Adverse impacts from tropical cyclones, with related losses and damages, have increased due to sea level rise and the increase in heavy precipitation. Impacts in natural and human systems from slow-onset processes such as ocean acidification, sea-level rise or regional decreases in precipitation have also been attributed to human-induced climate change.
“Climate change has caused substantial damages, and increasingly irreversible losses, in terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and open ocean marine ecosystems. The extent and magnitude of climate change impacts are larger than estimated in previous assessments. Widespread deterioration of ecosystem structure and function, resilience and natural adaptive capacity, as well as shifts in seasonal timing, have occurred, with adverse socioeconomic consequences. Approximately half of the species assessed globally have shifted polewards or, on land, also to higher elevations. Hundreds of local losses of species have been driven by increases in the magnitude of heat extremes, as well as mass mortality events on land and in the ocean and loss of kelp forests.
“Some losses are already irreversible, such as the first species extinctions driven by climate change. Other impacts are approaching irreversibilities such as the impacts of hydrological changes resulting from the retreat of glaciers, or the changes in some mountain and Arctic ecosystems driven by permafrost thaw.
“Climate change including increases in frequency and intensity of extremes have reduced food and water security, hindering efforts to meet Sustainable Development Goals. Although overall agricultural productivity has increased, climate change has slowed this growth over the past 50 years globally… Ocean warming and ocean acidification have adversely affected food production from shellfish aquaculture and fisheries in some oceanic regions. Increasing weather and climate extreme events have exposed millions of people to acute food insecurity and reduced water security, with the largest impacts observed in many locations and/or communities in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, Small Islands and the Arctic.
Jointly, sudden losses of food production and access to food compounded by decreased diet diversity have increased malnutrition in many communities, especially for Indigenous Peoples, small-scale food producers and low-income households, with children, elderly people and pregnant women particularly impacted.”
Will the signatories to the 2015 Paris Agreement keep their pledges? Will our actions match our rhetoric?
