Lack of progress to combat climate change hampers fight against poverty, hunger

Lack of progress to combat climate change hampers fight against poverty, hunger

The world is far from meeting its climate goals, seriously undermining efforts to tackle hunger, poverty and ill-health, the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Thursday.

Launching a new multi-agency report coordinated by the WMO, the UN agency also warned that insufficient progress towards climate goals is preventing better access to clean water and energy, and many other aspects of sustainable development.

“We are not going to meet climate targets and we are not going to meet the Sustainable Development Goal targets either at the current pace of action”, said Professor Petteri Taalas, WMO’s Secretary-General, at the UN in Geneva. “This was a demonstration of what has happened to the emissions in various parts of the world a year ago and from 2022 to 2023.”

The report, entitled “United in Science 2023” combines input and expertise from 18 UN organizations. It notes that at the midway point of the SDG 2030 Agenda, only 15 per cent of the goals have been achieved. When the SDG Agenda was launched in 2015 in New York, the aim was “a world of universal respect for human rights and human dignity, the rule of law, justice, equality and non-discrimination”.

According to Professor Taalas between 1970 and 2021, “we have seen 12,000 disasters related to weather and there have been two million people who have been killed in those disasters, mostly in less developed countries, 90 per cent in less developed countries. And there has been $4.3 trillion losses and 60 per cent of those have been taking place in less developed countries.”

The report underlines that science is central to find solutions to many of the current challenges the world faces.

“In the report we are demonstrating that with science and services, we can mitigate these negative impacts of climate change”, said the WMO chief. “At the moment, we have a major program called ‘Early Warning Services for All’. So what we aim is that in five years we would have 100 per cent coverage of proper early warning services, also in less developed countries in Africa and island states.”

The report shows how weather forecasting helps to boost food production and efforts to end hunger. Early warning-systems help to reduce poverty by giving people the change to prepare and limit the impact.

The need for science and solutions is more urgent than ever; 2023 has shown that climate change is here with record temperatures and extreme weather causing havoc around the globe.

“We have this record ocean heat this year, which is having impacts on ecosystems and fisheries, and it's also boosted by the acidification of the seawater since oceans serve as a sink of carbon dioxide,” said Professor Taalas.

Some future changes in climate are unavoidable, and potentially irreversible, but every fraction of a degree and every ton of CO2 matters if global warming is to be slowed and the SDGs achieved, says the report.

“The negative trend in weather patterns will anyhow continue until 2060,” said Professor Taalas. “There is no return back to last century's climate anymore and this glacier melting and sea level rise game we have already lost”. He added that “may be a problem for the coming thousands of years because of the very high concentration of carbon dioxide. So this is a growing issue we have just seen the first impacts, but these negative impacts are gradually growing until 2060.”

There is now a 98 per cent chance that one of the next five years will be the warmest on record, according to the WMO, and it quotes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projection that long-term warming may reach the Paris level of 1.5C “in the early 2030s”.

However, WMO chief stressed that humankind is “not heading towards the end of the world. We are not heading towards the end of mankind, no biosphere, but we are talking about different scales of gray for the future. If we are able to reach the Paris limits of 1.5 to 2 degrees, then we could say that we will have a light gray future”.

The United in Science report was issued ahead of the SDG Summit and the Climate Action Summit which takes place at the UN General Assembly next week.

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Lack of progress to combat climate change hampers fight against poverty, hunger

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