News Desk
ISLAMABAD/PARIS: Climate change warnings are increasingly becoming reality as catastrophic floods, record heatwaves and crop-wilting droughts in successive years have lent credence to the harsh reality that this could be the beginning as half-heartedly international efforts to curb emissions founder.
Impact of climate change
The outgoing year saw some important progress with new legislation in the US and Europe and a climate deal under the UN in Egypt to help vulnerable countries deal with the increasing assault of excruciating climate impacts, according to AFP.
However, the goal to keep warming within a safer limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius since the pre-industrial era appears to be in peril, with carbon dioxide emissions mainly from fossil fuels, the main driver of global heating, on track to reach an all-time high at 2022.
Earlier, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned global leaders at a climate summit in Egypt in November that humanity faced a stark choice between working together to fight global warming or committing a “collective suicide”.
Observers, however, say global leaders opted to put off the most important decisions for yet another year.
This year, UN climate experts issued their strongest warning of the dangers facing humanity and the planet, with a report on climate change in February dubbed an “atlas of human suffering”.
Since then, a series of extreme events have illustrated the accelerating dangers of climate change, at barely 1.2C of warming.
Record heatwaves had damaged crops from China to Europe and record droughts have brought millions to the point of starvation in the Horn of Africa.
Climate change-induced floods engulfed Pakistan, affecting 33 million people and causing over $30 billion in damage and economic losses to the country.
Head of France’s Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute and climate scientist Robert Vautard said that the year 2022 was one of the hottest years in history with all the phenomena that go with higher temperatures. He said that unfortunately, that was just the beginning.”
He said that when this phenomenon reverses, potentially within months, the world would likely climb to a “new level” in warming.
Still polluting
Economy-battering climate extremes that amplified the energy price surge for many countries as a result of Russia’s conflict with Ukraine provided the backdrop to the last month’s UN climate talks in Egypt.
The negotiations did make history, with wealthy polluters agreeing to a fund to pay for climate damage increasingly unleashed on poorer countries.
Pakistan Climate Minister Sherry Rehman called the move a “down payment on the longer investment in our joint futures”.
But vulnerable nations and campaigners said the climate conference failed to deliver on the emissions reductions needed to curb climate losses and damages in the future.
Harjeet Singh of Climate Action Network said that COP27 tackled the consequences of climate change, but not the cause, fossil fuels.
