The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has started a virtual meeting (14 – 25 February 2022) to consider a landmark report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

The report, the second instalment of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, integrates natural, social and economic sciences, highlighting the role of social justice and diverse forms of knowledge such as indigenous and local knowledge. It also reflects the increasing importance of urgent and immediate action to address climate risks. The report brings more knowledge at local and regional levels and linkages between biodiversity and climate change.

The report prepared by IPCC’s Working Group II will build on the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report released in August 2021 that showed that climate change is widespread, rapid and intensifying.

“From these previous reports, the message from the physics community is very clear. What we have seen happening so far and what is expected to happen during the coming decades and centuries, especially when it comes to melting of glaciers and sea level rise which is unfortunately going to last much longer than earlier estimated,” WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas told the opening session.

”The impacts of climate change are already very visible. We have seen them happening worldwide,” said Prof. Taalas. Especially vulnerable areas of the world include Africa, Southern Asia and the Pacific islands.

Prof. Taalas used the analogy of sports.

“At the moment we have the Winter Olympic Games in China where we have high performing athletes. If you give them doping substances, then they perform even more effectively. That is what we have done to the atmosphere. We have been doping the atmosphere. Our doping has been the use of fossil fuels and that has already led to an increase in disasters and their human and economic impact and biospheric impact,” he said.

“WMO published last year a report on disaster statistics for the past 50 years and we demonstrated that 4.5 billion inhabitants of this planet have experienced a major weather-related disaster during the past 20 years. There has been a drop in casualties thanks to improved early warning services but we have seen dramatic increases in economic losses,” said Prof. Taalas.