By Maria Angella Fortich Fraija
The Government Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ) is the international body in charge of evaluating scientific knowledge related to the current climate crisis and its changes. Every year they hold a conference and communicate the results of the analyzes they did taking into account the fluctuations of the environment based on our environmental behavior.
IPCC Trajectory
In 1988, various scientific organizations began to periodically assess climate change, the future risks of our dealings with nature, its repercussions, and all this taking into account how we can adapt and mitigate the effects of global warming. Theassessments that they elaborated in the past and continue to elaborate in the present are essential for the formulation of climate-related policies and for governments to take action on climate damage in their respective territories.
Being a government agency, its participation is open to all countries that are members of the WMO and the UN ; currently there are 195 countries. The IPCC committee, elected by the governments of the Member States, facilitates the process of orientation to scientific aspects, in the techniques of its work and the management of strategies to improve the current crisis.
The IPCC reports have a long and meticulous process in order to guarantee the best result to the objectives proposed in the conferences between the members. Therefore, they are elaborated in an open and transparent way so that everyone at any time can see how they arrived at the results and the proposed hypotheses from the points of view of the scientific community.
Report 2022
The document that was released on April 4 talks about the climate crisis and the solutions to face it, focusing on the key factors to achieve the goal of maintaining global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2050.
The new report is clear and forceful, if global greenhouse gas emissions do not start to decrease by 2025, it will be very difficult to avoid a climate catastrophe . The lack of decisions and actions by world governments to mitigate it have been almost nil and currently the time we have to stop the crisis is very little. However, the climate plans of different nations estimate to continue increasing throughout the decade.
According to the report, if it is not stopped in time there will be serious consequences, it is estimated that global warming will double what we can face as a civilization, it would be 3.2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century . This will be seen in the devastating consequences such as forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, among other natural catastrophes.
This is the third installment that this control body has made, it is focused on mitigating the problem and on how we can avoid the worsening of this crisis. To get all this information, they relied on more than 18,000 articles and/or scientific publications to analyze the process and the way to achieve the climate objectives.
IPCC Chairman Hoesung Lee says we have the tools and knowledge to limit warming. They estimate that the increase in temperatures will stabilize when emissions reach climate neutrality, which means that we need the sum of the gases that are emitted and those that the planet Earth absorbs to be zero. The 1.5 Celsius figure may seem like something small or easy to achieve, but it does represent a lot of radical changes in the way we consume and use natural resources.
What we must do to stop the crisis
- One of the central messages that came out of the report was the use of fossil fuels . To keep the rate of warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius requires CO₂ emissions to peak in 2025 and reduce by 43% by early 2030.
This change is possible if the change will generate sustainable energy such as wind and solar. The big message they wanted to get across is that the age of fossil fuels has to be ended and it has to be done very quickly before the indicators explode.
- As the climate crisis intensifies, researchers have been forced to reconsider the role of technology in limiting and reducing CO₂ in the atmosphere. The scientists were very clear in the report, “It will not be possible to keep temperatures low without some kind of techniques for removing carbon from the atmosphere, either through trees or by machines that extract CO₂.”
- The demand for energy by citizens in transport, food and housing must be curbed . It is suggested to intervene above all in the food area, including diets based on organic food, reduction in food waste and options that emit less carbon.
The IPCC considers that these changes could provide their services by 40 – 70% improving the well-being of people.
- We must change the mentality that being sustainable or buying sustainable products is more expensive . According to the BBC , the IPCC says too much money continues to flow into fossil fuels and not into clean energy climate solutions.
The IPCC points out that the economic damages from climate change show that the global cost of limiting the increase in temperature to 2 degrees Celsius during these years is less than the global financial benefits of reducing warming.
- According to Professor Patrick Devine-Wright, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, people of high socioeconomic status are some of the biggest contributors to global warming with their mass production and excessive consumption, but they themselves are the ones who they have high potential to reduce emissions while maintaining high levels of assets and a decent life.
In short, if they controlled their consumption and consumed responsibly, they could contribute to the net zero carbon example.
One of the conclusions that we can draw as an environmental community after receiving the analyzes from the IPCC is that we must review our consumption and see how we can reduce our use of carbon as a whole. We live in a digital age, where we can create too many eco-friendly alternatives to help us mitigate global warming.
At the end of the day, the IPCC scientists will be able to give us all the solutions, but it is up to us and our analysis to find or see ways to implement sustainable measures in our lives to leave a better planet Earth for the next generation.