Global warming impacts 'severe, widespread, and irreversible', UN warns

Urgent action needed to tackle man-made climate change, leaked report warns

“Without additional mitigation, and even with adaptation, warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally,” the leaked draft report said. Credit: Photo: PA

The world faces "severe, widespread and irreversible" effects of climate change unless it takes urgent action to limit global warming by cutting back on burning fossil fuels, the United Nations has warned in a leaked draft report.

Man-made global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions is already here and its effects "might already be considered dangerous", according to the draft of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

Extreme weather such as floods, heat waves and droughts are expected to become more common while climate change may even worsen the risk of violent conflicts, the report warns.

“Without additional mitigation, and even with adaptation, warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally,” the report said, according to Bloomberg.

The leaked document is the draft of a "synthesis" report bringing together the findings of three previous IPCC reports into the science, impacts and ways of tackling climate change.

While its contents are expected to broadly reflect the previous reports, attention will be focused on the strength of political rhetoric, ahead of a crucial talks in Paris in 2015 on agreeing international action to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The final report is due to be released at the start of November following a conference in Copenhagen where governments must agree its wording line-by-line.

The IPCC report acknowledges potentially "substantial" risks associated with taking costly action to tackle climate change. But it suggests these risks are less severe than those that would be faced if climate change continues unabated and says the longer the world delays action, the more costly it will become.

The UN has previously set a target of limiting global warming to 2C (3.6F) above pre-industrial levels. But the report says it appears increasingly likely that target will be missed, leading to more severe impacts.

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science, said: “The report must convey very clearly the scale of the risks that the world will face from global warming of more than 2C, which would create a prehistoric climate not seen on Earth for about 3 million years.

"It must correct the false impression created by the earlier IPCC report which suggested that the economic costs of further global warming of about 2C would be relatively small, but ignored most of the major impacts, such as a rise in sea level of several metres due to the destabilisation of the ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica.

"It should be a key aim of the synthesis report, when the final version is eventually published on 2 November, to make all governments aware of the scale of the risks and focus minds on the need to reach a strong international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the United nations climate summit in Paris in December 2015.”