The United Nations World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) issued yet another grim report about the state of our planet. Four of the seven major climate indicators, which are a set of parameters that hold key information about climate change, set “alarming” new records last year.
The indicators are greenhouse gas concentrations, sea-level rise, ocean heat and ocean acidification. The WMO said that these indicators portray a clear sign that human actions are causing catastrophic planetary changes on land and in the ocean. This will have harmful and long-lasting ramifications for sustainable development, biodiversity, and ecosystems.
The 2021 WMO State of the Global Climate report confirmed that the last seven years have been the warmest in recorded history with the average global temperature in 2021 about 1.11°C above the pre-industrial levels.
Criticising “the dismal litany of humanity’s failure to tackle climate disruption”, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres used the publication of the WMO flagship report to call for urgent action to grab the “low-hanging fruit” of transforming energy systems away from the “dead-end” of fossil fuels to renewable energy.
In a video message, Guterres proposed five critical actions to jump-start the renewable energy transition. They include greater access to renewable energy technology and supplies, a tripling of private and public investments in renewables and an end to subsidies on fossil fuels which amount to an estimated $11 million (R170 million) per minute.
“Renewables are the only path to real energy security, stable power prices and sustainable employment opportunities. If we act together, the renewable energy transformation can be the peace project of the 21st century,” said Guterres.
The world must act in this decade to prevent ever-worsening climate impacts and to keep the temperature increase to below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, he said.
“It is just a matter of time before we see another warmest year on record,” said WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas. “Our climate is changing before our eyes. The heat trapped by human-induced greenhouse gases will warm the planet for many generations to come.
“Sea level rise, ocean heat and acidification will continue for hundreds of years unless means to remove carbon from the atmosphere are invented. Some glaciers have reached the point of no return, and this will have long-term repercussions in a world in which more than 2 billion people already experience water stress.”
“Extreme weather has the most immediate impact on our daily lives. Years of investment in disaster preparedness means that we are better at saving lives, though economic losses are soaring. But much more needs to be done, as we are seeing with the drought emergency unfolding in the Horn of Africa, the recent deadly flooding in South Africa and the extreme heat in India and Pakistan.”
“Early warning systems are critically required for climate adaptation, and yet these are only available in less than half of WMO’s Members. We are committed to making early warnings reach everyone in the next five years, as requested by the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres,” said Professor Taalas.
The WMO State of the Global Climate report, which will be used as an official document for the UN Climate Change negotiations are known as COP27 set to take place in Egypt later this year.
The report said that greenhouse gas concentrations reached a new global high in 2020 with data from specific locations indicating that they continued to increase in 2021 and early 2022.
The ocean also heated to new highs with the upper 2000m continuing to warm in 2021 and it is expected that it will continue to warm in the future, a change which is irreversible on centennial to millennial time scales. All data sets agree that ocean warming rates show a particularly strong increase in the past two decades.
Ocean acidification rose to levels never before seen. The ocean absorbs around 23% of the annual emissions of anthropogenic CO2 into the atmosphere. This reacts with seawater and leads to ocean acidification, which threatens organisms and ecosystem services, and hence food security, tourism, and coastal protection. As the pH of the ocean decreases, its capacity to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere also declines.
Global average sea levels reached a new record high in 2021, after increasing at an average of 4.5mm per year over the period 2013 -2021. This is more than double the rate between 1993 and 2002 and is due to the accelerated loss of ice mass from the ice sheets. This has major implications for hundreds of millions of coastal dwellers and increases vulnerability to tropical cyclones.
Although the world’s glaciers saw less melting than in recent years, there is a clear trend towards an acceleration of mass loss on multi-decadal timescales.
The study found that on average, the world’s reference glaciers have thinned by 33.5 metres since 1950, with 76% of this thinning since 1980. 2021 was a particularly punishing year for glaciers in Canada and the US north-west with record ice mass loss because of heatwaves and fires in June and July.
Exceptional heatwaves broke records across western North America and the Mediterranean.
Death Valley, California reached 54.4°C on 9 July, equalling a similar 2020 value as the highest recorded in the world since at least the 1930s, and Syracuse in Sicily reached 48.8 °C.
Drought affected many parts of the world, including the Horn of Africa, Canada, the western United States, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkey. In sub-tropical South America, drought caused big agricultural losses and disrupted energy production and river transport. The drought in the Horn of Africa has intensified so far in 2022.
Eastern Africa is facing the very real prospect that the rains will fail for a fourth consecutive season, placing Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalis into a drought of a length not experienced in the last 40 years. Humanitarian agencies are warning of devastating impacts on people and livelihoods in the region.
The ozone hole over the Antarctic was unusually large and deep, reaching its maximum area of 24.8 million km² (the size of Africa) because of a strong and stable polar vortex and colder than average conditions in the lower stratosphere.
The compounded effects of conflict, extreme weather events and economic shocks, further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, undermined decades of progress toward improving food security globally.
Worsening humanitarian crises in 2021 have also led to a growing number of countries at risk of famine. Of the total number of undernourished people in 2020, more than half live in Asia (418 million) and a third in Africa (282 million).
Hydrometeorological hazards continued to contribute to internal displacement. The countries with the highest numbers of displacements recorded as of October 2021 were China (more than 1.4 million), the Philippines (more than 386 000) and Vietnam (more than 664 000).
Finally, global ecosystems, including terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems, and the services they provide, are affected by the changing climate and some are more vulnerable than others.
The report warned that some ecosystems are degrading at an unprecedented rate. For example, mountain ecosystems, from which we derive most of our water, are profoundly affected. Rising temperatures heighten the risk of irreversible loss of marine and coastal ecosystems, including seagrass meadows and kelp forests. Coral reefs are especially vulnerable to climate change.
They are projected to lose between 70 and 90% of their former coverage area at 1.5°C of warming and over 99% at 2°C. Between 20 and 90% of current coastal wetlands are at risk of being lost by the end of this century, depending on how fast sea levels rise.
This will further compromise food provision, tourism, and coastal protection, among other ecosystem services.