Not too late to tackle climate change, but almost

Every six years the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reviews the global scientific evidence on climate change. These reports aim to mobilise the international climate policy agenda, and have been crucial for the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. FOL has been involved in the last assessment cycle, that has just concluded with the release of the Synthesis Report.

The Synthesis Report condenses the current knowledge of climate change, its impacts and risks, as well as climate mitigation and adaptation gathering the main findings of the Sixth Assessment Report based on contributions from the three Working Groups. Based on this science, the delegates of governments need to agree on the final text in an intense workshop that took over several days along last march.  For the first time, the human dimensions of climate change have been a crucial part of the assessment, recognising structural inequalities that lead to social vulnerability, and highlighting the justice aspects of adaptation and resilient development pathways.

The Synthesis Report brings an important message to the policy community. Climate change is here, the effects are already being suffered, most often by the most vulnerable communities, but the solutions are there, adaptation and mitigation options that require some sort of transformative change in the way we tackle our relationship to nature. These involve nature-based solutions and societal transformational change towards resilient development pathways.

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