Aerial view of buildings submerged in floodwaters after heavy rains hit towns in Hunan provice, China. (Photo: REUTERS)
Press Trust of India New Delhi, UPDATED: Mar 11, 2025 15:05 IST
Climate impacts are unfolding faster than expected and scientists have been surprised by the speed of temperature rise, the chief of the United Nations' climate science panel has said.
In an interview with PTI on the sidelines of TERI's World Sustainable Development Summit, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Chair Jim Skea said the world is in a worse situation than three years ago due to inaction on climate change.
"If you look back over the last, say, five years or so, I think scientists have been surprised by the speed at which temperatures have risen globally and by the very obvious nature of climate impacts we have already seen... wildfires in some parts of the world, floods and more extreme events.
"So things do appear to be happening, perhaps more quickly than people expected," he told PTI.
The year 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first with a global average temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. According to the World Meteorological Organisation, the past decade (2015-2024) was the 10 warmest years on record.
Skea said scientists are now focusing on attribution science to determine how much human activity has influenced specific climate events, with growing evidence that many would not have occurred without greenhouse gas emissions.
He said the IPCC's target of a 43 per cent emission reduction by 2030 from 2019 levels is now outdated due to inaction, meaning the actual reduction needed is even higher.
"The 43 per cent figure is now about three years old and because we have not acted in the interim, it may have changed. If you were to recalculate it using new information but the same methods, the number would likely be different. So, we really are in a worse situation than we were three years ago when that number was produced," Skea said.
The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group III, published in 2022, said global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 43 per cent by 2030 (compared to 2019 levels) to limit the average global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution.