IPCC synthesis report

Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Synthesis Report for the Sixth Assessment Cycle.

✅The report emphasised the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to human-caused climate change through “mainstream effective and equitable action” for a “liveable sustainable future for all”.

● The Three working Groups:

✅The Synthesis Report is a compilation of the main findings of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, based on results from three Working Groups (WGs).

✅WG I: Evaluated the physical science basis of climate change.

✅WG II: Evaluated the impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability.

✅WG III: Evaluated the mitigation.

● What does the report say?

✅It Highlights the urgency of reducing the GHGs emission and thereby limit rising global temperatures by 1.5°C from pre-industrial levels, set by the Paris Agreement.

✅Despite the IPCC’s warnings in 2018, the increase in greenhouse gas emissions continued.

✅Now the global surface temperature has already warmed by 1.1°C over pre-industrial levels, leading to extreme and/or unpredictable weather events that risk human health, fortunes, and ecosystems.

✅The report highlighted the economic loss and damages incurred due to climate change and stressed on the need for financial resolution for a more equitable world.

● What is the way ahead?

✅The climate resilient development will not only mitigate the effects of climate change but also provide wider benefits.

✅Access to clean energy, improving air quality, increasing employment opportunities, boosting healthcare through technology, and delivering equity are recommended goals to help adapt to climate change.

✅The report also foregrounded the role of financial investments to achieve climate goals and encouraged public funding through banks, government and financial regulators to reduce emissions, scale up climate resilience and protect marginalised communities.

● What are the implications for India?

✅India’s priority should be to minimise loss and damage in terms of lives, livelihood and biodiversity, and accelerate equitable action and adaptation.

✅Message on impacts: Warming has already reached 1.1°C, this is unequivocally due to climate change and the impacts are likely to be greater at a particular temperature than earlier thought.

✅Messages that are salient for India: It proposes an approach emphasising ‘climate resilient development’.

✅This recognises that development is important, but the quality of that development, whether it locks us into low or high carbon choices or resilient development is important.

✅As a developing country, India can lower its per-capita emissions through energy efficiency policies already being implemented in almost every sector.

✅India can also decarbonise the energy sector by using cleaner options like solar and renewable energy.