Climate change: World in worse situation because of inaction, says UN climate science panel chief

New Delhi: 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He said the IPCC's target of a 43 per cent emission reduction by 2030 from 2019 levels is now outdated due to inaction, meaning the actual reduction needed is even higher.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.

Asked why governments are not acting with urgency, Skea said scientists have made the urgency of climate action clear, but it is up to policymakers to implement solutions.

"Scientists can sometimes say things in ways that are incomprehensible or difficult to understand. I think our messages have been absolutely clear."

"We have pointed out the available measures, the options (including) renewable energy, changes in land use patterns, all of these things could contribute to constraining the increase in emissions. I think you can even blame scientists for many things, but not for actions not taking place," the IPCC chief said.

The problem, he said, is not scientific messaging but broader social and political factors that influence public and policy decisions.

Asked whether scientists have failed to convince people that climate change is real, Skea said many resist climate policies because they feel imposed on them.

"I don't think we have failed in actually doing the job... Climate action takes place in the context of other social changes, other things that are going on. And one of the messages that we have put across in the reports that probably doesn't get so much attention is that we need to take societies and people with us in climate change action," he asserted.

"Climate change action should not be something that's forced on people from above and some of the reaction we are getting to climate change policies comes because it appears to ordinary people that they are being forced to do things, forced to change," Skea added.

On allegations of bias against the Global South in IPCC reports, he said scientific literature is increasingly shifting towards developing countries.

"(While) we have historically had strong scientific institutions in the North, that picture is changing. Climate-related publications increase by about 10 per cent per year in every IPCC cycle and the amount of literature we assess is roughly doubling. Much of this growth is occurring in developing countries, with Europe and China among the largest sources of new published research on climate change," he said.

Skea added that the United States is declining as a proportion of total publications, even though the absolute number is growing.