Environment

A BBC report described the current climate change situation as follows:

• CO2 levels hit 417 parts per million (ppm), setting record highs despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Humans have put 100ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past 60 years, a rate 100 times faster than previous natural increases

• The decade 2011-2020 was the hottest on record.

• In June 2020, temperatures reached 38C in Siberia, the hottest ever recorded in the Arctic; consequently, the summer of 2020 had some of the lowest sea ice areas on record.

• Increasing Arctic temperatures have also accelerated melting of permafrost, which stores twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, mostly in the form of methane (a greenhouse gas with a global warming impact 84 times higher than CO2).

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In its Sixth Assessment Report, the International Panel on Climate Change observed the following impacts from climate change:

• Widespread, pervasive impacts to ecosystems, people, settlements, and infrastructure have resulted from observed increases in the frequency and intensity of climate and weather extremes, including hot extremes on land and in the ocean, heavy precipitation events, drought, and fire weather.

• Substantial damages, and increasingly irreversible losses, have occurred in terrestrial, freshwater, coastal, and open ocean marine ecosystems.

• Increasing weather and climate extreme events have exposed millions of people to acute food insecurity and reduced water security, with the largest impacts observed in many locations and/or communities in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, Small Islands, and the Arctic.

• Climate change has shown adverse effects to the physical health of people globally and mental health of people in assessed regions.