“ The report provides our best estimates, for instance for the climate response, it also provides a complete description including, what is extremely important for risk management, the events that have a small chance of occurring but could lead to very large scale impacts, and therefore the report also provides information on climate extreme events, or multiple events occurring at the same time.”
Valérie Masson-Delmotte
Co-Chair, Working Group I
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
Anthesis acknowledges the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Sixth Assessment Report Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.
The report confirms human influence has warmed the climate at an unprecedented rate, with every inhabited region on Earth experiencing the effects of climate change to some degree. Human-induced climate change is the main driver of the more frequent and intense heat extremes and heavy precipitation events since the 1950s.
Providing meaningful data to inform decision-making, a third of the report is dedicated to region-specific information and an interactive atlas helps better communicate the anticipated climate response under five possible scenarios: very low, low, intermediate, high, very high CO2 emissions.
As well as presenting the working group’s best estimates for how the climate will respond to increasing GHG emissions, the authors highlight the increasing frequency of low likelihood but high impact events, which we agree are extremely important when responding to climate-related risks.
Critically, it demonstrates that every tonne of carbon counts, and only with immediate, rapid and large scale reductions in GHG emissions, will we be able to limit warming to 1.5°C by 2100.
In 2022, the IPCC will release two more assessment reports. Working Group II is working on society and nature’s past and future vulnerabilities to climate change and options for adaptation. Working Group III focuses on the range of mitigation options and solution pathways.
Read the IPCC’s latest report here
Find out more about climate risk