Browse the new five -year prospects of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and you will not see the United Nations Atmospheric Science Organism using the words “emergency” or “disaster”. And yet, it would be difficult for anyone who is even semi-alphabed in the science of climate change to switch it without a feeling of emergency and alarm.
The report, published earlier this week, notes that global temperatures will continue at record or close levels with a possibility that the temperature height since the industrial revolution approaches 2 ° C by 2030. Already, warming has momentarily violated 1.5 ° C of warming in 2024. It is a big brand: decades, political decision -makers were installed on 2 ° C ideal. Indeed, at a given time between 1.5 ° C and 2 ° C, we could expect to start seeing climatic effects which are both disastrous and, perhaps more important, irreversible. The WMO report reaffirms that the world has entered this area of danger – and the risks posed by global warming are about to grow dramatically.
The increasingly disastrous atmospheric reality, underlined by this new report, could lead to urgent calls for the reduction of their emissions. Indeed, reduction of emissions is the only way to prevent the problem of worsening. But our temperature height trajectory should also push companies to look carefully how prepared they are for changes that will come on the road at 2 ° C – not decades, but in the next five years.
“We are in the event of a climate emergency, and the situation is getting worse every year,” said Sonia I. Seneviratne, professor at the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich, earlier this year. “It is not necessarily to make the titles, because there are also many other crises, but we must not forget it.”
WMO report Describes a number of alarming predictions for the next half-receiver. For the summer season in the northern hemisphere, temperatures should exceed averages during the previous decades “almost everywhere”. In the Arctic during the northern winter season, warming should be particularly extreme, with the temperature anomaly of more than 3.5 times larger than the global anomaly. And sea ice should continue to decline through the Arctic.
Perhaps more important, and left in the end by the report, are the effects of the second order of a warmer planet. Between 1.5 ° C and 2 ° C, heat waves become more frequent and intense, according to the body of science of the UN climate. Crop yields decrease. And coral reefs can be completely destroyed.
This expresses problems for a wide range of companies. Infrastructure is faced with an increase in the risk of flooding and fire. The demand for air conditioning will stretch thin public electrical services. Farmers and agriculture companies are not only confronted with harvest losses, but also the decline in the productivity of workers in heat and other extreme weather conditions. All of this is added to a massive headwind ready to slow economic growth. A 2021 report by the Swiss reinsurance giant found that 2 ° C warming would lead to world GDP which is less than 11% by the middle of the century.
Don’t get me wrong. Sophisticated companies are aware of the challenges of the horizon. Research has shown that an increasing number of companies disclose the risks posed to their business by the physical effects of climate change. Nevertheless, many companies are still at the start of grappling with these challenges. Few are able to quantify the risk in financial terms and most of them lack complete plans to prepare.
And, even for the most outward companies, the problem with this new atmosphere in which we find ourselves is that it is impossible to fully understand what destruction these warmer temperatures will bring – and, therefore, which can be done to prepare. With each fraction of a degree that global temperatures increase, the more we deepen ourselves in an unexplored territory which stretches our scientific analysis.
Climate traders use uncertainty to say that we have to slow down our efforts to reduce emissions: why should we spend billions of dollars to approach something that we do not fully understand? But the truth is that current uncertainty is much more frightening than even potentially hyperbolic messaging on climate change ending the world. The new climate reality means that we can expect a variety of extreme meteorological events, apparently unpredictable. During the next half-reception, we will have a good idea for who has prepared effectively.
To get this story in your reception box, subscribe to the Time CO2 Leadership Report newsletter here.
