UN spokesperson, Mr Stephane Dujarric, told journalists at UN headquarters in New York that Guterres said that while speaking on the latest data by the World Meteorological Organisation, WMO, and the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

The data confirms July is set out to be the hottest month ever recorded in human history.

Guterres said that short of a mini-Ice Age in coming days, July 2023 would likely “shatter records across the board”.

“Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning,” said the UN chief, warning that the consequences were as clear as they were tragic: “children swept away by monsoon rains, families running from the flames (and) workers collapsing in scorching heat.”

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In Geneva, WMO and the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Change Service described conditions this month as “rather remarkable and unprecedented”.

They said that new data showed that so far, July had seen the hottest three-week period ever recorded and the three hottest days on record.

“We can say that the first three weeks of July have been the warmest three weeks periods ever observed in our record,” Carlo Buentempo, Director of Copernicus Climate Change Service, said via Zoom.

“This anomaly is so large with respect to other record-breaking months in our record that we are virtually certain that the month, the month as a whole will become the warmest July on record, the warmest month on record, in all likelihood.”

Just as worrying was the fact that ocean temperatures are at their highest-ever recorded levels for this time of year.

This trend has been apparent since the end of April.

Citing “a clear and dramatic warming decade on decade” since the 1970s, WMO’s Director of Climate Services Chris Hewitt noted that 2015 to 2022 saw the eight warmest years on record, based on a 173-year dataset.

This was in spite of the fact that the La Niña sea-cooling phenomenon prevailed towards the end of that period in the Pacific region, which reined in global average temperatures slightly, Hewitt explained.

“But now the La Niña has ended” – to be replaced by the sea-warming El Niño effect – waters have begun to heat up in the tropical Pacific, bringing the “almost certain likelihood that one of the next five years will be the warmest on record.”

It is also “more likely than not” that global average temperatures will temporarily exceed the 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial levels “for at least one of the five years,” the WMO scientist continued.

Source: NAN

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The Executive Action Plan for the Early Warnings for All initiative, calls for initial new targeted investments of 3.1 billion dollars between 2023 and 2027, equivalent to a cost of just 50 cents per person per year.

Guterres announced the plan at the ongoing COP27 climate change conference at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, during a meeting of government and UN leaders, financing agencies, ‘Big Tech’ companies and the private sector.

He told them that people who had barely even contributed to the climate crisis were the most at risk and the least protected.

“Vulnerable communities in climate hotspots are being blindsided by cascading climate disasters without any means of prior alert,” he said.

“People in Africa, South Asia, South and Central America, and the inhabitants of small island states are 15 times more likely to die from climate disasters.

“These disasters displace three times more people than war. And the situation is getting worse,” he said in a statement.

According to him, even though early warning systems save lives, vulnerable communities have no way of knowing that hazardous weather is on its way.

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“Countries with limited early warning coverage have disaster mortality eight times higher than countries with high coverage.

“The Action Plan launched today sets out the way forward to right this wrong, and protect lives and livelihoods,” said Guterres.

The UN chief had first announced the early warnings target back in March.

The plan will address key gaps in understanding disaster risk, monitoring and forecasting, rapid communication, and preparedness and response.

The 3.1 billion dollars represents a small fraction – roughly six per cent – of the requested 50 billion dollars in adaptation financing, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

The UN agency and partners drew up the plan, which was supported by a joint statement signed by 50 countries.

WMO said the need for early warning systems was urgent as the number of recorded disasters had increased five-fold, driven in part by human-induced climate change and more extreme weather.

Even though this trend is expected to continue, half of all countries do not have early warning systems in place, and even fewer have regulatory frameworks to link early warnings to emergency plans.

Coverage is worst for developing countries on the front lines of climate change, namely the world’s Least Developed Countries, LDCs, and Small Island Developing States, SIDS.

According to WMO, when it comes to climate change adaptation, early warning systems are widely regarded as the “low-hanging fruit” because they are a relatively cheap and effective way of protecting people and assets.

Furthermore, the Global Commission on Adaptation found that spending just 800 million dollars on these systems in developing countries would avoid losses of 3 billion dollars to 16 billion dollars per year.

“Such progress is only possible with modern science, sustained systematic observing networks, daily international exchange of quality data, access to high-quality early warning products, the translation of forecasts into impacts, plus advances in telecommunications.

“The UN, governments and partners will work together to achieve the early warning goal within the next five years,” Petteri Taalas, the WMO Secretary-General, said.

He added that the plan summarised the necessary initial actions and set out the pathway to implementation.

To ensure effective implementation, he said the UN Secretary-General was establishing an Advisory Board which would be co-chaired by the heads of WMO and the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, UNDRR.

Its members, he said would include many of the key partners who helped shape the plan to date, and the Secretary-General would receive progress reports in advance of future annual COP meetings.

Source: NAN

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The WMO, in its latest provisional 2022 State of the Global Climate in 2022, released on Sunday, stated that extreme heat waves, drought and devastating flooding had also affected millions and cost billions in this year.

The UN has said that the last eight years have been the warmest on record, fuelled by ever-rising greenhouse gas concentrations and accumulated heat.

Faced with the inevitability of continued climate shocks and extreme weather across the world, Guterres is to launch an action plan at COP27 to achieve Early Warnings for All in the next five years.

The UN chief explained that early warning systems are necessary, to protect people and communities everywhere.

“We must answer the planet’s distress signal with action, ambitious, credible climate action,” he argued.

“COP27 must be the place – and now must be the time,” he said in a statement.

The report outlines the increasingly dramatic signs of the climate emergency, which include a doubling of the rate of sea level rise since 1993, to a new record high this year; and indications of unprecedented glacier melting on the European Alps.

The full 2022 report is due to be released in the Spring of 2023, but the provisional study was brought out ahead of COP27, the UN climate conference, raising awareness of the huge scale of the problems that world leaders must tackle, if they are to have any hope of getting the climate crisis under control.

“The greater the warming, the worse the impacts,” WMO chief, Petter Taalas, said at the launch of the report at an event held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

“We have such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now that the lower 1.5 degree of the Paris Agreement is barely within reach.

READ ALSO: 37m children displaced globally in 2021 -UNICEF  

“It’s already too late for many glaciers and the melting will continue for hundreds if not thousands of years, with major implications for water security”.

The study details the effects of both droughts and excessive rains.

Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia are facing crop failure and food insecurity, because of another season of below-average rains, whilst more than a third of Pakistan was flooded in July and August, as a result of record-breaking rain, displacing almost eight million people.

The southern Africa region was battered by a series of cyclones over two months at the start of the year, hitting Madagascar hardest with torrential rain and devastating floods, and in September, Hurricane Ian caused extensive damage and loss of life in Cuba and southwest Florida.

Also, the World Health Organisation, WHO, issued a reminder that the climate crisis continued to make people sick, and called for health to be at the core of the COP27 climate negotiations.

The UN health agency announced a programme of high-level events, scheduled throughout the conference, focusing on the health threat posed by the crisis, and the huge health gains that would come from stronger climate action at the centre of discussions.

The WHO warned that, between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea, and heat stress; the direct costs to health are estimated to rise by as much as $4 billion dollars per year by the end of this decade.

However, the agency points out that investment in clean energy will yield health gains that repay those investments twice over: applying higher standards for vehicle emissions, for example, has been calculated to save approximately 2.4 million lives per year.

Source: NAN

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