The eagerly awaited IPCC report, in the midst of a series of climate disasters

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While the images of floods and fires make headlines around the world, climate experts from the IPCC publish their long-awaited new climate forecasts on Monday, three months before the COP26 climate conference, which is crucial for the future of the world. ‘humanity. The last such report dates from 2014.

After two weeks of closed and virtual meeting, 195 countries approved this first comprehensive assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for seven years and made public Monday, August 9. The “summary for policymakers” was negotiated line by line and word by word.

Amid an avalanche of disasters on the planet, from floods in Germany and China to monster fires in Europe and North America, to frenzied temperatures in Canada, scientists unveil, at 8 a.m. GMT, the news evaluations and forecasts concerning the rise in global temperature, the rise in ocean levels or the intensification of extreme events.

“This will be the sternest warning ever that human behavior is alarmingly accelerating global warming,” COP26 President Alok Sharma said in an interview with The Observer, edition Sunday of the Guardian.

This report “will be a wake-up call for all those who have not yet understood why the next decade must be absolutely decisive in terms of climate action”, added the British minister, noting that “we are getting closer dangerously from the moment “when it will be too late to act.

“Change direction urgently”

The UN climate manager, Patricia Espinosa, also insisted at the opening of the IPCC session at the end of July on the need to act quickly.

“The reality is that we are not on track to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to + 1.5 ° C by the end of the century. In fact, we are on the way. opposite, we are heading towards more than + 3 ° C. We must urgently change direction before it is too late “, she had hammered.

“I say this to decision-makers: science does not allow us to see the world as we would like it to be, it shows the world as it is. This is not politics, it is reality”, she added.

By signing the Paris Agreement in 2015, almost all the countries of the planet have committed to reducing CO2 emissions to limit global warming “well below” by + 2 ° C compared to the pre- industrial, if possible + 1.5 ° C.

While the planet has already warmed by around 1.1 ° C and each fraction of a degree more brings its share of additional extreme events, this threshold of + 1.5 ° C has since become the priority objective. many activists and political leaders.

“The + 1.5 ° C will most likely be reached between 2030 and 2040”

But can we manage not to exceed it? This is one of the central questions that the IPCC report will address, which is based on thousands of the most recent scientific studies.

“If we do not reduce our emissions in the coming decade, we will not succeed. The + 1.5 ° C will most likely be reached between 2030 and 2040, these are the best estimates we have today “, climatologist Robert Vautard, one of the authors of this first part of the IPCC assessment, told AFP before the start of the session in July.

To hope to limit warming to + 1.5 ° C, emissions should be reduced by 7.6% on average each year, between 2020 and 2030, according to the UN. And while 2020 has seen a drop of this magnitude due to the pandemic, a rebound is expected.

Two other parts of the IPCC assessment are due to be published in 2022. The one on the impacts, of which AFP has obtained a preliminary version, shows how life on Earth will inevitably be transformed within thirty years, or even earlier. The third concerns solutions to reduce emissions.

With AFP