New Insights in Climate Science 2021 | FUTURE EARTH

“To put it simply, the state of the planet is broken,” as United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres said in the 2021 State of the Planet address.1 Over the course of this past year and while the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage the world, massive wildfires wreaked havoc in places such as Siberia, western USA and Greece; cyclones devastated parts of South East Asia and the South Pacific; unprecedented and severe winter storms caused an extended power outage in the southern US state of Texas; and many parts of Europe experienced catastrophic flooding.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report should have put to rest any remaining doubts about the sources or impacts of climate change, and the 2018 IPCC Special Report covered how climate change strongly intersects with and amplifies threats to human and ecosystem health. The present study of the past year’s climate change research parses the complexity of earth’s systems in this context by highlighting 10 pertinent aspects, each of which is intrinsically linked to all others.

As this summary report shows, achieving the Paris Agreement target of a maximum of 1.5°C global temperature warming above pre-industrial levels is still possible. However, this will require transformations across all sectors, including deep decarbonization, and drastic coordinated global action to support lower-income countries in making climate-smart transitions as well as holding the highest emitters to account. Targeted measures that are designed and implemented to prioritize equity are needed urgently at all levels: structural, political and individual.

The greatest responsibility falls on wealthy, developed countries to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels and support a global shift to clean energy, transport, industry and housing. This is particularly true after decades of insufficient responses to the climate crisis (as evidenced by the roughly 60% rise in fossil fuel emissions since the first IPCC report in 1990).2