The 2023 update from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that the world is likely to miss its most ambitious climate target - limiting warming to +1.5 degrees C

The IPCC has issued its five year update on climate change with some stark warnings - again - saying humanity has reached a “critical moment in history”.

They say the world has all the knowledge, tools and financial resources needed to achieve its climate goals, but after decades of disregarding scientific warnings and delaying climate efforts, the window for action is rapidly closing.

They warned that the world’s plans to combat these changes are inadequate and that more aggressive actions must be taken to avert catastrophic warming.

The 2018 plan to limit warming to 1.5^oC  above preindustrial temperatures within a decade just won't be achieved. They fear that beyond that threshold climate stresses will become increasingly unmanageable that people will not be able to adapt. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally altered. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end, they say.

Calling the report a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb,” UN boss Guterres announced an “acceleration agenda” that would speed up global actions on climate.

Emerging economies including China and India, which currently don't plan to reach net zero until 2060 and 2070, respectively must drastically speed up their emissions-cutting efforts alongside developed nations, Guterres said.

Both the UN chief and the IPCC also called for the world to phase out coal, oil and gas, which are responsible for more than three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2018, the IPCC found that a 1.5^oC world is overwhelmingly safer than one that is 2^oC warmer than the preindustrial era. At the time, scientists said humanity would have to zero out carbon emissions by 2050 to meet the 1.5-degree target and by 2070 to avoid warming beyond 2 degrees.

Five years later, humanity isn’t anywhere close to reaching either goal.

Despite its stark language and dire warnings, the IPCC report sends a message of possibility, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and a member of the core writing team for the report.

“It’s not that we are depending on something that still needs to be invented,” she said. “We actually have all the knowledge we need. All the tools we need. We just need to implement it.”

In many regions, the report says, electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind is now cheaper than power from fossil fuels. Several countries have significantly reduced their emissions in the past decade, even as their economies grew. But they are all only developed European countries which import food (and did their climate-damaging efforts decades earlier) - except the one non-EU country in this group, the US. New analyses show how efforts to fight climate change can benefit society in countless other ways, from improving air quality to enhancing ecosystems to boosting public health. These “co-benefits” well outweigh the costs of near-term emissions reductions, even without accounting for the long-term advantages of avoiding dangerous warming.

This latest update focuses less on agriculture, more on coal and oil, perhaps in a shift that recognises the food security issues involved.

Today's released Synthesis Report is based on the content of the three Working Groups Assessment Reports: WGI – The Physical Science Basis, WGII – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, WGIII – Mitigation of Climate Change, and the three Special Reports: Global Warming of 1.5°C, Climate Change and Land, The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate.

The AR6 report has contributions from three New Zealanders; Bronwyn Hayward in the core writing team, Jared Lewis as a contributing author, and Andy Reisinger on the scientific steering committee. They are the only local voices out of 126 overall contributors, weighted towards those in or from Europe.