Forty per cent of humanity “highly vulnerable” to climate impacts . . .
The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released earlier this week, paints a grim and sobering picture of the negative impacts of human-induced climate change. The report focuses in large part on how climate change is affecting human societies and our potential to adapt to those changes. The authors agree that “the rise in weather and climate extremes has led to some irreversible impacts as natural and human systems are pushed beyond their ability to adapt” and that “approximately 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change.” While such vulnerability differs substantially by region, the report notes Asia is experiencing increased coastal flooding, infrastructure damage, and economic disruptions because of climate change, and that South Asia is a “global hotspot of high human vulnerability”.
China’s alarming energy and coal consumption growth . . .
At the COP26 Summit, held last November in Scotland, the world’s leading economies and carbon emitters pledged to reduce their carbon emissions in the following decades. The U.S., Canada, and much of Europe pledged carbon neutrality by 2050, and China and India pledged to become carbon neutral by 2060 and 2070, respectively. Yet China, by far the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitter, reported that its year-on-year increase in total energy consumption (5.2%) and total coal use (4.6%) for 2021 both ranked as the country’s largest annual increases in a decade. Even though benchmarked against pandemic-induced decreased energy consumption in 2020, many analysts fear China’s 2021 energy consumption increases indicate emissions moving in the wrong direction as collective vulnerability to climate change worsens.
Australia’s climate precipice, but hope for renewables . . .
The effect of climate change in Australia is in many ways a microcosm of the world’s climate vulnerability. Rising temperatures are increasing the destructive capacity of annual bushfires, and some areas are experiencing more frequent and severe inundations, such as the current deadly flooding along the country’s east coast. The IPCC report suggests that 2.0 degrees of warming could cost Australia over C$325 billion over the next 20 years. The world has currently warmed by 1.1 degrees over pre-industrial levels. Yet, in a country in which about 80 per cent of electricity is generated using coal, renewable electricity generation is offering some hope for lowering carbon emissions. The state of South Australia sourced 100 per cent of its electricity needs from renewables for one week late last year, an achievement many analysts think could be a record for comparable advanced electricity grids.