What the shock UN climate report means for Southern Africa
The report has blown earlier assumptions out of the water, and calls for immediate and unprecedented action to avert disaster
We have been warned: there are now only 12 years left for us to stop global warming in its tracks. And if we aren’t able to keep the warming to a maximum of 1.5ºC since pre-industrial times — we have already hit 1º — we could expect a horror show of extreme heat‚ more disastrous events like floods and droughts‚ and an ecology so out of sorts that daily life could become unbearable. While an extra 0.5ºC over that limit of 1.5ºC might seem insignificant‚ a shocking report just released by the United Nations shows how hitting a 2ºC rise would spell doom.
At the Paris Agreement in 2015‚ 2ºC was set as the ceiling we should aim to stay under‚ but that has now been changed to 1.5ºC. The consequences of hitting a 2ºC rise include: • Days of extreme heat and heat-related deaths would become much more common. • Hundreds of millions more people would become food insecure. • Fifty percent more people across the world would be water-stressed. • Plants and insects are twice as likely to lo...
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