The current state of our environment

Under the Paris climate agreement in 2015, nations agreed that they would take actions to limit global warming to 2°C while striving for the even tougher target of 1.5°C.

In its latest climate change report in August 2021 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body, the report provided its assessment of the current and foreseeable global climate situation. The world has warmed 1.2°C compared to preindustrial levels And the report predicts that global warming will reach 1.5°C by the early 2030s. The rise in temperature is correlated to the increase of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.

We can expect more extreme weather conditions in the future. Severe heat waves that happened only once every 50 years are now happening roughly once a decade. Tropical cyclones are getting stronger. Most land areas are seeing more rain or snow fall in a year. And fire seasons are getting longer and more intense.

Sea levels are sure to keep rising and has picked up speed recently, as polar ice sheets melt and warming ocean water expands. Even if global warming were halted at 1.5°C, the average sea level would still rise about 2 to 3 meters, and maybe more, inundating coastal cities and islands.

Fig. 2: Atmospheric carbon dioxide and Earth's surface temperature (1880 - 2019)