IPCC to table today report on mitigation of climate change

The UN’s inter-governmental panel on climate change (IPCC) will on Monday come out with a report explaining how to tackle climate change through mitigation at a time when there does not appear to be adequate efforts on the ground globally to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

The report — Mitigation of Climate Change — will elaborate on various scientific tools of mitigation, keeping in view meeting the Paris Agreement goal of making efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial (1850-1900) level. The global average temperature has, so far, already increased to 1.1°C from that level.

The report is currently going through an approval process at the 56th session of the IPCC — the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. Though it was scheduled to be finalised on April 1, the process got delayed by two days due to an elaborate consultation mechanism to arrive at a summary for policymakers — a key document which guides governments across the globe on the policy actions which they might take for reaching the common goal.

The upcoming report that took into account detailed methodologies for “estimating emissions and removals of greenhouse gases” will be the third in the series of the IPCC’s findings during its current assessment cycle. The first one, released on August 9 last year, was on the ‘physical science basis of climate change’ that scientifically explained how the global average temperature is likely to rise 1.5°C in the next 20 years and how it may lead to extreme weather events across the globe.

Its second report, released on February 28, dealt with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, showing how human-induced climate change is causing dangerous disruption and how it was of utmost necessity to go for adaptation at all levels to minimise the impact of global warming.