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Letters | Why we need climate justice: prevention isn’t enough when the poor are already suffering from a warming world
- Readers discuss the urgent need to build resilience among groups experiencing the overlapping effects of environmental change and socioeconomic inequality, and defend the EU’s response to refugees from Ukraine
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Human-induced climate change is causing dangerous disruptions to ecosystems and leaving billions around the world highly vulnerable to the consequences, according to the latest report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The report, “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability”, is a strong wake-up call to what will happen if we don’t act swiftly and now. The report illustrates how socioeconomic and natural systems are profoundly vulnerable and describes the widespread loss and damage caused by human-induced climate change.
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Impacts are especially potent because they can happen in multiple layers, leading to compounding risks that cascade across regions. For instance, simultaneously occurring heat and drought events can compromise food production and labour productivity, which in turn can increase food prices and lead to risk of malnutrition.
Adverse effects can further spread across national boundaries through supply chains and natural resource flows. These impacts are not happening in a far-off future; billions of people are already experiencing them today.
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While the Paris Agreement brought the idea of climate mitigation into the global spotlight, the IPCC reminds us that no matter the emissions scenario, many climate risks are already becoming unavoidable. Governments must therefore expend more effort on adapting to the effects of climate change. However, most climate-related funding is allocated to mitigation while progress on adaptation is highly uneven.
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