1. Risk of death, injury, ill health or disrupted livelihhoods in low lying areas along coasts and in island states due to storm surges and rising sea levels.
2. Risk of severe ill health and disrupted livelihoods in large urban areas in some regions due to inland flooding.
3. Extreme weather events leading to the breakdown of critical infrastructure.
4. Risk of food insecurity.
5. Loss of ecosystems and biodiversity and therefore the goods and services that we get from them.
The report also highlights a moral issue when it says "risks are unevenly distributed and are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities at all levels of development". It makes two rather obvious but powerful points as a summary. Firstly, "increasing magnitudes of warming increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts" and secondly, "the overall risks of climate change impacts can be reduced by limiting the rate and magnitude of climate change". This second point serves as a good introduction to the latter of the two reports.
This second (third actually published but the second I am looking at now if you get my drift) covers mitigation: what we could do to slow down the effects we are causing. At its basic level the report describes mitigation as "a human intervention to reduce the sources or enhances the sinks of greenhouse gases" which for an academic report is remarkably concise. It goes on to say that sustainable development is a good basis for mitigation and that issues of "equity, justice and fairness" can arise. Although the report is mainly about mitigation it does have a couple of good stats in it:
- CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes contributed 78% of the total GHG emissions increase from 1970 to 2010 which shows where our attention should be focused.
- about half of the cumulative man made CO2 emissions between 1750 and 2010 have occurred in the last 40 years so it really is our fault.
The academics have looked at about 900 mitigation scenarios in preparing the report. Their basic conclusions are that if we want a better than evens chance of restricting the rise in global temperature to 2 degrees we need to do more, quicker than we are. When they start reaching conclusions on what needs to be done the message is actually fairly clear as promising scenarios "show large scale changes in the energy supply sector" and "energy enhancements and behavioral changes, in order to to reduce energy demand compared to baseline scenarios without compromising development, are a key mitigation strategy".
Looking at electricity supply specifically here is probably the key sentence. "In the majority of low stabilization scenarios, the share of low carbon electricity supply (comprising renewable energy, nuclear and Carbon Capture and Storage) increases from the current share of approximately 30% to more than 80% by 2050". The last few pages of the report (23 to 29) contain a good summary of what the global community needs to considering the areas to electricity, transport, buildings, industry agriculture and land use, and in a final category of human settlements, infrstructure and spatial planning by which they mean smart cities.
In response to the second report the UK's Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Davey, said "I call for international leaders to work together with enforced vigour to reduce carbon emissions and secure an ambitious legally binding global agreement in 2015". I am not sure what 'enforced vigour' is but I do know that it is not only 'world leaders' who have a responsibility to act but the whole of society particularly in pressurising those 'world leaders' to actually achieve something more than good reports and nicely worded press releases.
