In the foreword to the report, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: “This year is unprecedented for the people of our planet and for the planet itself. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused disruptions in the lives of people around the world. Meanwhile, the heating of our planet and the climate system’s disturbances continue at a rapid pace.”
Unfortunately, over the past year, public attention has shifted from climate change to the global coronavirus pandemic. This is understandable, because human nature tends to focus, first of all, on momentary problems. The instinct of self-preservation works. However, we must be clear that with the advent of COVID-19 in our lives, climate change has not stopped.
While the public may have the mistaken impression that global isolation has led to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, the reality is much more complicated. Quarantine measures have indeed led to a 17% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 2019. However, this volume of emissions still turned out to be equal to the level of 2016. This observation serves as evidence that the rate of growth in atmospheric emissions over the past few years has reached incredible proportions.
Moreover, our reality has changed significantly. Accordingly, the measures to combat change must be reviewed.
All these issues were actively discussed in a new interdepartmental report of leading scientific organizations - “United in Science 2020” (Unity in science 2020). Notably, this report emphasizes that one of the implications of COVID-19 for combating climate change is the added complexity of tracking changes through the global observing system.
A little about the report itself ...
The Unity in Science Report is the second one in a series of reports produced by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) with contributions from the Global Carbon Project, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, the United Nations Environment Program and the UK Met Office. It brings together the most relevant data related to climate change.
“The concentration of greenhouse gases, which is already at the highest level in the last 3 million years, continues to grow. Meanwhile, over vast Siberia areas in the first half of 2020, a prolonged and extraordinary heatwave was observed, which would have been highly unlikely without anthropogenic climate change. The period from 2016 to 2020 is already approaching to be the warmest five-year period on record. The report shows that even though many aspects of our lives were disrupted in 2020, climate change continued”, - said WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas.
You can read more about the report itself and its main findings here.
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