UN Report Highlights Impacts of Climate Change

Future perturbations could include even more drastic reductions in food production—half of the thousands of studies drawn upon to compile the report a 10 percent or more drop in crop yields by the end of this century—more extreme weather events, ocean acidification, economic losses, and humanitarian crises resulting from wars and mass migrations, the IPCC group said.

The word “risk” appears in the technical summary of the 2,600-page report more than 230 times.

Impoverished communities—subsisting on foods gathered or fished from the wild and on crops grown using conventional farming methods—are and will be hardest hit by climate change, with greater warming meaning more severe impacts, the report said. “In a world where a billion people are already going hungry, this makes it harder for more people to feed their families,” Tim Gore of Oxfam International told The Washington Post.

But the report also mentioned opportunities for human communities to adapt to some of the challenges being presented as the climate changes. Beyond limiting the warming by reducing greenhouse gasses, initiating public health measures and making water supplies more flexible are a couple of the ways that humans can lessen the impacts of climate change, according to the report. “Thirty years ago, the previous generation maybe was damaging our atmosphere, [and] the Earth, out of ignorance. Now, ignorance is no longer a good excuse,” said Michel Jarraud, the head of the World Meteorological Organization, at a press conference announcing the release of the report. “We know—therefore, we have the information to make decisions and to act upon this information.”