“Even very ambitious mitigation” can’t change the fact that the world has already “locked in” mid-century warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial times, a new report from the World Bank Group finds.
This warming brings increased threats to food and water security and jeopardizes poverty-reduction efforts, the study states.
It “confirms what scientists have been saying—past emissions have set an unavoidable course to warming over the next two decades, which will affect the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people the most,” stated Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank Group.
Titled Turn Down the Heat: Confronting the New Climate Normal (pdf), the report looks at how the regions of Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa will be impacted by more frequent weather extremes including heatwaves and drought. These extremes will be the “new climate normal,” the report states.
It marks the third in a series of reports commissioned by the World Bank Group from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics.
The findings of the new report, the World Bank writes in its foreword, “are alarming.”
With a 2°C rise—which the planet is on track to hit by mid-century—Brazil’s soybean yield could decrease up to 70 percent, while melting glaciers will threaten cities in the region. Melting glaciers threaten Central Asia with torrential flooding as well. Thawing of permafrost in northern Russia threatens to unleash stored methane, contributing to a climate feedback loop. In the Middle East and North Africa, increased overall temperatures and more frequent heatwaves threaten already scarce water resources, a fact that could contribute to further conflict.
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