New York, 22 September 2019 – The world’s leading climate science organisations have joined forces to produce a landmark new report for the United Nations Climate Action Summit, underlining the glaring – and growing – gap between agreed targets to tackle global warming and the actual reality.
The report, United in Science, includes details on the state of the climate and presents trends in the emissions and atmospheric concentrations of the main greenhouse gases. It highlights the urgency of fundamental socio-economic transformation in key sectors such as land use and energy in order to avert dangerous global temperature increase with potentially irreversible impacts. It also examines tools to support both mitigation and adaptation.
“The Report provides a unified assessment of the state of our Earth system under the increasing influence of anthropogenic climate change, of humanity’s response thus far and of the far-reaching changes that science projects for our global climate in the future. The scientific data and findings presented in the report represent the very latest authoritative information on these topics,” said the Science Advisory Group to the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Action Summit.
The ISC’s CEO, Heide Hackmann sits on the UN advisory group, which was established to raise awareness of key scientific facts with leaders, policy makers and other stakeholders leading up to the Climate Action Summit.
Speaking on behalf of the ISC at the launch event, Daya Reddy, ISC President, said “The scientific findings presented in the synthesis report initiated by the Science Advisory Group convey with clarity and authority the stark reality of an existential crisis; one that is of our own making.
“The evidence of the anthropogenic nature of this crisis is incontrovertible. We are confronted on a daily basis with its immediacy, as experienced by communities around the world, and most severely by those that already grapple with extremes of poverty and inequality”, he said.
Professor Reddy signalled a call to action to the scientific community, seeking the global community to energetically engage in amplifying the impact of international, solutions-oriented climate and sustainability research; building vibrant science advisory ecosystems and new, data-intensive scientific capacities
in all parts of the world, and convening a global forum of funders to accelerate support for this work.
But he also called on the policy-making community to ensure that the political will to enact the necessary changes, and to do so in partnership with science, was put urgently in place.
“I, the ISC and the scientific community are dead serious about transformation, and stand ready to engage with the worlds of policy, business and civil society in actions aimed at tearing down the roadblocks on pathways to global sustainability. Today’s event demonstrates that. With the political will to collaborate, I have hope: for our planet, our science, our future. United in science, building and deploying knowledge together, we can succeed”.
Dr Flavia Schlegel, the ISC’s Special Envoy for Science in Global Policy who also attended the event said, “This landmark multi-partner report says loud and clear that our planet is warming, it’s caused by humans, the science is certain, and while it presents an existential crisis, together we can fix it if we unite behind the science”.
“This report shows that the science is non-negotiable and governments need to act now”, she added.
To join the ISC’s call to action, click here.
To download the full synthesis report, United in Science, commissioned by the Science Advisory Group, which includes a chapter by Future Earth, co-sponsored by the ISC, click here.