CLIMATE CRITICAL IN 2023

While climate change impacts intensified in 2023, the richest countries responded with a shrug

- Bibek Bhattacharya

Permacrisis', was voted the word of the year for 2022. It seemed about right, given the fact that people around the world were stumbling from one crisis to another, be it war, disease, climate impacts or economic devastation. Earlier this year, a variation of this word became popular: polycrisis.

Polycrisis' has been around for three or so decades, but to many, it seemed like the perfect encapsulation of 2023: a year when all the crises of the world were impossibly tangled, where it was difficult to make out where one crisis ended and another began.

But hasn't the world always been in one crisis or another? Why was it such a big deal in 2023? Key to underpinning this new popularity of the term was certainly the newness of all the awful things happening around the world. It was as if the received wisdom of the post-Cold War consensus of more growth, more capitalism, more of business-as-usual was suddenly not the panacea, but the problem.

And nowhere was this more keenly felt than in two very related subjects: climate change and the collapse of multilateralism.

THE HEAT IS ON

We have been getting here slowly but surely since 2019, with nearly each year hotter than the one before, but in 2023, several worrying-and that's putting it mildly-climate milestones were passed. For starters, it is the hottest year ever recorded, beating the record previously set in 2016. A mix of rising greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration in the atmosphere and the El Niño climate pattern has meant that six months of the year-from June to November-have been the hottest ever recorded.

Releasing these findings in early December, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) stated that since their data record began in 1940, no other year, including 2016, has been hotter.