Climate Justice, Now

IPCC's latest climate report provides evidence that climate-justice needs to be at the centre of global policymaking

-  Snigdha Das

THE WORLD'S top authority on climate science has finally started to acknowledge and provide evidence for what everyone knew all along. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has so far published two instalments of its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). While the first report, The Physical Science Basis released in September 2021, unequivocally attributed extreme weather events to climate change, the latest, released on February 28 this year, lays bare that inequality makes certain communities and countries more vulnerable to climate change impacts. In this report, IPCC for the first time authoritatively states that climate justice now needs to be at the centre of global policy-making.

The report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, compiled by 270 authors from 67 countries, incorporating research from over 34,000 scientific papers, identifies 127 risks to natural and human systems and notes that nearly half the global population now lives in settings that are “highly vulnerable to climate change.

However, climate change disproportionately affects marginalised groups, amplifying inequalities and undermining sustainable development across all regions, it states with high confidence. The poor typically have low carbon footprints but are disproportionately affected by adverse consequences of climate change, it states, adding that they lack access to adaptation options.

The report identifies that the most vulnerable regions are located in Global South-East, Central and West Africa, South Asia, Micronesia and in Central America. These regions already reel from the compound challenges of high levels of poverty, inadequate access to basic services like water and sanitation, gender inequalities and poor governance.