The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was a “huge alarm for the globe,” according to a group of 39 coastal and low-lying states, who urged more powerful countries to do all possible to limit global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius; to “save lives and livelihoods.”
“We have to turn this around,” Diann Black-Layne, the Alliance of Small Island States’ chief negotiator, said in a statement published after the IPCC report was released on Monday.
“The IPCC verifies what tiny island governments have observed: cyclones are becoming more powerful, and sea levels are increasing, but it also shows that we may still mitigate the worst effects.”
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She claims that limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) rather than the 2 degrees Celsius set by the Paris climate agreement in 2015 would prevent a long-term rise of three meters (9.6 feet).
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“Right there,” she continued, “that is our very future.”
While warming might be halted by reducing carbon emissions, the IPCC study cautioned that sea levels will continue to rise even in the best-case scenario, placing coastal towns in danger of floods and disasters.
Singapore, Seychelles, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Bahamas, and Belize are represented by the Alliance of Small Island States.
Kiribati, a Pacific island country made up of three low-lying archipelagos that rise little more than 6 feet above sea level at their highest point, is so anxious that it has partnered with China to physically lift its islands above the water.
According to the IPCC, a rise of merely 3 feet may drown as much as two-thirds of Kiribati by the end of the century.
Source: Nature World News
