FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: STATEMENT ON THE LATEST IPCC REPORT
OTTAWA, ON, August 9th, 2021 – Today’s release of the first of three instalments of the Sixth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is another wake-up call that the federal government needs to do away with its business-as-usual approach to addressing the worsening climate crisis and launch a social and economic mobilization to do their part to avoid locking in an uninhabitable planet.
A major finding from this latest IPCC report is that we have already overheated the planet and that nowhere on Earth is untouched. The report also shows that the world runs the risk of breaching climate tipping points that could potentially lock in runaway global heating.
According to Chapter 5 (p.95) of the report, there is a very real possibility that the maximum amount of CO2 that can be emitted to stabilise warming to 1.5°C, the aspirational goal of the Paris agreement, is now zero. (See note on carbon budgets below). This level of warming would bring about far worse climate devastation and extreme weather than is currently being experienced, but far less than under a 2°C rise. According to the United Nations, current country pledges to limit climate pollution would raise the global mean temperature by over 3°C this century.
António Guterres, the UN secretary general said in response to the report: “This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet. If we combine forces now, we can avert climate catastrophe. But, as the report makes clear, there is no time for delay and no room for excuses.”
Seth Klein, director of strategy with the Climate Emergency Unit and author of A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, said:
“The world’s top climate scientists are again sounding an alarm, telling all of us and our governments that we are in peril if we don’t start treating the climate crisis as the emergency that it is. This has been a summer of reckoning – the June heat dome killed 569 people in BC, wildfires across the country are inflicting massive destruction – driving home that events are unfolding at a quickening pace. But our governments – federal and provincial – are failing to rally us to the task at hand.”
Avoiding Tipping Points at All Cost
Anthony Garoufalis-Auger, Quebec organizer with the Climate Emergency Unit said:
“This report confirms that the business-as-usual approach proposed by our governments so far to eliminate planet-heating pollution is putting us all at risk of breaching climate tipping points that could make large parts of this planet uninhabitable. We need an emergency societal mobilization akin to our homefront response during WW2 to rapidly restructure our economy and eliminate every human-source of planet-heating pollution. This needs to be reflected in all federal election platforms. We must not waste time debating incremental measures when this report makes clear that to save ourselves we need monumental change at emergency speed.”
International Equity
Anjali Appadurai, sectoral organizer and climate justice campaigner with the Climate Emergency Unit said:
“The report makes clear that heating is happening faster than previously estimated. There has been a clear warning from developing nations, especially small island states and least developed countries, that this would have deadly and devastating consequences. This is now happening. Climate inaction is already destroying lives, livelihoods, and local economies especially in desert and coastal areas while exacerbating pre-existing inequalities.”
“The report highlights the grave injustice that the countries and populations that are the least responsible for heating the planet are those that are and will continue to be impacted the hardest. Wealthy countries like Canada have an obligation to provide new and additional no-strings-attached grant-based funding well and above the 100 billion US dollars per year already promised and to waiver certain intellectual property rights to ensure every country can properly address the climate emergency.”
Federal Government Must Inform the Whole Public
Anthony Garoufalis-Auger, Quebec organizer with the Climate Emergency Unit said:
“The federal government needs to ensure each individual in Canada is completely aware of the significance of the emergency outlined in this report and what we need to do as a society to avoid the deadliest scenarios and prepare for what is already locked in. We need a well resourced federal agency to coordinate intensive and sustained programs of education and information designed to secure the support of every Canadian in the rapid restructuring of our economy that the science demands.”
Crop Failures and Food Insecurity at Home
Anthony Garoufalis-Auger, Quebec organizer with the Climate Emergency Unit said:
“The IPCC makes clear that without rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes across all sectors of society, agricultural collapse and mass starvation are very real possibilities in a not so distant future. While the COVID pandemic has been hard and disruptive, it never completely disrupted our food and water systems. The climate crisis, if we continue on this path, certainly will. We need to ensure our agriculture and food sector is put to the service of ensuring a sufficient and affordable supply of non-polluting and healthy foods for everyone, even under the catastrophic climate conditions outlined in this report. Already this season, many of our agricultural producers are being brought to the brink in large part due to record-breaking heat waves and droughts that are only going to increase in frequency and intensity. People in Canada are already being negatively impacted by food price hikes caused in part by global heating, and this is particularly being felt by Indigenous and racialized communities. A wholesale transformation of our food system at emergency speed needs to be a top national priority. ”
Additional Information on Carbon Budgets
The IPCC report puts this remaining carbon budget (the maximum amount of CO2 that may be released to keep warming at a particular level) to have a 66% of limiting warming to 1.5°C at 400 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions (GtCO2) as of 2020 with an uncertainty range of plus or minus 220 GtCO2. This would leave a carbon budget of 361 GtCO2 as of January 2021 since the world emitted an estimated 39GtCO2 in 2020. At the current rate of emissions, this carbon budget will be depleted in about 9 years. To have a 66% chance of remaining within the budget would require CO2 emission cuts of about 10% per year globally with other greenhouse gases like methane following a similar pathway.
However, according to Chapter 5 (p.5-95) to the report: “there is a small probability that the remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5°C since the 1850–1900 period is effectively zero.”
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Notes:
An outline of the emergency framework put forward by the Climate Emergency Unit can be found here or in video form here.
Contact:
For media interviews, contact:
Anthony Garoufalis-Auger
anthony@rapiddecarbonizationgroup.org
438-877-9007
About the Climate Emergency Unit:
The Climate Emergency Unit is an initiative of the David Suzuki Institute. The overarching goal of the Unit is to press for the implementation of wartime-scale policies in Canada to confront the climate crisis. It is headed by Seth Klein and operates in multiple provinces.
About Seth Klein:
Seth Klein is the Team Lead and Director of Strategy of the Climate Emergency Unit. Prior to that, he served for 22 years (1996-2018) as the founding British Columbia Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a public policy research institute. He is the author of A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency (published in 2020) and writes a regular column for the National Observer.
About Anthony Garoufalis-Auger:
Anthony Garoufalis-Auger is a human rights advocate and the Quebec organizer for the Climate Emergency Unit. He was the founder of Divest Concordia, the first campaign to successfully get an anglophone university to commit to divesting their funds from fossil fuels. He was co-founder and spokesperson of Extinction Rebellion Quebec, and a board member of Rapid Decarbonization Group. In 2019 he initiated a cross Canadian coalition to tackle aviation pollution through a frequent flyer levy. He is on the coordinating committee of the Front commun pour la transition energetique. He has been featured in many media outlets including CBC Radio, CTV News, City News, and Postmedia.
