The Earth's rapidly warming climate will cause inevitable human suffering and the threat of species extinction if action isn't taken, warns a UN scientific panel's report.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Saturday in Valencia, Spain that climate change puts "the most precious treasures of our planet" at risk.
The risks are so great "that only urgent, global action will do," he said upon release of the last in a series of reports by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"What's new is the clarity of the signal, how clear the scientific message is," said Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate change official. "The politicians have no excuse not to act."
Scientists and bureaucrats have been meeting in Valencia to hammer out a final "synthesis" of the panel's previous three reports on the planet's changing climate.
The report declares that the world's climate systems have already begun to change and that human activity is the driving factor.
Greenhouse gas emissions, which primarily come from burning fossil fuels, must stabilize by 2015 and decline after that.
IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said the consequences of not doing so could be "disastrous."
In a best-case scenario, temperatures will continue to rise because of the carbon already in the atmosphere, the report said.
"We have already committed the world to sea level rise," said Pachauri, with the report saying the average will be 1.4 metres higher than pre-industrial levels even if factories were shut down and cars taken off the roads.
If the Greenland ice sheet melts, scientists say they can't even predict the sea level rise, other than to say coastal cities would be drowned.
In terms of effects:
- The poor and the elderly will suffer most from climate change;
- Hunger and disease will be more common;
- By as early as 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages;
- Asia's megacities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding;
- More animal and plant species will vanish, particular in Europe; and
- North America will see longer and hotter heat waves and more competition for water
Advocacy groups have praised the report. "It's great to have a nice, concise report of 20 pages that's accessible to everyone to read so that we can all understand that we have a crisis, and that (this) crisis needs immediate action," John Bennett of ClimateForChange.ca told Â鶹´«Ã½net.
Delegates to the UN-sponsored meeting next month in Bali, Indonesia to negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol will use it as their main guide.
"We expect to see their personal copies of the Synthesis Report return from Bali, battered and worn from frequent use, with paragraphs underlined and notes in the margin," said Stephanie Tunmore of Greenpeace.
The landmark Kyoto treaty requires 36 of the most industrialized countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by an average of five per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. The UN hopes to have a follow-up treaty in place by 2009.
A major issue to be hammered out is who will shoulder the burden of cutting emissions.
In 2001, U.S. President George Bush rejected Kyoto because developing countries like India and China weren't required to cut emissions.
Those two nations are expected to shoulder some of the reduction burden in a post-Kyoto treaty. China is expected to pass the U.S. as the world's biggest total emitter this year, although Americans still produce far more carbon emissions on a per capita basis than an average resident of China or India.
Australia -- which is one of the world's top per capita emitters, along with the U.S. and Canada -- also refused to ratify Kyoto.
Canada's Conservative government has said it will not meet its Kyoto target of a six per cent cut below 1990 levels by 2012. The plan proposed in the spring for regulating industrial emitters would see the Kyoto goal reached in 2020.
Environmentalists call Ottawa's response to the climate change crisis shameful.
"We could meet our Kyoto targets if the federal government was willing to invest the five billion dollars it just cut from the GST," said Bennett.
Ban said that there are real and affordable options for countries willing to tackle the problem.
The Bali talks should set the agenda and a timetable for a post-2012 plan, he said.
The treaty must include financial help so poor countries can adopt clean energy and adapt to changing climates, he said.
With files from The Associated Press
