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World Underestimates Climate Breakdown Risks: Guterres – G’dian

Humanity is close to irreversible tipping points, as governments have not made deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, Guterres said


UN chief Antonio Guterres says the world is close to tipping points that could spur irreversible climate changes (Reuters file photo from 2021).

 

The world is still underestimating the risk of catastrophic climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has warned in an interview he gave to The Guardian.

Guterres said humanity is approaching potentially irreversible tipping points such as the collapse of the Amazon rainforest and the Greenland ice sheet, because governments were not making the deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions needed to limit global warming at safe levels.

Speaking in the run-up to the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, he said a second US departure from the Paris climate agreement under a new Donald Trump presidency could cripple the process, but he believed the accord would survive.

“The risk of these tipping points accelerating climate change is something that must be taken very seriously. Just to give two examples, some people say that we might come to a situation where the Amazon forest will become a savanna irreversibly, or that the Greenland [ice sheet] and west Antarctica will melt.

“Even if it happens over a huge period, it will melt irreversibly. So we are coming close to dramatic game-changers in relation to the impacts of climate change in the life of the planet,” Guterres said the sidelines of the biodiversity Cop16 event in Cali, Colombia.

Read the full report: The Guardian.

 

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Jim Pollard

Jim Pollard is an Australian journalist based in Thailand since 1999. He worked for News Ltd papers in Sydney, Perth, London and Melbourne before travelling through SE Asia in the late 90s. He was a senior editor at The Nation for 17+ years.