The Earth's temperature is rising at a pace not seen for over 400,000 years. It threatens fresh water availability, could cause food shortages to millions of people around the world and put hundreds of thousands of plants and animals under threat of extinction.
The pressure is on to stop emissions of greenhouse gases whilst getting resilience into our natural ecosystems so they can adapt to the climate chaos taking place.Already glaciers and ice shelves are rapidly melting in Antarctica, the Arctic and the Himalayas. Billions of tonnes of methane could be unleashed from melting Siberian permafrost the size of France and Germany combined (methane is over 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2). Forest fires have raged across Europe releasing stored CO2 into the atmosphere. And extreme storms have lashed the Americas.
Already our global average temperature is 0.6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times and if we don’t reverse our increasing greenhouse gas emissions, we will have to live with an average global temperature rise of between 1.4–5.8 degrees Celsius over the next century.
