Each periodic assessment report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) brings a flurry of stark warnings and unsavoury outlooks and this time it was no different.

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment on impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptations, released at the start of March, triggered the latest unequivocal warning from UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez. He accused policymakers of “sleep-walking over climate emergencies”, having made a similar warning last year that the world had reached ‘Code Red’ in terms of climate change scenarios.

The latest IPCC report has, in fact, reinforced the conclusions of previous assessments.

First, our small window of opportunity to limit the average rise in global temperature to a manageable 1.5°C, although still available, is closing on us, ramping up the risks to human survival. Secondly, the strident calls about ‘loss and damage’ made by developing countries, including the 58 SIDS (Small Islands Developing States), have found scientific backing within the latest report. SIDS bear a disproportionate part of the brunt of climate change, despite historically being the least to contribute in terms of greenhouse emissions.

With this ‘loss and damage’ rationale, developing countries are advocating the setting up of a financial compensation fund by richer countries to mitigate the impacts that climate changes will inevitably bring upon their poorly-adapted societies.

The G20 are responsible for 80 per cent of all global greenhouse emissions but, while committing to green technologies at home, they still pursue the financing of large-scale coal-fired projects abroad. The US and the EU have stymied developing-country calls out of fear of prolonged legal wrangling, although the same calls are expected to re-emerge with renewed vigour at the next international climate change meeting (COP 27) scheduled to be held along the Egyptian Red Sea coast (Sharm el-Sheikh) in November. Without a just energy-transition system in place, the “finger-pointing while the planet burns” malaise, cited recently by the UN secretary-general, will prevail.

A major unsavoury conclusion of the IPCC report is that technology, on its own, is no silver bullet. For instance, technology, which purportedly soaks up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, has been touted in recent years as the solution to the whole climate change debacle. But its downsides demonstrate that pinning our hopes simply on technological fixes is a blinkered approach.

Probably, the worst tidings to emerge from the latest assessment is the likely impact that climate change will have on global food production as a result of shifting precipitation, air temperature and desertification patterns. This would further compound the global migration phenomenon, with climate refugee numbers set to surge. Maize and bean production in Africa, for example, is predicted to decline by 30 per cent and 50 per cent respectively.

Europe and, in particular, the Mediterranean are not immune to these predicted impacts. The Mediterranean is expected to witness negative impacts on most of its terrestrial and marine and freshwater ecosystems, increasing water scarcity and making heatwaves more frequent. This would, in turn, hit human health and damage key economic sectors, notably tourism.

“The cauldron of challenges”, a term recently coined by Gutierrez, featuring an uneven COVID-19 recovery, record inflation and the fallout from the Russia-Ukraine war, is derailing the global concerted effort to address climate change. The need for climate action could not be more dire and the proverbial spokes in the wheels to such action could not be more formidable.