UNEP Frontiers 2016 Report - Chapter 4

Anthropogenic climate change is underway and will continue for the foreseeable future. It is manifesting more rapidly and more intensely than many had expected. The most recent global assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates that the world has become 0.85°C warmer than it was in the late nineteenth century and that extreme weather events are likely to become more frequent. An increase in the frequency, intensity, and/or amount of heavy precipitation is expected; droughts are projected to become more intense and prolonged in many regions; and the incidence and/or magnitude of extreme high sea levels is likely to increase. These climatic changes and extreme events pose an unprecedented threat to people, ecosystems, assets, and economies. Mitigation and adaptation—described as avoiding the unmanageable and managing the unavoidable, respectively—remain the most important approaches for reducing the adverse effects of a changing climate. However, given the delays over the last 25 years in implementing mitigation measures and the late start in addressing adaptation, scientific evidence indicates that the limits of adaptation are clear and that losses and damages resulting from climate change in both human and natural systems are inevitable. Although there is no universally agreed-upon definition to date, the term loss and damage may be used to describe the adverse effects of climate change that cannot be avoided through mitigation measures or managed through adaptation efforts. Loss and damage become evident when adaptation measures are unsuccessful, insufficient, not implemented, or impossible to implement, or when adaptation measures incur unrecoverable costs or increase vulnerabilities, resulting in maladaptation. Full report is available at: https://wedocs.unep.org/handle/20.500.11822/7664