A higher global temperature will bring about more frequent and more intense weather extremes in many regions of the world, including the Philippines, Filipino scientists, and co-authors of the latest climate report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warned on Friday, Aug. 20.
Manila Observatory scientists Faye Cruz and Laurice Jamero highlighted the IPCC 6th Assessment Report's (AR6) findings that global temperature rise will cross 1.5℃ within the next 20 years--earlier than what has been assessed--and that human activity will be the main cause of climate change.
Cruz and Jamero, together with the late Dr. Gemma Narisma, are co-authors of the new IPCC report.
"Climate change will make extreme climate events, including heatwaves, heavy rainfall, and drought, more frequent and severe," Cruz said.
"Human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2,000 years," she added.
Citing the AR6, National Panel of Technical Experts of the Climate Change Commission member Dr. Rosa Perez said that if the larger estimate of global warming to date and the assessed climate response to all considered scenarios were combined, the central estimate of crossing 1.5℃ of global warming for a 20-year period occurs in the early 2030s--10 years earlier than the midpoint of the likely range assessed in the IPCC special report--assuming that there is no major volcanic eruption.
The Filipino experts pointed out that the increase in global temperature will badly hit the Philippines, which is the fourth most at-risk country based on the Global Climate Risk Index 2000-2019.
"Climate change is already affecting every inhabited region across the globe with human influence contributing to many observed changes in weather and climate extremes," Cruz said.
In the Philippines and the rest of Southeast Asia, mean air temperatures, extreme heat, heavy precipitation, floods, and sea levels are projected to increase with further global warming, Cruz and Jamero said.
In particular, most of the Philippines is projected to experience a drier climate but in some areas more extreme rainfall events are expected to occur, they added.
"The report emphasizes that limiting warming requires reductions in greenhouse gas emissions as early as now, but these efforts need to be sustained over decades," Cruz said.
"For me the most important part of AR6, it will finally have a deadline. AR 1, 2, 3, and 4 did not give us a deadline. I understand it because scientists have to follow the data. But here the scientists have given us a deadline. You have to fix this by 2030, which means you have to have everything in place with five years a stretch goal. But it should actually be now or in the next couple of years as well," said Dean Antonio La Viña, Manila Observatory's director for Energy Collaboratory.
"That means really tough decisions. No more coal-fired power plants which the Philippines has already made for future ones. But we actually need to extend that decision to ones that are being built and extend that decision actually to existing coal power plants in the right way," he added.
La Viña also recommended to the Philippine government the updating of the 2010 emissions inventory.
For his part, Manila Observatory director and climate scientist Fr. Jose Ramon Villarin emphasized the need to have more than one agency to handle the problem.
"We really need to be collegial and we need to work together. It also helps to have several sets of eyes looking at this issue. We hope to work more closely ," Villarin said.
The 195-member IPCC is a United Nations body that provides governments with scientific information to help them formulate climate policies.