Earth’s latest climate crisis report card is in, and the prognosis doesn’t look good. Monday, 270 scientists from over 67 countries discussed the environmental challenges the planet is facing now and can expect to face in the future. Some of the 127 key risks identified in the 3,500-page report aren’t exactly shocking—including rising sea levels, sweltering temperatures and increasingly frequent natural disasters.
One in three people are already exposed to heat stress . This is expected to get much worse as global temperatures continue to creep up as high as 2 degrees Celsius from present-day averages, the IPCC authors wrote. Mounting temperatures also mean the near equivalent rise of climate-related food-borne and water-borne diseases. Climate change will also have wide-ranging mental health impacts, like for those displaced by extreme weather events such as wildfires or are threatened by food scarcity driven by environmental factors.Human health is not the only precious commodity at stake.
For example, countering rising sea levels and flooding using hard coastal defenses like sea walls, as many oceanfront communities currently do, can harm coastal ecosystems by reducing fish diversity and degrade coastal and offshore ecosystems. The sense of safety gained by installing sea walls also encourages people to settle in those areas, exposing more people to extreme floods if and when those sea walls fail.