World Underestimates Climate Breakdown Risks: Guterres

The world is still underestimating the risk of catastrophic climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has warned in an interview he gave to The Guardian.

Guterres said humanity is approaching potentially irreversible tipping points such as the collapse of the Amazon rainforest and the Greenland ice sheet, because governments were not making the deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions needed to limit global warming at safe levels.

Speaking in the run-up to the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, he said a second US departure from the Paris climate agreement under a new Donald Trump presidency could cripple the process, but he believed the accord would survive.

“The risk of these tipping points accelerating climate change is something that must be taken very seriously. Just to give two examples, some people say that we might come to a situation where the Amazon forest will become a savanna irreversibly, or that the Greenland [ice sheet] and west Antarctica will melt.

“Even if it happens over a huge period, it will melt irreversibly. So we are coming close to dramatic game-changers in relation to the impacts of climate change in the life of the planet,” Guterres said the sidelines of the biodiversity Cop16 event in Cali, Colombia.

Read the full report: The Guardian.