The timing of COP 26 coincided with the findings of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
IPCC Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis (AR6), provides the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, based on the latest advances in climate science according to Professor Gisele M Arruda of the University of Aberdeen's Business School - Circumpolar Studies.
AR6 notes that ‘each of the last four decades has been successively warmer than any decade that preceded it’ and estimates that the period between 2011 and 2020 was 1.09o C warmer than 1850-1900, in comparison with last report’s estimate of a 0.78o C increase from the same period to 2003-2012.
The contribution of countries to climate change, and their capacity to prevent and cope with its consequences, varies enormously.
The report finds that, taken together, the available Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of all Parties to the Paris Agreement actually imply an increase of about 16 per cent in global emissions in 2030 compared to 2010, which would correspond to a temperature rise of about 2.7o C by the end of the century.
It is fundamental to engage stakeholders in order to accelerate sectoral systems transformation through climate re-aligned industries and breakthrough technology from the Arctic clusters of innovation (Arruda and Jóhannsdóttir, 2022).