Some of the planet's most important ecosystems are being pushed towards tipping points as fossil-fuel emissions speed up global warming, the climate scientist Johan Rockström, director of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told the Sustainability Europe conference on Tuesday.
The damage to coral reefs worldwide and to the Amazon rainforest is very close to becoming uncontrollable and irreversible, he said. Key parts of the Atlantic Ocean's circulation, especially the current that carries warm water from the Caribbean and keeps western Europe's climate mild, are also at risk of collapse.
He gave the warning ahead of the UN COP31 climate summit, which opens on 9 November. The latest science, he said, shows the world's average surface temperature will pass 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels within the next few years, and extreme natural disasters are growing in scale and intensity as a result.
His advice to companies is to treat climate change and nature protection as one agenda rather than two, to put cutting carbon emissions first, and to invest heavily in nature, particularly biodiversity and the restoration of freshwater sources.
He also criticised continued subsidies for petrol and diesel, which he said were badly hurting the market for electric vehicles, and called corporate lobbying to relax rules phasing out combustion-engine cars deeply worrying.
The report is by Ekattor TV's environment desk.
Photo: Frankie Fouganthin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Ekattor TV
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