More details revealing the contents of UN climate change report confirm the dire—and expensive—consequences of an increasingly warming world.
According to reporting by Japanese media on Friday, a draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that a 2.5 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures will cost $1.45 trillion of economic damage by the end of the century due to a reduction in gross domestic production.
The draft report also states that increased drought will reduce crop production, and hundreds of millions of people will be climate refugees as a result of rising sea levels, according to Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun.
The report also calls for measures to manage the risks, like increased flooding, set to come.
Chris Field, professor in the Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University and co-chair of the working group preparing the report, spoke to reporters on Monday, as Kate Sheppard reported in the Huffington Post.
"I think if you look around the world at the damages that have been sustained in a wide range of climate related events, it's very clear we're not prepared for the kinds of event we're already seeing," Field warned.
The report, "Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability," is the second part of the Fifth Assessment Report from the IPCC, which is set to meet and approve the draft next month in Yokohama, Japan.
A leaked draft of this second installment already revealed how human and natural systems would suffer devastating consequences as a result of climate change.
The first installment of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, which was released in September, concluded that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal."
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