UN Report: Climate Change Already Decimating Life, Worst to Come

“Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” was the message of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in a voluminous new report published Monday.

The statement was made by Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, speaking at a press conference in Yokohama, Japan on the release of Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability by Working Group II of the IPCC.

The objective of the report, the second in a series of three, is to “consider the vulnerability and exposure of human and natural systems, the observed impacts and future risks of climate change, and the potential for and limits to adaptation,” according to report authors.

The effects of climate change are already among us from melting sea ice to droughts and severe storms. However, the authors note, with imminent threat to global food stocks and human security, the worst is yet to come.

“The findings make an increasingly detailed picture of how climate change – in tandem with existing fault lines such as poverty and inequality – poses a much more direct threat to life and livelihood,” according to the Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg, writing about the report. The report highlights how already visible impacts of climate change—such as killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in Australia, and deadly floods in Pakistan—will lead increasingly to humanitarian crises around the world.

Further, Goldenberg reports, the report “struck out on relatively new ground by drawing a clear line connecting climate change to food scarcity, and conflict.”