COP 29: IFRC to world leaders – please hit the ground running
By the Climate Centre
On the eve of this year’s UN climate talks in Baku, the IFRC renewed its call for “local action on a global scale” to address the humanitarian impacts of the climate crisis.
Calling for an approach spanning health, investment and timeliness, or HIT, Secretary General Jagan Chapagain – who is in the Azerbaijani capital – reaffirmed that climate is a strategic priority for the IFRC and called on world leaders to “hit the ground running” at COP 29.
Last month’s 34th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent included a resolution on climate that frames a greater level of collaboration between states and the Movement to expand anticipatory action, ensuring better disaster preparation and humanitarian response.
Earlier this year, the IFRC and the Climate Centre detailed a seven-stage climate action journey that was trialled by the National Societies of Malawi, Nigeria and Pakistan and includes the central concepts of climate-smart operations and locally led adaptation.
‘The sheer pace of climate change
in a single generation…’
The year 2024 is on track globally to be the warmest on record, meanwhile, after a run of exceptionally high monthly temperatures, the World Meteorological Organization said today in a report issued to coincide with the start of COP 29.
The WMO State of the Global Climate 2024 again warns of “the sheer pace of climate change in a single generation, turbo-charged by ever-increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere”.
Six international datasets used by the WMO put the global average January–September 2024 temperature at 1.54°C above the pre-industrial average, boosted by a warming El Niño.
This did not equate to a definitive breach of the long-term temperature goal set in the Paris Agreement, which refers to average temperatures sustained over decades, it emphasized, but WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said today it was “essential to recognize that every fraction of a degree of warming matters [and] every additional increment of global warming increases climate extremes, impacts and risks.
“The record-breaking rainfall and flooding, rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones, deadly heat, relentless drought and raging wildfires that we have seen in different parts of the world this year are unfortunately our new reality and a foretaste of our future,” she added.
State of the Global Climate reports have been published annually since 1993 by the WMO, which has established an international team of experts to assess methods for tracking the Paris temperature goals.
IFRC Secretary General Jagan Chapagain at last week’s donor conference in Geneva, where he said that “pledges today ensure that just before, when, or straight after the next storm hits, the next flood rises, or the next crisis unfolds, help will be there – not as a distant promise but as a reality, fast.” On his left is Fatima Gailani, former president of the Afghan Red Crescent Society. (Photo: IFRC)