UN secretary-general António Guterres has described the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report as a “chronicle of climate chaos” which details the catastrophic speed of climate change, which is devastating lives and livelihoods on every continent.

The WMO, in its latest provisional 2022 State of the Global Climate 2022, released on Sunday, stated that extreme heatwaves, drought and devastating flooding had also affected millions and cost billions this year.

The UN said the last eight years had been the warmest on record, fuelled by ever-rising greenhouse gas concentrations and accumulated heat.

Faced with the inevitability of continued climate shocks and extreme weather worldwide, Mr Guterres will launch an action plan at COP27 to achieve Early Warnings for All in the next five years.

The UN chief explained that early warning systems are necessary to protect people and communities everywhere.

“We must answer the planet’s distress signal with action, ambitious, credible climate action. COP27 must be the place – and now must be the time,” he said in a statement.

The report outlines the increasingly dramatic signs of the climate emergency, which include a doubling of sea level rise since 1993 to a new record high this year and indications of unprecedented glacier melting in the European Alps.

The full 2022 report will be released in the Spring of 2023. But the provisional study was brought out ahead of COP27, the UN climate conference, raising awareness of the huge scale of the problems that world leaders must tackle if they hope to get the climate crisis under control.

“The greater the warming, the worse the impacts,” WMO chief Petter Taalas said at the launch of the report at an event held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

“We have such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now that the lower 1.5 degree of the Paris Agreement is barely within reach. It’s already too late for many glaciers, and the melting will continue for hundreds if not thousands of years, with major implications for water security,” he added.

The study details the effects of both droughts and excessive rains.

Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia are facing crop failure and food insecurity because of another season of below-average rains, while more than a third of Pakistan was flooded in July and August due to record-breaking rain, displacing almost eight million people.

(NAN)