World on ‘red alert’ after heat records smashed in 2023, UN agency says

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The World Meteorological Organization sounded a “red alert” on the climate change behind record surface and ocean temperatures, glacial retreat and rising seas during the warmest 10-year period on record, with twice as many people going hungry in the years since the pandemic.

The UN agency’s report, which brings together data from member countries and partner agencies, affirmed that 2023 was the hottest year on record. The average global surface temperature was 1.45C above pre-industrial levels, it concluded, with a margin of uncertainty of 0.12C.

Records were broken “and in some cases smashed” in 2023 for greenhouse gas levels, ocean heat and acidification, sea level rise, Antarctic sea ice cover and glacier retreat, the WMO said.

“There is a high probability that 2024 will break the record of 2023,” said Omar Baddour, head of climate monitoring at the WMO.

The world was “so close — albeit on a temporary basis at the moment” to breaching the 1.5C lower limit of the Paris Agreement, said WMO secretary-general Celeste Saulo. “The WMO community is sounding the red alert to the world.”

The 1.5C threshold refers to the measure of long-term average temperatures reached over more than a decade, with the world presently on a trajectory for as much as 2.9C by 2030, according to UN scientists.

Extreme weather events made worse by climate change were having a devastating impact on communities, the WMO said, including an alarming rise in food insecurity. The number of people it said were “acutely food insecure” worldwide had more than doubled, from 149mn people before the Covid-19 pandemic to 333mn people in 2023.

Tina van de Flierdt, head of earth science and engineering at Imperial College, said the WMO report “reinforces that climate change is not a distant threat — it is here now, and it is already impacting lives worldwide”.

There was a “large finance gap” when it came to tackling climate change, the agency said, estimating that levels of $1.3tn in 2021-2022 must be boosted to almost $9tn annually by 2030.

Although the El Niño weather phenomenon contributed to the rise in temperatures last year, the WMO noted the long-term increase in the global average temperature remained the result of increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide levels are 50 per cent higher than pre-industrial levels, trapping heat in the atmosphere. Once it is released, CO₂ lasts in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, so temperatures were expected to rise for many years to come, the WMO noted.

There was a “glimmer of hope” in the rise of clean energy sources after renewable power capacity additions of almost 50 per cent in 2023 from the previous year, to a total of 510 gigawatts.

But the International Renewable Energy Agency cautioned that a target set at the UN’s COP28 climate summit to triple renewable power capacity by 2030 would only be possible with a “major global course correction”.

An average of almost 1,100GW of renewables capacity must be installed annually by 2030 to meet the target — more than double the record set in 2023, Irena said.

This was “technically feasible and economically viable, but its delivery requires determination, policy support and investment at scale”.

Richard Allan, professor of climate science at the University of Reading, said a “reversal in greenhouse gas increases through rapid and massive emissions cuts” was essential in “limiting dangerous increases in global temperatures, worsening weather extremes and rising oceans”.