UN climate panel finalises blueprint for action

Mumbai: The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has agreed on a blueprint for fighting global warming and said governments have only a few years to avert some of the worst impacts.

Delegates and scientists at the 130-nation forum approved a summary of some 20 pages, condensing 3,000 pages of the report published earlier this year, late last night.  

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri concluded the November 12-17 meeting in Valencia, Spain that wrapped up six years of work on the most authoritative review of climate change.

The document comes ahead of a meeting of environment ministers, scheduled to be held next month in Bali, Indonesia, to plan action to combat global warming.

The document says human activity is "very likely" to be the cause of rising temperatures and that deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, are needed to avert ever more heatwaves, melting glaciers, extinctions and rising sea levels.

Under the toughest scenario considered by the IPCC, greenhouse gases would have to peak by 2015 to limit global temperature rises to 2.0 to 2.4 Celsius (3.6 to 4.3 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times.

The European Union says 2.0 Celsius will be a threshold for "dangerous" changes, and even with temperature rises of below 2.0 Celsius, the IPCC projects more wildfires, more deaths from heatwaves, floods and droughts and more malnutrition in Africa.