Climate change: Five things we’ve learned from the IPCC report

A new report released this week by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) looks at the causes, impacts and solutions to climate change.

The report gives the clearest indication to date of how a warmer world is affecting all living things on Earth.

Here are five things we learnt from it.

From the melting of the Greenland ice sheet to the destruction of coral reefs, climate related impacts are hitting the world at the high end of what modellers once expected. And much more quickly than previously assessed by the IPCC.

Right now, as the new report makes clear, around 40% of the world’s population is “highly vulnerable” to the impacts of climate change.

But the burden is falling mainly on those who did the least to cause the problem.