Europe warming twice as fast as other regions

EUROPE has been warming twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, with extreme weather causing excess deaths and economic disruption.

Many nations in the region in 2022 had their warmest year on record but the expanded use of renewable energy provides a silver lining, according to a report issued last week by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Extreme heat, drought and wildfire, marine heatwaves and unprecedented glacier melt shows that decades of accelerated heating has had far-reaching impacts on the region’s socio-economic fabric and ecosystems, the report said.

Europe in 2022was approximately 2.3°C above the pre-industrial average used as a baseline for the Paris Agreement.

Climate change is taking a major hu- man, economic and environmental toll, the report said.

“Summer was the hottest ever recorded: the high temperatures exacerbated the severe and widespread drought conditions, fueled violent wildfires that resulted in the second largest burnt area on record, and led to thousands of heatassociated excess deaths,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom had their warmest year on record last year and the summer in Europe was the hottest ever recorded.

The 2022 annual average temperature for Europe was between the second and fourth highest on record, with an anomaly of about 0.79 °C above the 1991–2020 average. With precipitation below average

ENVIRONMENT Secretary Antonia Loyzaga has called on the business community to deal with plastic pollution to avoid the destruction of the country’s ecosystems.

Loyzaga sought the commitment of private companies to fully implement the the Extended Producers Responsibility (EPR) law of 2022 and urged them to be environmentally responsible throughout the life cycle of a product, especially its post-consumer or end-of-life stage.

The DENR chief made the plea in a speech before the general membership meeting of the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) on June 14 in Taguig City. She said “climate action for resilience is everyone’s business.”

She said the EPR law was an opportunity to curb the destruction of ecosystems by setting targets for large enterprises to cover and divert 20 percent of the plastic waste they produce in 2022 by the end of 2023, gradually increasing this by 40 percent by 2024 and setting 10 percent targets until 80 percent can be decreased and reached by 2028 onwards.

“Some of you have already stepped forward and committed to work with us,” she said. “Among the biggest threats to the environment is our unsustainable consumption and production practices that lead to production of polluting waste. This is where our partnerships would not only be strategic but critical to our survival,” she said. across much of the region in 2022, France had its driest January to September, and the United Kingdom had its driest January to August since 1976, with far-reaching consequences for agriculture and energy production.

“Confronting the complex roots of the pollution on land, seas and air requires a whole of society effort that will come at a cost but will have far reaching benefits,” she added.

The DENR chief stressed that investments were needed not just in diversion and collection, but also in research for the substitution of single use plastic.

“Unless there is a product that has the same functionality and affordability as single use plastic, the demand for its use, particularly among communities that can afford no other ways to consume and store will not wane,” she said.

Loyzaga has also urged the country’s top business leaders to work with government on efforts to address the climate crisis and create sustainable communities.

Spain’s water reserves decreased to 41.9 percent of total capacity by on July 26, with even lower capacity in some basins. Glaciers in Europe lost about 880 cubic kilometers of ice from 1997 to 2022.

The Alps were worst affected, with an average reduction in ice thickness of 34 meters. In 2022, glaciers in the Alps experienced a new record loss of mass in a single year, triggered by low winter snowfall, an extremely warm summer and dust deposits from the Sahara.

The melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet contributed around 14.9 mm to global mean sea-level rise. And according to scientific assessments, it contin- ued to lose mass during 2022, said the WMO report.

Average sea surface temperatures across the North Atlantic were the warmest on record and large portions of the region’s seas were affected by powerful marine heatwaves. The rates of surface ocean warming, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the southern Arctic, were more than three times the global average. The record-breaking heat stress that Europeans experienced last year was one of the main drivers of weather-related excess deaths.

Based on information in the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT), meteorological, hydrological and climate-related hazards in Europe in 2022 resulted in 16,365 reported fatalities and directly affected 156, 000 people. UN News