KINGSTON / PORT-AU-PRINCE:

Hurricane Beryl barreled toward Jamaica as a powerful Category 4 storm on Tuesday, threatening to dump rain on parts of Hispaniola after leaving at least three people dead on smaller islands in the eastern Caribbean.

Tropical storm conditions were expected on parts of the southern coasts of Haiti and the Dominican Republic on Tuesday evening, according to an advisory from the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC).

“Beryl is expected to bring life-threatening winds and storm surge to Jamaica on Wednesday and the Cayman Islands Wednesday night and Thursday,” the NHC said. A hurricane warning is in effect for both places.

In Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, which is in the grips of entrenched gang violence and an ongoing humanitarian crisis, strong winds took residents by surprise on Tuesday afternoon.

The country’s southwestern peninsula could get 4-8 inches (10-20 cm) of rain, with as much as 12 inches in some places, the NHC said. New Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille warned residents to take precautions and stay alert.

The unusually early hurricane, whose rapid strengthening scientists said was likely fueled by human-caused climate change, is expected to still be a hurricane when it passes near Jamaica and the Cayman Islands later this week.

Beryl, the 2024 Atlantic season’s first hurricane and the earliest storm on record to reach the highest category on the Saffir-Simpson Scale, felled power lines and unleashed flash floods across smaller islands.

The storm hit St. Vincent and the Grenadines especially hard, according to Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves.

“The hurricane has come and gone, and it has left in its wake immense destruction,” he said. On one island in the Grenadines archipelago, Union Island, 90% of homes had been “severely damaged or destroyed,” he added.

The prime minister confirmed one death and said more fatalities could be confirmed in the coming days.

In a video briefing on Tuesday, Grenada’s prime minister, Dickon Mitchell, stressed that Carriacou and Petite Martinique, two of the three islands that make up the country, bore the brunt of the natural disaster.

“The situation is grim. There is no power. There is almost complete destruction of homes and buildings,” he said, citing impassable roads due to downed power lines and destroyed fuel stations crimping supplies.

Mitchell said at least two deaths were attributed to the impact of Beryl so far.

The hurricane, packing maximum sustained winds of 150 miles per hour (241 kph), is currently located about 360 miles (579 km) east-southeast of the Jamaican capital of Kingston, according to the NHC.

The Miami-based hurricane centre estimates that the massive weather system is moving toward the west-northwest at a speed of 22 mph (35 kph).

In Jamaica, men hauled fishing boats out of the water and tied them down in preparation for the hurricane’s arrival, while others noted there was still time to prepare on Tuesday morning.

“We Jamaicans don’t take things serious,” said Standford Pusey, as he showed off items secured with plastic tarps.

In Fort-de-France on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, north of St. Vincent, a video shared on social media showed heavy flooding in the streets as locals attempted to clear away debris.

In addition to Haiti’s southern coast, the NHC also posted a hurricane watch for Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, dotted with beach resorts popular with tourists.

Ahead of the storm’s approach expected Thursday night, Mexico’s defense ministry said the army, air force, and national guard had activated emergency response protocols in the three Yucatan states, with 120 shelters opened and nearly 4,900 troops on guard on the peninsula.

The unusually early timing and rapid intensification of the storm is partly due to warmer ocean temperatures, scientists say.

Climate change likely contributed to Beryl’s early formation, while also driving how quickly it intensified, according to scientists surveyed by Reuters, which could provide an unsettling preview of future storms.

Global warming has helped push temperatures in the North Atlantic to record highs, said Christopher Rozoff, an atmospheric scientist at the U.S.-based National Center for Atmospheric Research. The warmer waters lead to more evaporation, which fuels more intense hurricanes featuring higher wind speeds, he said.

Beryl jumped from a Category 1 to a Category 4 storm in under 10 hours, according to Andra Garner, a Rowan University meteorologist. That marked the fastest intensification ever recorded before September, the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season, she added.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Labourers sleep on the roadside during an early hot summer morning in Karachi, Pakistan. Pakistan port city Karachi and some other parts of the country continued to experience heatwave these days. File
| Photo Credit: AP

The world experienced an average of 26 more days of extreme heat over the last 12 months that would probably not have occurred without climate change, a report said on May 28.

Heat is the leading cause of climate-related death and the report further points to the role of global warming in increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather around the world.

For this study, scientists used the years 1991 to 2020 to determine what temperatures counted as within the top 10 per cent for each country over that period.

Next, they looked at the 12 months to May 15, 2024, to establish how many days over that period experienced temperatures within — or beyond — the previous range.

Then, using peer-reviewed methods, they examined the influence of climate change on each of these excessively hot days.

They concluded that “human-caused climate change added — on average, across all places in the world — 26 more days of extreme heat than there would have been without it”.

The report was published by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, the World Weather Attribution scientific network and the nonprofit research organisation Climate Central.

2023 was the hottest year on record, according to the European Union’s climate monitor, Copernicus.

Already this year, extreme heatwaves have afflicted swathes of the globe from Mexico to Pakistan.

The report said that in the last 12 months, some 6.3 billion people — roughly 80% of the global population — experienced at least 31 days of what is classed as extreme heat.

In total, 76 extreme heatwaves were registered in 90 different countries on every continent except Antarctica.

Five of the most affected nations were in Latin America.

The report said that without the influence of climate change, Suriname would have recorded an estimated 24 extreme heat days instead of 182; Ecuador 10 not 180; Guyana 33 not 174, El Salvador 15 not 163; and Panama 12 not 149.

“[Extreme heat] is known to have killed tens of thousands of people over the last 12 months but the real number is likely in the hundreds of thousands or even millions,” the Red Cross said in a statement.

“Flooding and hurricanes may capture the headlines but the impacts of extreme heat are equally deadly,” said Jagan Chapagain, secretary general of the International Federation of the Red Cross.

According to a recent research, the summer months in 2023 were on average 2.2 C (4 F) warmer than the estimated average temperature across the years 1 to 1890.
| Photo Credit: The Hindu

The intense northern hemisphere summer heat that drove wildfires across the Mediterranean, buckled roads in Texas and strained power grids in China last year made it not just the warmest summer on record – but the warmest in some 2,000 years, new research suggests.

The stark finding comes from one of two new studies released on Tuesday, as both global temperatures and climate-warming emissions continue to climb.

Scientists had quickly declared last year’s June to August period as the warmest since record-keeping began in the 1940s.

New work published in the journal Nature suggests the 2023 heat eclipsed temperatures over a far longer timeline – a finding established by looking at meteorological records dating to the mid-1800s and temperature data based on the analysis of tree rings across nine northern sites.

“When you look at the long sweep of history, you can see just how dramatic recent global warming is,” said study co-author Jan Esper, a climate scientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany.

Last year’s summer season temperatures on lands between 30 and 90 degrees north latitude reached 2.07 degrees Celsius (3.73 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial averages, the study said.

Based on tree ring data, the summer months in 2023 were on average 2.2 C (4 F) warmer than the estimated average temperature across the years 1 to 1890.

The finding was not entirely a surprise. By January, scientists with the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service were saying the year of 2023 was “very likely” to have been the warmest in some 100,000 years.

However, proving such a long record is unlikely, Esper said. He and two other European scientists argued in a paper last year that year-by-year comparisons could not be established over such a vast time scale with current scientific methods, including gleaning temperature data from sources such as marine sediments or peat bogs.

“We don’t have such data,” Esper said. “That was an overstatement.”

Last year’s intense summer heat was amplified by the El Nino climate pattern, which typically coincides with warmer global temperatures, leading to “longer and more severe heatwaves, and extended periods of drought,” Esper said.

Heatwaves are already taking a toll on people’s health, with more than 150,000 deaths in 43 countries linked to heatwaves for each year between 1990 and 2019, according to the details of a second study published on Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine.

That would account for about 1% of global deaths – roughly the same toll taken by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

More than half of those heatwave-related excess deaths occurred in populous Asia.

When the data are adjusted for population size, Europe had the highest per capita toll with an average of 655 heat-related deaths each year per 10 million residents. Within the region, Greece, Malta, and Italy registered the highest excess deaths.

Extreme heat can trigger heart problems and breathing difficulty or cause heat stroke.

Washington:

Can America’s national parks remain “unimpaired” forever, with their majestic scenery and wildlife unaltered? Global warming makes that impossible, says Wylie Carr, a climate change specialist at the National Park Service.

According to Carr, who works on environmental protection at the agency’s climate change response team, hotter temperatures are the main threat to the parks.

With some species vanishing and the natural habitats of others destroyed, park service workers sometimes have no other choice but to defy their mission as stated in a 1916 law: preserving the parks in their original state.

The Organic Act asked the National Park Service “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and… leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

But the NPS is developing innovative strategies to fulfill the goal as best they can.

Carr talked to AFP about some of those new ideas:

What is the new NPS philosophy? 

“Often, because our policies focus on maintaining historical or natural conditions, our default mode is to resist change. What the ‘Resist, Accept, Direct’ (RAD) framework helps us to do is recognize that we have to be managing for persistence, but we also have to be managing for transformation.

“And so where it’s no longer possible or feasible to resist change, then what do we do?

“The RAD framework helps us lay out the other possibilities. One is to just accept change. And a lot of times, that’s what we’re going to have to do. Because we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the ability to resist the change.

“Then when we are directing change, we’re thinking about: how would we intentionally move the system in a different direction, working with the trajectory that we’re on, to arrive at maybe a more desirable endpoint?”

Examples of ‘directed changes’? 

“That’s where we might be thinking about: are there opportunities for maybe assisting migration of species in a way that helps us to maintain key species on a landscape, even if they’re not in the same place?

“Are there ways that we could start to bring in species that are going to be better adapted to the future climate of the park, that are not invasive species? Maybe it’s a species that is a native species, but it occurs further south.

“And so when we have a big forest fire, we’re replanting with that tree species that’s going to be better adapted to hotter and drier conditions.”

Does this contradict mission to preserve? 

“Everyone in the Park Service is very committed to the Organic Act. And so it’s not that we want to manage differently, it’s that climate change is forcing us to make unavoidable choices as strategically as possible.

“I think what’s important to keep in mind is that no one wants to do things differently. We’re being forced to. And so we’re trying to do that in a thoughtful and intentional way.

“A lot of times, we are going to have to accept change, and be clear that that’s a management decision and approach that we’re taking.

“And so we’re not going to deny the impacts of climate change. It is transforming ecosystems. In a lot of cases, we’re just going to have to accept those changes.

“But we’re going to call it out and say that’s what we’re doing, and not act like we’re just going to be able to continue to resist everywhere all the time.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A woman covers her head for protection against the scorching sun on a hot summer day, in Kolkata, on May 1, 2024.
| Photo Credit: PTI

The searing April temperatures were the highest over eastern and northeastern (E&NE) India and the second highest over south India since 1901, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said in a press conference on Wednesday.

These record-breaking temperatures were due to the combined effect of a prevailing El Nino and a weather system — called an “anticyclone” — that blocked moisture-laden sea breeze from the Bay of Bengal, which in other years brought rainfall and eased temperatures, said M. Mohapatra, Director-General, IMD.

Average temperatures over E&NE India were 28.1 degrees Celsius and max temperatures at 34 degrees Celsius, both nearly or two degrees above what’s typical for the month.

Some places also witnessed anomalous increases in temperature; for instance, Panagarh in West Bengal recorded 45.6 degrees Celsius, which was 10 degrees above normal and Kalaikunda, also in West Bengal, registered 47.2 degrees Celsius – 10.4 degrees above normal.

Also read: Warming of Indian Ocean to accelerate: IITM study

In southern peninsular India, average temperatures were as high as 37.25 degrees Celsius or about 1.35 degrees above normal. This was only slightly below the 37.57 degrees Celsius recorded in 2016 – the all-time high since 1901.

Odisha saw as many as 18 heatwave days and West Bengal 16 while Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala saw eight, seven and five days respectively. India’s 36 meteorological subdivisions (as defined by the IMD for weather and climate-based analysis) cumulatively see 71 heatwave days on average during April. This April, they saw 118 – the third highest since 2010. April 2022 saw 198 heatwave days and April 2010 saw 337 such days.

In contrast, north-western India did not see any heatwave day on account of regular incursions of “western disturbances” which are spells of rain that originate from Central Asia.

The hot conditions are likely to persist through most of May over most of India and this time, northwestern States/Union Territories such as Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi are also expected to register more than their usual quota of heatwaves, the agency predicted.

Geneva:

Asia was the world’s most disaster-hit region from climate and weather hazards in 2023, the United Nations said Tuesday, with floods and storms the chief cause of casualties and economic losses.
Global temperatures hit record highs last year, and the UN’s weather and climate agency said Asia was warming at a particularly rapid pace.

The World Meteorological Organization said the impact of heatwaves in Asia was becoming more severe, with melting glaciers threatening the region’s future water security.

The WMO said Asia was warming faster than the global average, with temperatures last year nearly two degrees Celsius above the 1961 to 1990 average.

“The report’s conclusions are sobering,” WMO chief Celeste Saulo said in a statement.

“Many countries in the region experienced their hottest year on record in 2023, along with a barrage of extreme conditions, from droughts and heatwaves to floods and storms.

“Climate change exacerbated the frequency and severity of such events, profoundly impacting societies, economies, and, most importantly, human lives and the environment that we live in.”

The State of the Climate in Asia 2023 report highlighted the accelerating rate of key climate change indicators such as surface temperature, glacier retreat and sea level rise, saying they would have serious repercussions for societies, economies and ecosystems in the region.

“Asia remained the world’s most disaster-hit region from weather, climate and water-related hazards in 2023,” the WMO said.

Heat, melting and floods

The annual mean near-surface temperature over Asia in 2023 was the second highest on record, at 0.91 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average, and 1.87 C above the 1961-1990 average.

Particularly high average temperatures were recorded from western Siberia to central Asia, and from eastern China to Japan, the report said, with Japan having its hottest summer on record.

As for precipitation, it was below normal in the Himalayas and in the Hindu Kush mountain range in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile southwest China suffered from a drought, with below-normal precipitation levels in nearly every month of the year.

The High-Mountain Asia region, centred on the Tibetan Plateau, contains the largest volume of ice outside of the polar regions.

Over the last several decades, most of these glaciers have been retreating, and at an accelerating rate, the WMO said, with 20 out of 22 monitored glaciers in the region showing continued mass loss last year.

The report said 2023 sea-surface temperatures in the northwest Pacific Ocean were the highest on record.

‘Urgency’ for action

Last year, 79 disasters associated with water-related weather hazards were reported in Asia. Of those, more than 80 percent were floods and storms, with more than 2,000 deaths and nine million people directly affected.

“Floods were the leading cause of death in reported events in 2023 by a substantial margin,” the WMO said, noting the continuing high level of vulnerability of Asia to natural hazard events.

Hong Kong recorded 158.1 millimetres of rainfall in one hour on September 7 — the highest since records began in 1884, as a result of a typhoon.

The WMO said there was an urgent need for national weather services across the region to improve tailored information to officials working on reducing disaster risks.

“It is imperative that our actions and strategies mirror the urgency of these times,” said Saulo.

“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the evolving climate is not merely an option, but a fundamental necessity.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Dubai airport, one of the world’s busiest, witnessed major disruption for a third straight day Thursday after the heaviest rains on record drenched the desert United Arab Emirates.

Emirates, Dubai’s state-owned flagship airline, and sister carrier flydubai resumed check-ins after telling passengers to stay away on Wednesday when thousands of delayed passengers clogged the airport.

The airport, which handles more international passengers than any other, hopes to resume “something approaching normality” within 24 hours, Dubai Airport CEO Paul Griffiths told AFP.

Some 1,244 flights were cancelled and 41 were diverted on Tuesday and Wednesday after torrential rains flooded the Middle East financial centre including its homes, malls and offices, and highways.

Traffic congestion remained severe on Thursday, two days after the storms, with at least one major road completely blocked by water and multiple junctions cut off by flooding.

Climate experts say the rains, the UAE’s heaviest since records began 75 years ago, are consistent with changes caused by global warming.

“There’s no news here,” Karim Elgendy, Associate Director at the Buro Happold engineering consultancy and associate fellow at Britain’s Chatham House think tank, told AFP. 

“We are expecting an increase in variability of rainfall, which means more extreme events, more drought and an increase in intensity of rainfall when it does rain.

‘Deeply distressed’ 

Dubai airport has witnessed chaotic scenes with crowds of marooned travellers clamouring for information about their flights.

Even as Emirates and flydubai resumed check-ins, more than 200 departures were listed as delayed or cancelled on the airport’s website.

Griffiths said it was “challenging” to get the airport fully functional, with supplies and staff also held up on flooded roads.

“Getting supplies through, people and all of the necessary things to the airport to help the schedule recover, was a massive challenge because all of the roads were blocked,” he said in an interview.

“We just hope that the level of customer care that we’ve been able to provide will go some way to mitigate the impacts that we had to customers. But obviously we’re deeply distressed by all of the disruption and concern that we’ve created,” he added.

One elderly couple’s 14-hour flight from Brisbane took 24 hours on Tuesday after it was diverted, and they were then unable to reach their hotel because of the flooding.

“It’s just the start of our holiday and I feel like going home — and I don’t know how to do that either,” Julie, 72, told AFP through tears.

“When they landed the plane on this airfield that was deserted, there was no terminal, there were no other planes and I thought we had been hijacked by terrorists,” she added, without giving her surname.

Makeshift ferry

Although schools and public sector offices have been closed until next week, traffic returned to the roads with some motorists, finding their route blocked, driving the wrong way down highways.

Supermarkets had empty shelves as deliveries failed to arrive, and retail staff reported having to stay overnight or sleep at hotels because they could not get home.

“We’re working but the problem is we’re not receiving chicken,” said one employee at a chicken restaurant that had no chicken or fries on display.

“The delivery cannot come here because of the flood.”

In the Arjan district, a man used a canoe to paddle passengers across a flooded street.

With taxis hard to book and hail, private motorists were stopping at queues of people and offering rides for high prices.

British visitor Chris Moss, 30, was one of those looking for a cab as he tried to reach the airport and locate his lost luggage.

“When we arrived the baggage area was full of bags but my luggage was nowhere to be seen,” said Moss, whose plane, hastily booked after his original flight was cancelled, arrived five hours late.

“It was still on the plane because the baggage area was flooded and they couldn’t get the bags off.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Image of people watching a sunset for representation
| Photo Credit: AP

The global economy is expected to lose about 19% income in the next 25 years due to climate change, with countries least responsible for the problem and having minimum resources to adapt to impacts suffering the most, according to a new study published on Wednesday.

The study by scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said climate impacts could cost the global economy around $38 trillion a year by 2049.

“Our analysis shows climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly developed ones such as Germany, France, and the United States,” said scientist Leonie Wenz who led the study published in the journal Nature.

South Asia to be affected

South Asia and Africa will be strongly affected, said Maximilian Kotz, another researcher.

The researchers looked at detailed weather and economic data from over 1,600 regions globally, covering the last 40 years.

They said global income loss could vary between 11% and 29%, depending on different climate scenarios and uncertainties in the data.

The predicted loss is massive and already about six times more than what it would cost to reduce carbon emissions enough to keep the average temperature rise below two degrees Celsius, the researchers said.

These economic damages are mostly due to rising average temperatures. However, when the researchers also considered other factors like rains and storms, the predicted economic damages increased by about 50 per cent and varied more from one region to another.

Regions closest to equator to be hit

While most regions in the world are expected to suffer economically due to these changes, they said regions near the poles might see some benefits due to less temperature variability.

On the other hand, the hardest-hit regions will likely be those closer to the equator, which historically have contributed less to global emissions and currently have lower incomes.

“Our study highlights the considerable inequity of climate impacts: We find damages almost everywhere, but countries in the tropics will suffer the most because they are already warmer. Further temperature increases will therefore be most harmful there,” said Anders Levermann, head of Research Department Complexity Science at the Potsdam Institute and co-author of the study.

The countries least responsible for climate change are predicted to suffer income loss that is 60% greater than the higher-income countries and 40% greater than higher-emission countries. They are also the ones with the least resources to adapt to its impacts, he said.

“These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions. We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them. We have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately; if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60 per cent of the global average by 2100,” Mr. Wenz said.

“It is on us to decide: structural change towards a renewable energy system is needed for our security and will save us money. Staying on the path we are currently on will lead to catastrophic consequences. The temperature of the planet can only be stabilized if we stop burning oil, gas, and coal,” Mr. Levermann said.

Average temperatures

Global average temperatures have risen by more than 1.1 degrees Celsius since 1850, exacerbating climate impacts, with 2023 being the hottest on record.

The greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere, largely due to the burning of fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution, is closely tied to it.

According to the World Meteorological Organization’s “State of the Global Climate 2023” report, greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, and sea level rise all reached record highs in 2023.

Climate science says the world needs to slash CO2 emissions by 43% by 2030 to limit the average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the guardrail to prevent worsening of climate impacts.

The business-as-usual scenario will take the world to a temperature rise of around three degrees Celsius by the end of the century, scientists have warned.

Since last June, the globe has broken heat records each month, with marine heat waves across large areas of the globe’s oceans contributing. File
| Photo Credit: AP

For the tenth consecutive month, Earth in March set a new monthly record for global heat — with both air temperatures and the world’s oceans hitting an all-time high for the month, the European Union climate agency Copernicus said.

March 2024 averaged 14.14 degrees Celsius, exceeding the previous record from 2016 by a tenth of a degree, according to Copernicus data. And it was 1.68 degrees C warmer than in the late 1800s, the base used for temperatures before the burning of fossil fuels began growing rapidly.

Since last June, the globe has broken heat records each month, with marine heat waves across large areas of the globe’s oceans contributing.

Scientists say the record-breaking heat during this time wasn’t entirely surprising due to a strong El Nino, a climatic condition that warms the central Pacific and changes global weather patterns. “But its combination with the non-natural marine heat waves made these records so breathtaking,” said Woodwell Climate Research Center scientist Jennifer Francis.

Also read: Explained | How El Nino could impact the world’s weather in 2023-24

With El Nino waning, the margins by which global average temperatures are surpassed each month should go down, Ms. Francis said.

Climate scientists attribute most of the record heat to human-caused climate change from carbon dioxide and methane emissions produced by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

“The trajectory will not change until concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop rising,” Ms. Francis said, “which means we must stop burning fossil fuels, stop deforestation, and grow our food more sustainably as quickly as possible.” Until then, expect more broken records, she said.

‘Trajectory is not in the right direction’

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world set a goal to keep warming at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. Copernicus’ temperature data is monthly and uses a slightly different measurement system than the Paris threshold, which is averaged over two or three decades.

Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, said March’s record-breaking temperature was not as exceptional as some other months in the past year that broke records by wider margins. “We’ve had record-breaking months that have been even more unusual,” Ms. Burgess said, pointing to February 2024 and September 2023. But the “trajectory is not in the right direction,” she added.

The globe has now experienced 12 months with average monthly temperatures 1.58 degrees Celsius above the Paris threshold, according to Copernicus data.

In March, global sea surface temperature averaged 21.07 degrees Celsius (69.93 degrees Fahrenheit), the highest monthly value on record and slightly higher than what was recorded in February. “We need more ambitious global action to ensure that we can get to net zero as soon as possible,” Ms. Burgess said.

Researchers have explained a new approach they developed to estimate climate velocities in mountainous regions. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Species living in 17 mountains around the world may be facing the risk of extinction due to the rapid rate at which the planet is warming, new research published in the journal Nature has found.

Researchers said that the mountains at significant risk due to global warming included those in the Iran-Pakistan region, Northeast Asia, Brazilian highlands, Western America and Mexico, and the Mediterranean basin.

The international team of researchers, led by Academia Sinica in Taiwan, called for setting up more meteorological monitoring stations in mountainous areas globally, essential for developing a deeper understanding of the extent of such risks.

In their study, the researchers found these mountain regions to have the highest climate velocity, or the rate at which “species must move to stay within their survivable habitats”.

They explained a new approach they developed to estimate climate velocities in mountainous regions that considers two important influencing factors — surface warming and humidity — whilst incorporating the theories of atmospheric science.

Setting up meteorological observation stations in mountainous areas is challenging, leading to a global shortfall in long-term climate data for these regions, the team said.

This knowledge gap, compounded by the complex topography, has limited the understanding of warming trends, they said.

The team’s newly developed approach compensates for the lack of station data and assess shifts in temperature isotherms — locations having the same temperature — in mountain regions under climate change, they said.

In humid climates, climate velocity can be high, even as warming is less pronounced, according to lead author Wei-Ping Chan from the Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, and a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, U.S.

“The mountainous regions of Taiwan, like Japan, are more affected by humidity-induced high velocities than continental regions. Our study suggests that accounting for humidity is critical to fully understanding the variability of temperature isothermal shifts in mountainous areas worldwide,” said Chan.

Lead researcher Sheng-Feng Shen, also from the Biodiversity Research Center of Academia Sinica, said, “The lack of meteorological observation data from mountains is both the most valuable and the biggest challenge of our study.” In the absence of such data, he said they have to rely on models for making estimates, which could vary significantly depending on the model and method used.

Further, global data isn’t suitable for making local predictions due to differences in scale, Shen added.

“The unique characteristics of various mountain regions and the absence of local data mean that just because an area isn’t highlighted, doesn’t mean it’s unaffected,” he said.

Therefore, the researchers emphasised the need to set up more weather stations in mountains to better understand the real situation and tackle the effects of climate change on species.