The world is already experiencing warming levels equivalent to those associated with the Paris Agreement's 1.5 C target, according to new research from the University of Victoria's (UVic) Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC).
Published in Nature Climate Change , the study provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of regional warming across global land areas since pre-industrial times. The research, which focuses on the climate regions to assess climate change around the world, known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 regions, comes from Tong Li, Francis Zwiers, Xuebin Zhang and Qiaohong Sun, who is from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology. The research provides new insight into how warming is unfolding across different parts of the world.
"Many of the climate risks associated with 1.5 C of warming are no longer a future concern; they are already being experienced around the world," says Zwiers, a statistician and scientist emeritus at PCIC.
"Our results reveal that current warming is already indistinguishable from that of a 1.5 C world even on regional scale, highlighting the shared urgency of adaptation across all regions," Li adds.
"Very importantly," Zwiers says, "we're providing information that policy-makers and decision-makers in the individual regions will be able to use to quantify the extent to which their regions are being affected."
The Paris Agreement, adopted by nearly 200 countries in 2015, aims to limit global warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change. As world leaders, policy-makers and researchers gather for the United Nations climate change conference in Antalya, Türkiye beginning on Monday, the study highlights just how close all regions already are to that threshold.
By the end of 2025, warming in all regions had already reached 90 to 94 per cent of the levels expected in a 1.5 C warmer world.
"What is less well understood," says Zhang, climate scientist and director of PCIC, "is that 1.5 C of global warming does not translate to the same amount of warming everywhere. Communities in many parts of the world are already facing much higher levels of warming and associated impacts."
Land areas warm faster than oceans, particularly at high northern latitudes. As a result, ocean-influenced regions such as southern South America, southeast Asia and New Zealand have experienced less warming than northern land regions, including the Arctic areas of Russia and North America, where temperatures have risen more rapidly than tropical regions such as much of Africa.
The study found that human influence on the climate had resulted in a global land average temperature that was already 1.9 C above its preindustrial level. In northwestern North America, warming has already reached 3 C above preindustrial levels, compared with 1.7 C in Northern Central America, which includes Mexico. The methods used in this study were also used in the recent Canada's Changing Climate Report, which estimated that Canada as a whole was 2.2 C warmer during the past decade than during the 1850-1900 preindustrial period.
Despite these differences, the researchers estimate all regions identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will reach their 1.5 C equivalent warming levels at about the same time— around 2029.
"People have asked: 'What should we be designing for in the future? What climate should we be considering?' For the past decade, the scientists at PCIC have been identifying how their findings can inform the design and construction of large infrastructure like buildings and bridges," says Zwiers.
"Regional warming has already reached levels effectively equivalent to those of a 1.5 C world. The science underscores the urgency of adaptation everywhere, now."
Read the Nature Climate Change research about IPCC AR6 regions
