Saleemul Huq is a Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), UK, and Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCAD), Bangladesh. He is also a Senior Advisor to CDKN and a Lead Author on the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on adaptation, impacts and vulnerability. Here he provides his response to the recent IPCC report on the physical science of climate change.

In this video blog or ‘vlog’ Dr Huq anticipates the results of the IPCC’s report on the physical science of climate change, which were released late last week following intensive government negotiations. The headline messages discussed here by Dr Huq are borne out in the report – here you can hear Dr Huq’s assessment of what the IPCC’s sobering findings mean for global society, and particularly for his home country of Bangladesh.

“We are headed for a temperature rise [on global average] of three degrees or possibly even four degrees by the end of the century unless we take drastic action now,” he concludes, which means “catastrophic” impacts for vulnerable, least developed countries such as Bangladesh.

Read a headline version of the IPCC’s report on the physical science of climate change.