Over the last two years more people were displaced in their own countries by weather events than by conflict, over 40 million. 

Low and middle income countries are struggling with the quality of the air they breathe and the water they drink. Latest estimates are that pollution is responsible for 9 million premature deaths worldwide, or one in six of all deaths. 

Fossil fuel consumption has now joined the traditional drivers of disaster risk such as poverty, inappropriate land use, weak building codes, the disappearance of protective ecosystems and lax governance, as drivers of preventable loss of life, displacement and loss of livelihoods. 

It is a cliché to say that we are in the last chance saloon as the world meets in Bonn for the COP23 climate conference but if the calamitous and unprecedented chain of extreme weather events witnessed over the last year, does not provide impetus for change then one dreads to think what will. 

The eighth edition of the UN Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report warns that even full implementation of current national pledges makes a temperature rise of at least three degrees Celsius by 2100 very likely. 

The expectation among the most vulnerable to climate change, represented by the 47 member Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group, is that they will leave Bonn with a draft negotiating text for the Paris Agreement work programme which will be finalized in the coming year. 

The LDC Group are pushing for greater ambition in reducing greenhouse gas emissions so that global warming does not exceed two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and, ideally, is kept below 1.5 degrees. 

They have called for robust frameworks for reporting, implementation and compliance, and more financial support given that they “face the unique and unprecedented challenge of lifting people out of poverty and achieving sustainable development without relying on fossil fuels.” 

Reducing emissions now is essential to global efforts to reduce existing levels of disaster risk and to avoid the creation of new risk, often of an unforeseen nature given how much climate change impacts are uncharted territory.