How climate change could impact our future

A new report by an international body of scientists exposes the sheer gravity of climate change and the increasingly severe climate impacts facing people and nature. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report included a stunning data visualization that uses warming stripes—a series of colored lines in chronological order that portray long-term temperature trends—to show how the climate people live with today differs from the climate that their parents experienced and the one that their children could experience.

To drive home the impacts on nature, WWF created a new version incorporating plants and animals to highlight how climate change affects generations across all species on the planet.

With every increment of warming, extreme events including heatwaves, droughts, fires, floods, and storms, and their impacts on nature and our lives, become more frequent and severe.

Climate change is already affecting species in terrestrial, freshwater, and ocean ecosystems around the world, according to the IPCC. Future warming will make impacts worse. More frequent and more severe extreme events like droughts, floods, and fires, along with habitat degradation, changes in water cycles, and heat stress challenge most animal populations. Those impacts also affect humans and lead to more competition among all life for resources.