Many of the changes being seen in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, with the United Nations warning that findings in its latest report on climate change are “a code red for humanity”.

Within the next two decades, temperatures are likely to rise by more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, breaching the ambition of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and bringing widespread devastation and extreme weather.

Only rapid and drastic reductions in greenhouse gases in this decade can prevent such climate breakdown, with every fraction of a degree of further heating likely to compound the accelerating effects, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.