Fairness will be key to successfully tackling the climate crisis | Larry Elliott

Just as inequality fuelled the pandemic, it could wreck plans to cut emissions

The message from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could hardly be clearer. Business as usual means global temperatures will rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels within two decades. Preventing that happening will require a massive and rapid drop in the amount of greenhouse gases being emitted.

Diagnosis is the easy bit. The question is not whether human beings are on a collision course with nature but how to use the time left to bring about the far-reaching economic changes required to avoid catastrophe.