Humanity faces "untold suffering" if it fails to tackle the "climate emergency" threatening life on Earth, more than 11,000 scientists warned Tuesday.
In a declaration in the journal BioScience, they noted that 40 years ago, scientists from 50 nations at the first World Climate Change Conference "agreed that alarming trends... made it urgently necessary to act".
"An immense increase of scale in endeavours to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering," the scientists said in BioScience, a peer-reviewed publication of the
American Institute of Biological Sciences.