The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is a "continuation of a story which has become depressingly familiar", Climate Change Minister James Shaw says.
The IPCC report noted unless countries step up their efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the planet will on average be 2.4C to 3.5C warmer by the end of the century - a level experts say is sure to cause severe impacts for much of the world's population.
Shaw said the report notes 83% of net growth in greenhouse gases since 2010 has occurred in Asia and the Pacific - and that New Zealand, Australia and Japan, as a group, had some of the highest rates of greenhouse gas emissions per capita in 2019.
He told Breakfast New Zealand had been "kicking the can down the road for decades", claiming the Government in the last four years had taken more climate change action than in the previous three decades.
READ MORE: World hurtling to climate danger zone, brakes half-pulled
Shaw said actions such as the green investment bank, the decarbonising industry fund, and the clean car discount had changed the country's trajectory somewhat, but they were not enough to get the country on the trajectory to net-zero emissions.
"I've said any number of times that I don't think we're moving fast enough or far enough and that we need to continuously lift our game and that's kind of the main reason why we're putting so much effort into the Emissions Reduction Plan."
The plan is being released next month and Shaw said it will set out how the country's climate targets can be achieved.
"The kind of action that we need to take over the coming four years to get to that 2025 target and the 2030 target and then the 2035 target, that's a lot more radical than it would have had to have been if we'd started sooner," Shaw said.
New Zealanders will also be asked this month how the country can adapt to the climate change that is already unavoidable through the release of the draft National Adaptation Plan for consultation.
"It's really important to understand climate change is real, it is happening, it is us, it is bad and we can fix it. The window of opportunity to turn that around is vanishingly small, but it's still there and we need to grasp it and make sure we do everything that we can," Shaw said.
Brianna Fruean says the latest IPCC report shows the world is running out of time. (Source: Breakfast)
Climate change activist Brianna Fruean told Breakfast ahead of Shaw's interview the IPCC report showed the world was running out of time to tackle the climate crisis.
Fruean said while New Zealand was doing better than other countries at this, New Zealand was still not doing enough, fast enough.
She felt more money and resources needed to be pooled into a just transition away from fossil fuels and said climate justice - not leaving anyone behind - was important in this.
Meanwhile, Greenpeace Aotearoa has said governments' current policies are setting up the world for failure.
Christine Rose, Greenpeace Aotearoa's lead agriculture campaigner, said the IPCC report outlined solutions do exist for meeting the Paris Agreement's warning limit, but they won't materialise at this rate.
"For New Zealand, where our biggest climate polluter is the dairy industry with its massive reliance on synthetic fertiliser, real climate action means halving the herd and cutting synthetic nitrogen fertiliser."
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