A UN report says climate change is taking lives and livelihoods and driving disease and crop failure - but there is still a window to act.

COP26 President Alok Sharma MP called it a "grim" and "incredibly stark" warning.

"I would argue this is another code red for humanity," he told Sky News.

"And what this report says to us is that the impact on lives and livelihoods and nature are far, far worse than we originally anticipated."

It is hard to know how much more urgent the warnings could be.

But this report won't draw anywhere near as much attention as its authors might normally expect.

The world's focus is firmly on Ukraine.

It is an example of something that keeps climate scientists up at night: the prospect that rolling crisis after rolling crisis, from pandemics to conflicts, diverting attention and effort from an issue that is already an existential threat.

Diplomats and policy experts at the UN climate change conference COP26 often remarked on how much can be achieved when the world sets its sights on a single issue, and how quickly progress stalls when nations begin to look elsewhere.

And there is concern that some of the G20 nations will not deliver on their climate promises because they will be preoccupied with other problems.

The other issue simmering underneath the IPCC's work, as it so often does, is cash.

The report starkly illustrates that rich nations in particular must find the money to simultaneously protect people and places from the impacts of the climate crisis, while at the same time investing in working out how to reduce carbon emissions down to net zero by 2050.

And the longer we wait to invest in either of these things (known as adaptation and mitigation), the more expensive it is going to get.

The escalating row over the cost of paying for net zero in this country alone tells you how hard it is going to be to prise those wallets open across the planet.