Climate change will "challenge" local communities regardless of efforts to minimise the impact of global warming.
Professor Thomas Stocker, one of the lead authors on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says the world is at a point where it must choose between "business as usual" and immediate action to limit that increase to just two degrees.
Inaction could result in a rise of global temperatures of four degrees by the end of the century, but he says either scenario will have an impact on local communities.
What could be most important is the effect warming will have on extreme events, making floods or droughts more severe or increasing the frequency of heatwaves.
"These are all things the local communities need to take into account when weighing their choices between a warmer world versus a world where climate change is limited," Professor Stocker told AAP on Tuesday.
"People have had almost 100 years of relatively stable climate to basically lay out their way of living.
"So any change would constitute, not a threat, but a challenge to these local communities."
In his home country of Switzerland, Prof Stocker said that might mean adapting to a region where there was less snow in winter.
In coastal communities it might be adapting to rising sea levels.
"This adaptation is a challenge," he said.
"Some aspects (of climate change) may actually constitute benefits.
"But change is always an investment into something that has not been there before."
The latest IPCC report, the organisations's first such comprehensive assessment since 2007, found that warming of the atmosphere was unequivocal and that human influence on climate systems was also clear.
It concluded that more than half of the warming that had occurred since 1951 was due to the emissions of greenhouse gases.
"As this problem is a global problem created by local emissions of greenhouse gases, the solution must also lie with reducing the local emissions of greenhouse gases," Prof Stocker said.
"That requires action by everybody."
Prof Stocker presented an overview of the IPCC's findings at the Greenhouse 2013 conference in Adelaide on Tuesday.
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