The window of opportunity to avoid an amount of global warming that global leaders have agreed would be “dangerous” is rapidly closing, with just a decade left for the world to begin undertaking sweeping technological and governmental actions to rein in emissions of global-warming gases such as carbon dioxide, according to a new United Nations report released Sunday in Berlin. After that, it becomes far more difficult and expensive to cut emissions sufficiently to avoid dangerous amounts of warming.

Given recent emissions and temperature trends, the world is on track to see an increase in global average surface temperatures of up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century, the report says. This could have disastrous consequences by dramatically raising global sea levels, melting land-based ice sheets, and leading to more heat waves and extreme precipitation events, among other impacts.

See also: 7 Key Findings From the New UN Climate Science Report

The report, the third and final installment of the latest comprehensive review of climate science from the Nobel Prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC), analyzes more than 1,000 scenarios of potential economic growth and environmental changes to determine how to minimize global warming.

The report is simultaneously optimistic and grim in tone, since it concludes there is time and pre-existing technological knowledge available to meet the goals that leaders set out in a non-binding agreement in 2009, yet lays bare the sheer scope of the challenges that lie ahead.

Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chairman of the IPCC Working Group III, Jochen Flasbarth, State Secretary of the German Environment Ministry, Rejendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC and Jochen Schuette, State Secretary of the German Science Ministry, from left, pose for the media prior to a meeting of the UN IPCC in Berlin, Germany on April 7, 2014. Image: Michael Sohn/Associated Press

The central task for scientists, engineers and policymakers is to figure out how to facilitate continued economic and population growth, without also causing emissions to skyrocket at the same time, the report says.

Figuring out how to do that gets at the core of global-development issues and the sharp climate-policy divide between industrialized and developing nations. Government representatives meeting in Berlin last week to approve the report, objected to language in the widely read summary for policymakers that suggested developing countries have to do more to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, according to the New York Times. However, such language remained in the lengthy technical report. Text discussing transfers of funding to developing countries to assist them in growing their economies without boosting emissions was also removed from the summary,

The IPCC’s fifth assessment provides the foundation for upcoming rounds of negotiations to craft a new global climate treaty, starting with a high-level climate summit in New York this September, and culminating in another summit in Paris next year. The next treaty is supposed to be enforced by 2020.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the report underscores the need for action by 2015.

“So many of the technologies that will help us fight climate change are far cheaper, more readily available and better performing than they were when the last IPCC assessment was released less than a decade ago,” Kerry said in a statement. “This report makes very clear we face an issue of global willpower, not capacity.”

Here are some of the report’s key findings: