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Posts Tagged adaptation

The Gore synthesis: where we are now, where we are heading, and what we need to do Gareth Renowden Jan 22

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This is the five minute condensed version of the talk I gave in Gore at the Coal Action Network Aotearoa Summerfest (a somewhat optimistic title, given the chilly and wet weather last weekend).

It’s too late to avoid damaging climate change, because it’s already happening. Weather extremes — floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and storms — are on the increase, dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice is affecting northern hemisphere weather patterns, and accelerating ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica points towards a rapid increase in sea level. And the climate commitment, the 30 years it will take the planet to get back into energy balance once atmospheric CO2 is stabilised, guarantees that we will see much worse long before we see any benefit from action we take today.

Everything we do now to cut emissions will help us to avoid the very worst impacts — the almost unimaginable stuff that will be happening by the middle of this century — so it’s really worth doing.

To avoid future damage being catastrophic, we need emissions cuts to be made as if this were wartime. The global economy has to be switched from fossil fuel burning to clean energy as fast as possible — as if our very civilisation depended on it, because it does. Every year of delay now is a year more in the 2040s and 2050s of the very worst the climate system will throw at us. Every year of delay will make the job harder.

We need to go beyond stabilising atmospheric CO2 levels, and remove much of carbon emitted since the industrial revolution if we are to avoid losing much of the low lying land to long term sea level rise.

We need to be working now to futureproof New Zealand (and everywhere else) as much as possible. We must not lock our economies into high emissions pathways by investing in fossil fuel extraction or emissions-intensive agriculture. We must put in place policies to deal with sea level rise as it happens, but they will have to focus on managed retreat — at least until atmospheric CO2 is on a downwards trend. We need to focus on developing economic and social resilience, to enable us to recover from the inevitable shocks caused by rapid climate change.

This has to be the reality that our governments confront. Getting them to face up to the full seriousness of climate change is not going to be easy, but it’s going to have to be done.

*****

I often find that preparing a talk crystallises my thinking around an issue, and that was certainly the case here. Reviewing the climate events of the last year, looking forward to the near future, and considering our options as climate change begins to really bite left me feeling rather gloomy — but the energy and enthusiasm of the CANA crowd, committed to preventing lignite mining in Southland and to phasing out coal mining throughout New Zealand, did a lot to put a smile back on my face.

Below the fold is an expanded version of the notes I prepared for my talk, with links to supporting material (as I promised to the audiences in Gore)…

Where we are now

Every year since 1976 has been above 20th century average [NOAA National Climate Data Centre]

2012 9th/10th warmest year (see link above)

  • Warmest La Niña year
  • 9 out 10 warmest years this century
  • UKMO forecast new record in 2013 [Hot Topic]

Arctic sea ice rapid decline continues — new record minimum [National Snow and Ice Data Centre]

Greenland ice sheet record melt [Arctic Report Card]

NH weird weather linked to Arctic ice decline: In this section I described how the summer sea ice decline leads to a warm Arctic ocean in autumn and early winter, and the effect this has on jetstream behaviour (with much waving of arms). [Good overview at Climate Central]

Extreme weather is where climate bites

  • Aussie heatwave + fires
  • US warmest ever year
  • US drought
  • Floods & intense rainfall: – Pakistan, Nigeria, England’s wettest year
  • Sandy
  • The new normal

CO2 = 394 ppm – emissions still growing 2.5ppm per year [CO2Now]

Weak emissions policies: In this section, I described how the persistent framing of environmental protection as having to be balanced against economic activity, coupled with industry lobbying to reduce environmental protections and limit the costs of action to reduce emissions combine to create a lack of political will to address climate change. As a result national and international policies have been weakened or left becalmed.

Where we are heading

4ºC of warming is looking more and more likely… [World Bank report: Climate Progress, Hot Topic]

2ºC in rear view mirror: there’s still a chance, but it’s getting slimmer by the day

Sea level likely to rise 24 metres if atmospheric COs stabilises at 400 – 450 ppm [Science Daily]: the only question is how long it will take.

Scary stuff

Realities

Damaging climate change is unavoidable: climate commitment – 30 years warming in the pipeline

We have to cut net emissions to zero, then we have to take carbon out of the atmosphere

  • 350.org (but 300 would be better)
  • Oceans will work against us
  • Technology not ready (yet)

Need “wartime” emissions cuts

  • The longer you leave it, the harder it gets to cut
  • The longer you leave it, the worse the unavoidable damage
  • Geoengineering seems almost inevitable

Futureproofing NZ

  • Resilience
  • Self-sufficiency
  • Coastal retreat – Christchurch!
  • Do not lock economy into high emissions
  • Coal, lignite
  • Emissions intensive agriculture (dairy)

Coal deposits are not assets, they’re liabilities!

A challenge to the dream of reason Gareth Renowden Mar 13

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This article by David Schlosberg, professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney was first published earlier today at The Conversation. It’s an excellent and forthright overview of the challenges we will face in coming to terms with the reality of climate change.

When thinking of the challenges we face in responding to climate change, it is time to admit that our political focus has been fairly narrow: limiting emissions and moving beyond carbon-based energy systems. For 30 years, prevention has been the stated goal of most political efforts, from UNFCCC negotiations to the recent carbon tax.

For anyone paying attention, it is clear that such efforts have not been enough. And now we have entered a new era in the human relationship with climate change, with a variety of broad and different challenges.

The first of our current challenges is to admit that we will not stop climate change. Prevention is no longer an option. The natural systems that regulate climate on the planet are already changing, and ecosystems that support us are shifting under our feet.

We will be a climate-challenged society for the foreseeable future, immersed in a long age of adaptation. What we might have to adapt to, what an adapted society might look like, and how we design a strategy to get there are all open questions.

One of the hopeful signs is that, even if many national governments are not preventing climate change, there is a growing concern for adaptation at the local level.

Climate change challenges the whole enlightenment project — the dream that reason leads us to uncover truths, and those truths lead to human progress and improvement.

We imagine we live in a rational, enlightened society. In such a place, experts would identify issues to be addressed, and goals to be reached, in response to our creation of climate change. Scientific knowledge would be respected and accepted (after peer review, of course), and policy would be fashioned in response.

The reality is that we frequently have direct intervention explicitly designed to break the link between knowledge and policy; we have seen just how easy it is for power to trump and corrupt knowledge, on a global scale. In fact, organised climate change denialists, and the political figures that support them, have done more to damage the ideals of the enlightenment than any so-called postmodern theorist.

The key adaptive challenge is to rebuild a constructive relationship between scientific expertise, the public, and policy development. It may be that the necessary engagement of scientific expertise with local knowledges and interests will help rebuild some hope of human progress.

How do we play fair?

Climate change will undermine many of the ecological foundations of our ability to provide for basic needs.

Clearly, one of the key challenges is going to be how the burden is distributed, and how we respond to the vulnerability of people to climatic shifts and adjustments — from drought and floods, to health issues ranging from disease to heatstroke, to food security, to environmental migrations.

Even more challenging, however, is the reality that our emissions undermine the environments of vulnerable people elsewhere: Bangladesh, the horn of Africa, small island states, New Orleans.

And, of course, our actions now — given the delay between emissions and impact — will harm people in the future. So our responsibilities of justice now extend over vast stretches of geography and time.

That’s a lot of ethical challenges to face up to — or not. So how might we begin to address the challenges of climate justice?

Importantly, local communities can be thoroughly involved in both mapping their own vulnerabilities and designing adaptation policies. Perceptions of vulnerability will differ across stakeholder groups — indigenous peoples, farmers, and tourism managers might have a different sense of what is made vulnerable through climate change.

Local participation and deliberation — basic rights themselves — can help us to understand and determine the distinct and local environmental needs of various communities, and so plan for adaptation.

Such adaptation strategies can help to address climate justice.

Governing complexity

For all of those conspiracy theorists who think climate change is a leftist conspiratorial plot to develop a UN-based world government — you have got to be kidding. The UNFCCC represents a failure of global governance on a scale we’ve never seen before.

We may be dealing with an issue with a level of complexity that human beings are simply not capable of addressing. Climate change will certainly challenge our adaptive abilities more than anything else the species has faced.

The issue represents a different kind of problem for governments. It will demand multi-scale, widely-distributed, networked, flexible, anticipatory, and adaptive responses on the part of governments from the global down to the local. Climate change will require a radical re-thinking of the very nature of governance, and the adoption of new forms.

We need to take a long, hard look at ourselves (and nature)

But the major challenge of climate change, of course, is whether or not we are capable of changing our currently destructive relationship with the rest of nature. Key here is the reality that, in bringing climate change upon ourselves, we have demonstrated that the very construction of how we immerse ourselves in the natural world, and how we provide for our basic needs, is simply not working.

In fact, our relationship with nature is undermining the lives we’ve constructed. We imagine ourselves removed from the systems and relationships that support us, and so cause these massive disruptions in the life processes around us.

Our continued refusal to recognise ourselves as animals embedded in ecosystems has resulted in the undermining of those systems that sustain us. That’s our key problem, our central challenge.

Thankfully, there are growing examples of alternatives, and of models for adapting to a climate-challenged society. Many groups and movements are rethinking and restructuring the ways we interact with the natural world as we provide for our basic needs — around sustainable energy, local food security, and even crafting and making.

These new materialist movements offer alternative ways of relating to the nonhuman systems that sustain us, and illustrate the possibility of redesigning and restructuring our everyday lives based in our immersion in natural systems. After 30 years of failing in our response to climate change, we may yet demonstrate that human beings still have the capacity to adapt.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Vidal’s voyage to Durban Bryan Walker Nov 28

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How better to journey to the climate conference at Durban than through the African countries along the way which are already grappling with climate change? That’s the route John Vidal, the Guardian’s environment editor, has been following over the past ten days and reporting on in a series of articles.

He started in Egypt. The impacts of climate change are difficult to disentangle from natural coastal processes and the effects of human activities on the flow of the Nile, but an inexorably rising sea level and the increasing intensity of storms threaten increased salination of groundwater and soil as well as inundation. Extreme heat will also take its toll on city life.

Sudan was next. A Sudanese researcher reports drought and extreme flooding becoming more frequent, temperatures rising in winter, extreme — good and bad — years now more common and rainfall patterns changing. If temperatures continue to rise, as is predicted over the next 50 years, Sudan can expect more desertification, and more tension between traditionally hostile groups. The country is not well placed to adapt to changes in climate, stressed as it is by endemic poverty, ecosystem degradation, complex conflicts and limited access to markets, infrastructure and technology. In South Sudan changes in rainfall patterns threaten crops and livestock.

In Uganda Vidal visited a coffee-growing village.

 One by one, the farmers, who mostly cultivate two acres of land each, tell us what they have observed in their lifetimes. “The springs are drying up”; “we find we can only plant crops twice’; “the coffee has started behaving differently; it flowers even as it fruits”; “we have more diseases”; “we have lost 20% of our income”; “there is less water from the mountain”.

The villagers say they have no scientific understanding of why it is hotter and there is less rain, but they instinctively believe it’s because there are fewer trees, and argue that they should plant more. And they had something to say to the negotiators at Durban:

“We must start with mitigation. Our message to the world leaders and the countries meeting in South Africa is to talk less and act more”, says Januario Kamalha, a villager.

Vidal moved on to Kenya where he reports the ambitious plans to continue the legacy of Wangari Maathai in massive tree-planting projects and to build one of Africa’s biggest wind farms near Lake Turkana. He includes an extract from the environment department’s official assessment of what has happened in the past 20-30 years:

“Rainfalls have become irregular and unpredictable, when it rains [the] downpour is more intense, extreme and harsh weather is now the norm. Since the 1960s both minimum (night time) and maximum (daytime) temperatures have been warming. Rainfall has increased variability year to year, there is a general decline in the main rainfall season and drought in the long rains season is more frequent and prolonged. On the other hand, there are more rains during September to February. This suggests that the short rains are expanding into what is normally the hot and dry period of January and February.”

An official in the environment department sums it up:

’We are vastly affected by climate change. The trends are now extreme. We are seeing adverse effects everywhere. When no crops grow, we have to seek aid. Our economy is greatly affected, so adaptation is our priority.’

In South Africa Vidal visited Ocean View near Capetown, where 75 fisherwomen each own a small 5 metre-long boat and go one mile out in the giant Atlantic swells two or three times a week to catch rock lobsters. They know that fish stocks are affected adversely by a variety of factors, including poaching and over-fishing, but they are convinced that climate change now plays a part.

“We the fisher people know what we see, and we can see changes. The lobsters are hibernating for longer, and their shells are softer and more fragile than they were. Their breeding cycles are being disrupted. The sea temperature is definitely warmer than it used to be. The seas are much rougher these days and people are scared to go out. The wind comes up bigger than before. The weather patterns seem to have changed too.”

Vidal sums his journey up in a final article.

From north to south the broad observations are remarkably similar. More floods, droughts, storms and changing seasons are being experienced: the heatwaves are getting longer and more frequent; the storms more intense; the nighttime temperatures higher; the farmers see new diseases and pests; and the growing seasons appear disrupted. On top of that, the marginal areas are turning to desert and cities are becoming unbearably hot. The peer-reviewed science is still sketchy, but it’s the best there is in a continent starved of research funds and it is consistent with the latest models done by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But as the evidence continues to mount and the pain begins to be experienced in some of the poorer parts of the world there is little sign that the rich countries are preparing to tackle the issue seriously  at Durban or anywhere else:

… some leaders of the rich and big-emitting countries have lost interest and political momentum and want to consign the talks, like those on world trade, to a never-ending, never-achieving, low-grade, low-profile discussion to take place in backrooms without anyone listening or caring much. They may profess concern, but there is little evidence they want to act.

The 175 or more developing countries are not taking this submissively.

[They are] talking more as one, and the great illusion trick of the rich world is wearing thin. What has changed, they ask? The science of climate change is firmer than it ever was. A 2C-4C temperature rise still means that Africa fries and the polar bears die out, that Bangladesh and Egypt drown, the droughts in Latin America and Ethiopia continue to worsen, and the poorest communities and small-island states, who have the least resources to adapt, will be hurt the hardest.

Vidal is hardly optimistic. He ends with the comment that convincing the US to stop playing with the lives of the poorest or China to brake their economic rise may be too much to expect. Nevertheless he’s right to put his journalism at the service of those who are already discovering in their vulnerable lives what climate change means. Maybe the rich world will prove impervious to moral appeal. But the advocacy must continue and be reiterated again and again so that at least we cannot claim ignorance of the human effects of ever-rising greenhouse gas emissions. I often think how repetitive I feel my own writing about climate change has become as the years go by and little appears to change, at least at the political level. But there’s no escape from that repetition. The twin themes of the reality of the science and the injurious human impacts of climate change must go on being sounded until the world wakes up to what we are doing to ourselves.

The Climate Show #22: Durban doubts & Renwick on extremes Gareth Renowden Nov 25

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A crisp and crunchy show this week, as Gareth and Glenn interview Dr James Renwick about the IPCC’s cautious new report on extreme weather and the riskier future we all face. With added ruminations on the potential slowdown in international action at the Durban conference, record greenhouse gas levels reached in 2010, the prospect of “hyper warming” and the release of some lightly warmed over stolen emails. No debunking a la Cook this week, but he’ll be back soon, and we have news of the world’s first hybrid jet aircraft.

Watch The Climate Show on our Youtube channel, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, listen to us via Stitcher on your smartphone or listen direct/download from the link below the fold…

Follow The Climate Show at The Climate Show web site, and on Facebook and Twitter.

The Climate Show

News & commentary: [0:04:30]

Rich nations ‘give up’ on new climate treaty until 2020 — Ahead of critical talks and despite pledge for new treaty by 2012, biggest economies privately admit likelihood of long delay: Fiona Harvey in the Guardian

But Chris Huhne disagrees.

And Gummer, Prescott and Jay are more upbeat, as is Mark Lynas, adviser to the Maldives.

And just to underline how stupid that all is, the WMO reports record GHG levels in 2010
Reuters, WMO Bulletin.

Which might mean we’re on the way to ’hyperwarming’.

Fresh round of hacked climate science emails leaked online: A file containing 5,000 emails has been made available in an apparent attempt to repeat the impact of 2009′s similar release.

Two year old turkey for Thanksgiving: CRU emails part deux, and Stephan Lewandowsky at The Conversation.

Interview [0:27:00]

Dr James Renwick, principal scientist, climate, at NIWA talks to us about the IPCC’s latest report – the SREX, or Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation.

See also: http://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2011/11/21/nz-faces-moral-obligations-as-climate-changes-hit-scientist/, and all links to report here: Stormy weather: we’re making it worse, and there’s more on the way.

Solutions [0:54:00]

California hits 1GW of rooftop solar.

Turning Commercial Jets into Hybrids.

Google drops some projects… A “Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal” initiative launched to drive down the cost of generating solar power was listed among the Google undertakings being nixed. “At this point, other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level,” he added.

Thanks to our media partners: Idealog Sustain, Sciblogs, Scoop and KiwiFM.

Theme music: A Drop In The Ocean by The Bads.

Hotspots hit poor hardest Bryan Walker Jun 04

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Another report this week drives home the message that the world’s poorer people are going to suffer the early and potentially devastating effects of climate change. The report is the work of the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) programme associated with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a group of food research organisations.

The report, Mapping Hotspots of Climate Change and Food Insecurity in the Global Tropics, was produced by a team of scientists responding to what CCAFS describes as an urgent need to focus climate change adaptation efforts on people and places where the potential for harsher growing conditions poses the gravest threat to food production and food security.

The researchers identified places around the world where the arrival of stressful growing conditions could be especially disastrous.  They are areas highly exposed to climate shifts, where survival is strongly linked to the fate of regional crop and livestock yields, and where chronic food problems indicate that farmers are already struggling and they lack the capacity to adapt to new weather patterns.

For example, the report points to large parts of South Asia, including almost all of India, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa — chiefly West Africa — where there are 369 million food-insecure people living in agriculture intensive areas that are highly exposed to a potential five percent decrease in the length of the growing period. That’s a big enough change to significantly affect food yields and food access for people — many of them farmers themselves — already living on the edge.

Higher temperatures are also likely to exact a toll, the report indicates. Today, there are 56 million food-insecure and crop-dependent people in parts of West Africa, India and China who live in areas where, by the mid-2050s, maximum daily temperatures during the growing season could exceed 30 degrees. This is close to the maximum temperature that beans can tolerate, while maize and rice yields may suffer when temperatures exceed this level. For example, a study last year in Nature found that even with optimal amounts of rain, African maize yields could decline by one percent for each day spent above 30 degrees.  This map shows where the threatened areas are:

GISTEMPFig E201104

The intention of the report is to identify regions where adaptation measures are likely to be most urgently required. Crop production and livestock capacity are likely to be severely affected. One of the researchers commented on the need to move quickly on innovative solutions to meet the challenges if future serious food security and livelihood problems are to be avoided.

Time journalist Bryan Walsh’s blog remarks that the report is a reminder of one of the inescapable facts of global warming politics: those who are least responsible for the problem, those who are already living close to the edge, are those who will almost certainly suffer the most. The implication he draws is surely correct:

’That leaves much of the responsibility in the hands of the developed nations, whose wealth will shield them from the worst impacts of climate change – provided they plan well. Reducing emissions is a must, to blunt the worst effects of warming.  But adaptation will be just as important – if not more so… In short, we’ll need to help with the hard work of international development – which in a hotter world, is all but synonymous with climate adaptation.’

In obvious exasperation with lack of progress on mitigation he pushes the cause of adaptation:

’As diplomats gather for yet another round of climate negotiations – this time in Bonn – I’d rather see governments make concrete pledges on adaptation, foreign aid and technological development, instead of another empty promise about preventing temperature rise or keeping the atmosphere’s carbon concentrations at a ‘safe’ level. Action now is worth a lot more than promise tomorrow.’

It’s certainly a cause worth pleading, although not one that is likely to have much traction if New Zealand’s recent budget is any indication.  For yet another year the small proportion of our gross national income devoted to aid has suffered a cut. Caritas politely says how regrettable this is.  I think I’d have chosen a stronger adjective.

No matter how impervious politicians appear to the hardships global warming is beginning to impose on the poor and will impose on generations to come it’s important to keep hammering the message, if only to bear witness, as Stephen Gardiner’s recently reviewed book, A Perfect Moral Storm, puts it. There may be some ethical embers lying dormant which might yet be fanned into a blaze. Here’s a short video from CGIAR which brings viewers face to face with those who already grapple with climate change.

There are a couple more of the videos, on Ghana and Kenya, which can be accessed here.

BBC News carries some useful comments on the report, and John Vidal’s Poverty Matters blog in the Guardian is worth a look.

Listener gets serious about sea level Bryan Walker May 15

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As I walked past the magazine stand at the supermarket this week my eye was caught by the front cover of the this week’s Listener (on sale last week). ’Rising sea levels & extreme weather — why NZ needs to get serious,’ it said. A cautious peek inside suggested Ruth Laugeson’s article might deserve a comment on Hot Topic so I parted with four dollars and brought it home to look more closely.  It does indeed deserve mention here if only because it’s the sort of straightforward treatment of climate change that we should be able to expect of serious journalism. Laugeson has been reading Mark Hertsgaard’s book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, which I reviewed a few weeks back on Hot Topic. Hertsgaard argues that we must plan adaptation to the now unavoidable changes at the same time as working to avoid much worse and likely unmanageable change.

Laugeson has enquired about how local government is faring in New Zealand with its adaptation planning, discussing the question with Local Government New Zealand president Lawrence Yule. His overall feeling is that there’s something of a vacuum nationally. Some councils are working hard, but progress is patchy. There are vocal mayors who say that climate change is a lot of rubbish and local bodies shouldn’t be drawn into it. Work that is being done by some councils includes mapping coastal hazard zones likely to be at risk from inundation and storm surges over the next 50 to 100 years, and Laugeson provides interesting examples of outcomes such as restriction of new developments or requirements for new housing to be relocatable.  Difficult times lie ahead over decisions as to when to defend the coastline and when to let the sea come in. Developers use the Environment Court to fight councils who put obstacles in the way of development in vulnerable areas.

What support is central government giving the local councils? Not a lot, by the sound of it. The Ministry for the Environment has given a baseline guidance of 0.5m sea level rise by 2100, with the advice to consider higher rises. (Reported here two years ago on Hot Topic.) But Yule thinks central government should make a ruling on what level councils should plan for, revising it as necessary as new scientific data becomes available. The environment minister Nick Smith appeared to agree in 2009 that a National Environmental Standard on sea-level rise should be prepared, which would give legislative backing to councils when defending their policies in the Environment Court. But work has stopped on that, and Smith claims that the current guidance does not need revision — it is ’fair, balanced advice relative to the uncertainties and long time horizon.’

Laugeson’s narrative is much fuller than this brief outline. She also includes some sidebars. One looks at the question of how high the sea will go; it identifies the difficulty of estimating how the ice caps are going to behave in response to the global warming and provides a list of recent scientific predictions, all of them higher than that of the 2007 IPCC report on which the Ministry for the Environment bases its guidance. Another sidebar takes a quick look at what we’re doing to cut emissions, noting that today’s forestry credits are tomorrow’s forestry debits when the trees are cut down, and concluding that it needs optimism to think that we will meet our 2020 emissions reduction target. A third lengthy box covers the thinking of James Hansen and gives information about his NZ tour.

There was a time when journalists writing articles on themes such as this would have felt obliged to ring up someone from the denialist Climate Science Coalition and duly report that some scientists consider that predictions of sea level rise are greatly exaggerated. (The habit dies hard: I notice the Herald report on James Hansen’s arrival gratuitously introduced the observation ’While he has been criticised as an alarmist…’) It’s good therefore to see a lengthy and well-written article in a major magazine simply accepting the mainstream science and focusing on the adequacy of the political response to it. More such reporting would surely see more of the public understanding that human-caused climate change is real and thinking seriously about how we address it.

Adapting to climate change in Vietnam and the Philippines Bryan Walker Apr 27

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I stumbled across a documentary programme on BBC World during the weekend, Nature Inc. It visited two Asian regions where the impacts of climate change are being experienced and described the active local measures under way to cope with them. It’s the sort of programme we ought to be seeing a great deal more of as the evidence of climate change effects accumulate around the world. The narrator presumably felt obliged to mention in passing that sceptics dispute the impacts of climate change identified by the local people, but that kind of disputing will surely wither in the face of the realities such populations are facing. Facing with energy and purpose in the two cases covered by the short documentary.

The first section of the documentary went to the region of Albay in the Philippines. In the office of the Governor, Joey Salceda, preparations were under way for the evacuation of some tens of thousands of residents from beach areas which might have been at risk from the tsunami following the Japanese earthquake. In 2006 a typhoon of enormous force had hit the region with the loss of 600 lives. The governor now has a zero casualty policy, and the successful evacuation in advance of the possible tsunami was an evidence of this.

Weather-related disasters are common in the region, and the people are in no doubt that they are being worsened by climate change. The protestations of the sceptics are not for them. A fisherman commented simply on the observable change from thirty years ago:

’Today the typhoons are getting stronger. The weather is very erratic. It’s very dangerous now to go fishing.’

The governor speaks of the investment that is being made in disaster risk reduction. It is not only making people safer, but also better off. The local economy has grown while the national economy has been stagnant. The price of doing nothing, the governor says, is more than triple the price of doing something. Food for work programmes for low income families have resulted in canal clearing and reforestation and the restoration of mangroves as a barrier to storm surges. An ambitious resettlement programme is under way to move people from areas vulnerable to sea level rise and storm surges to new housing built on higher ground. Sweet potato cultivation, much less vulnerable to storm damage, is encouraged to take the place of rice.

But the governor in his busy office acknowledges that these are band aid solutions. The only long term solution he sees is for the world to agree on an international accord.

’Every day I pray for a psychic shift in the world view of the national leaders of the world. Adaptation is not the only answer, although adaptation is very critical at this point for us. It is our imperative, but mitigation is now very definitely the global imperative.’

The second section of the programme went to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. Already a million hectares of rice paddy fields have been contaminated by salt water. The Vietnamese government has begun planning for a one metre rise in sea level by the end of the century. The consequences of doing nothing would see more than a third of the Mekong Delta flooded by then.

A spokeswoman for the Tra Vinh Commune People’s Committee was direct:

’I can tell you climate change is having a big impact on agricultural production and on the lives of the people because of the intensified drought, the saline water coming in, as well as the stormy weather. They’ve all had a very negative effect on agriculture and as a result on the income of the farmers.’

Mangroves are the first line of defence, forming a natural barrier against sea erosion. However half of Vietnam’s mangroves have already been cut down, mainly for shrimp farming. The documentary recorded the work of a German international aid organisation working with villagers in the group management of mangrove replanting programmes. The villagers are finding many benefits from better storm barrier protection, less sea water contamination of rice crops, and the harvesting of the sea life which inhabits the mangroves such as crabs and clams. Their daily income has increased.

One rice farmer has adopted adaptive measures against salt water intrusion which have produced a big improvement in his yield. He floods his fields from the canal, but then straight away pumps the water out again instead of leaving the fields flooded as has long been normal practice. The ensuing problem of weeds he deals with by planting the rice in rows and weeding between them, an operation which improves the rate of growth.

Biotechnology research is also under way in laboratories with the intent of producing rice varieties which will better cope with such problems as salinity. The scientist who spoke with the documentary crew wanted to make the point that that the scientists spend time talking with and learning from the farmers, a feature which is often emphasised in studies of adaptation.

It’s heartening to see adaptation under way in such vulnerable areas of the world, and good to know that it can even bring some improvements in living conditions. But I have no doubt that the Vietnamese working on these issues would echo the sentiments of the governor of Albay who prays for global attention to the mitigation of what can only be the worsening effects of climate change.

Bangladesh: lessons in adaptation Bryan Walker Mar 25

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A basket case” said Henry Kissinger of Bangladesh in 1974 after the civil war that liberated it from West Pakistan (the side he backed). Mark Hertsgaard in Hot (reviewed here) reports a rather different picture. I thought it worth dwelling longer on what he has to say about Bangladesh than was possible in the review because he shows the Bangladeshis as far from passive even in the face of what look like daunting odds, and because he underlines the case for assistance.

Bangladesh’s ambassador to the US, in conversation with Hertsgaard, firmly refutes the Kissinger perspective.

“We are now feeding ourselves, 140 million people. We have cut our population growth rate in half. All Bangladeshi children are immunized against major childhood diseases. Our economy has grown an average 5.5 percent a year over the last seventeen years. We are not a basket case at all.”

Hertsgaard acknowledges the advances, but recognises the threat they are under from climate change. The vulnerability of Bangladesh is well known. Two-thirds of the country stands less than sixteen feet above sea level. The three feet of sea level rise that Hertsgaard regards as unavoidable will displace an estimated 20 million Bangladeshis. Soil and water in coastal regions are already becoming too salty to deliver traditional rice yields. There’s plenty to suggest that Bangladesh appears doomed in the face of fifty more years of global warming. However, says Hertsgaard, spend some time inside the country and things look different.

He singles out the human factor. It counts for a lot in adapting to climate change. Bangladeshi biologist, Saleemul Huq, an influential advocate for the poor within the global climate change discussions, spoke to him of the resilience developed by people who have been dealing with floods and other disasters for centuries, “so they have greater capacity than rich people who are not used to facing catastrophe”. The months Huq spent researching among river communities of fishing families were an eye-opener for him, brought up in more favoured circumstances.

“I got to know the poor as individuals, not as an abstraction. I saw they were extremely resilient and often ingenious at coping with the circumstances they faced.”

Huq and others have subsequently developed an approach called Community-Based Adaptation in which experts on climate change impacts work together with poor communities in a dialogue of equals where local solutions which draw on the experience of local people can be devised.

Hertsgaard describes some of the adaptation measures he saw when visiting the Bangadeshi countryside. In one village a farmer had taken some simple steps to protect his family against the storm surges of cyclones. With NGO help he had elevated his mud and thatch house five feet above ground, on a mound of packed dirt with hard dirt steps leading up to the entrance. He explained to Hertsgaard that it had worked well and that during the last two cyclones they hadn’t had to go to the cyclone centre, which gets very crowded and short on food and water. Their own food, rice and fish, was kept dry during the floods in a basket made from tightly woven strands of bamboo, which floats.

In another village they relied on “floating gardens”. The villagers wove water hyacinth plants into a watertight mesh. The one Hertsgaard saw measured about fifteen feet long and ten feet wide and floated in one of the many ponds in the village. The mesh was covered with a few inches of topsoil, which was planted with vegetables. Since the structure floated it simply rose higher in flood inundation. The same village was also seeking to diversify its income sources by establishing, with NGO help, a tree nursery that grew mango and other fruit trees as well as medicinal herbs. Seedlings were sold in the local market.

These are very local and specific small measures, but the Bangladeshi government, in spite of its frequent dysfunctional bouts, has also been working on the wider picture for the past twenty years. With help from foreign donors it has invested $10 billion to bolster defences against floods, cyclones and drought. It has also pursued climate-focused agricultural research and is testing varieties of rice that could survive immersion in salt water for longer than two weeks. If successful that would help farmers cope with flash floods that mix sea and river water and will occur more frequently as sea levels rise. The government has developed an action plan to prepare for climate change on many fronts. But it will need money. Early estimates suggest that the first five years of work on the plan would cost about $5 billion. Some of this Bangladesh itself will pay for, but it can’t meet it all and it calls on the international community “to provide the resources needed to meet the additional costs of building climate resilience”.

Huq puts the obligation of the rich countries this way:

“It is poor countries that are suffering the brunt of climate change, but it is the rich countries’ greenhouse gas emissions that caused this problem in the first place. If we follow the principle of ‘the polluter pays’ they are obligated to pay damages. It is important to understand that this is not charity, like money given to poor countries for economic development. This is compensation.”

US chief climate change negotiator Todd Stern told the Copenhagen climate summit that he “absolutely” rejected the suggestion that the US owes a “climate debt” to the rest of the world. Hertsgaard comments that as a lawyer himself Stern must surely know that in a court of law damages are damages, regardless of one’s intent.

I appreciated the attention Hertsgaard gave to the way Bangladesh is trying to face up to the challenges of climate change adaptation. The changes are real for them. They may be congruent with challenges they have long faced as part of their normal life, but they are mounting and threatening. Some of the adaptive measures he describes may turn out to have only been buying time as the sea continues its inexorable rise, but they are worthy of respect. They are also worthy of assistance.

The poor ask far less of life than we are accustomed to demand and the help they are seeking is not large by our standards.  We would help them most, of course, by seriously taking in hand the task of drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but while we continue to refuse this we at least owe them a measure of compensatory assistance.

Adapting to Climate Change Bryan Walker Mar 01

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Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds, Values, GovernanceAdapting to Climate Change is a reassuring sounding title, but the content of this book makes it clear that there will be nothing straightforward or easy as human communities try to ready themselves for the coming climate crisis. Editors Neil Adger, Irene Lorenzoni and Karen O’Brien have been doing on research in the area for a number of years and worked closely together in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on adaptation. They convened a conference in 2008 at the Royal Geographical Society in London and the resulting papers are the basis of this book, now published in a paperback edition.

It’s the social and political dimensions of adapting to climate change that the book is mainly concerned with. The 31 papers are grouped around the three headings which form the sub-title of the book: Thresholds, Values, Governance.  The thresholds chapters consider a variety of situations.  One paper looks at how human modification of ecosystem services, as in agriculture, can reduce adaptation capacity, suggesting that building ecological resilience may be an important contribution to successful adaptation (and mitigation). Another considers the potential engineering adaptations to protect London from flooding across the thresholds of stages of increase in sea level rise, emphasising the need to be prepared well in advance for the trajectory of the risk; 5.75 metres is considered the end point for engineering adaptations. The puzzling extinction of the Norse Greenland settlement in the 15th century which figured dramatically in Jared Diamond’s book Collapse is the subject of a paper. It suggests a different conclusion from that explored by Diamond, but certainly some threshold factors, whatever they were, put an end to what appears to have been a successful centuries-long adaptation. In present time the capacity of an Inuit community in Arctic Canada to adapt to major changes in their ice environment raises threshold questions not only about the physical challenges, but also the impact on their cultural and community life.

The papers which discuss values are often a reminder that adaptation is undertaken by communities of people with cultural values and human rights that not only need to be respected but may also be the source of important input into the adaptive processes. One paper looks at a community of alpaca herders in the Peruvian Andes threatened by glacier retreat and the associated availability of water — their collective orientation and concern with continuity rather than economic growth is apparent in their discussions about how best to manage their future. Interviews with elderly people in the UK about their perception of and coping strategies for hot weather revealed how difficult it can be for many of them to perceive their vulnerability and think of being proactive in relation to heat waves. Another paper asks what an agricultural community does when it becomes apparent that building resilience to climate threats may mean moving away from short-term technological fixes and settling for a lower production level and lower returns. A flooding event in Boscastle, Cornwall is examined in a paper which suggests that there were adaptive strategies well understood by local people in the past which subsequent development of the village overlooked, leading to flooding consequences that might have been much less serious if the local knowledge had not been lost.  Relocation may be a possible, if drastic, adaptive response and one of the papers explores why that option was taken by some in drought-stricken Oklahoma in the 1930s and rejected by others. In general this section of the book digs away at the cultural factors which guide people as they make difficult decisions and changes, and the relative flexibility they display.

The values considerations impact on the governance issues associated with adaptation. One paper argues that adaptation must go beyond the laundry lists of potential options and constraints and beyond simplistic assertions that technology, information and money will sufficiently serve the purpose; the social dynamics of governance structures must also be understood and examined. Another paper reports a scheme in the Brazilian province of Ceará seeking to enable local participation in adaptation to drought conditions and to bring those marginalised by the prevailing patron-client governance into the public arena where their voice can be heard directly and the planning process thereby made more effective. Planning for adaptation to changing coastlines raises large governance questions as to how the people profoundly affected by coastal erosion and flooding can be properly engaged in the difficult decisions ahead, an issue addressed by one paper in relation to England’s east coast. On an international level cooperation between states in transboundary water management is already important and will only become more so as climate change progresses, an issue explored by one of the papers. The governance of adaptation funding for developing countries is a question of great importance for those countries and a chapter looks at the need for efficiency and fairness and responsiveness in the administration of that funding.

The book is not one of cheering examples of successful adaptation efforts, or of prescriptions of future adaptation measures. If there are prescriptions indicated they are more concerned with the underlying social and political factors which will need to be part of effective adaptation. It’s not a simple matter of applying the right technology or the correctly chosen course of action to achieve the necessary changes. That will be part of the picture, of course, but it is people and communities of people who have to adapt, and try to hold on to what they value as human beings and cultural groupings as they do so. The social sciences come into play and this book gives an indication of the wide front on which social researchers are operating and what their understandings have to offer. It’s an impressive array. The papers are specialised and directed mainly at researchers, policy makers and practitioners. However they are not inaccessible to the general reader prepared to pause and dwell on their substance and consider the implications for the massive social undertakings of adaptation.

There’s no triumphalism in the book. Adaptation is going to be a shaky process, and there must be real doubt about our capacity to achieve it in some of the situations in which it is required. Indeed the prospect, if fully appreciated, is surely a further spur to trying to prevent the extremes of global warming which lie ahead if we continue to exploit fossil fuels. The editors certainly don’t present adaptation as a substitute for preventing climate change in the first place. It will be challenge enough trying to adapt to the changed conditions which will accompany the 2 degrees of warming our politicians say we are setting as an upper limit. Adaptation to the 4 degrees of warming which we are actually on course for beggars the imagination. One fears that in that event the thoughtful explorations of issues represented in this book may be thrown into disarray by pressing urgencies of survival. There’s every reason to keep insisting that our political leaders get real with mitigation.

[Purchase via Hot Topic affiliates Fishpond (NZ), Amazon.com, Book Depository (UK, with free shipping worldwide).]

Heart of the city Bryan Walker Jan 27

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We tend to become riveted on the efforts of national governments to address greenhouse gas reductions, so far with dismal results. But as a valuable new study reminds us, city administrations can play a significant role in mitigation and with more immediate effect. Cities and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Moving Forward is to be published in the journal Environment and Urbanization in April and has been made available online in advance. The lead author is Daniel Hoornweg, lead urban specialist on Cities and Climate Change at the World Bank.

A large share of global greenhouse gas emissions is attributable to cities. But the study points to cities’ ability to respond to climate change at a local and proximate level; cities usually offer more immediate and effective communication between the public and the decision makers than national governments. Cities, say the authors, are credible laboratories of social change, with sufficient scale to bring about meaningful changes. The potential co-benefits of mitigation and adaptation are largest in cities.

The study proposes a path forward for cities which clearly measure and communicate their emissions. They can identify and tackle the largest issues first. They can get help from citizens, other cities and national governments. The study recognises the pragmatism with which cities have been able to tackle other issues such as waste management and water supply, seeing that as a likely indicator of the way they can address climate change.

Cities vary greatly in their per capita levels of greenhouse gas emissions, and the study includes many interesting analyses and comparisons. It is surprising — and encouraging — to see how much work has been done on the measurement of a large number of cities’ per capita emissions. The study refers to 100 for which peer-reviewed studies are available, discussing some of them in closer detail. In most countries per capita greenhouse gas emissions are lower in cities than the country-wide average, but there are often considerable differences between cities within the same country. For example, the per capita emission level in the USA is 23.59 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) per annum. The average level of emissions for New York residents is considerably less at 10.5 tCO2e, yet Denver’s approaches the national average at 21.5 tCO2e. The difference between the two cities is mainly attributable to New York’s greater density and much lower reliance on the automobile for commuting. A review of Denver’s emissions which includes the embodied emissions of material such as food and concrete coming into the city has emissions rising to 25.3 tCO2e per capita, which is above the national average.

Chinese cities are atypical in that, generally, their GHG emissions are, on average, much higher than per capita national averages. For example, Shanghai’s emissions are 12.6 tCO2e per capita, while national emissions are 3.4 tCO2e per capita. This reflects the high reliance on fossil fuels for electricity production, a significant industrial base within many cities and a relatively poor and large rural population, and hence a lower average per capita value for national emissions.

The study offers interesting material relating to Toronto where researchers have broken down the city into districts. Wealthy neighbourhoods and distant sprawling suburbs had significantly higher emissions, dramatically so by comparison with a dense inner-city neighbourhood with good access to public transportation.

Greenhouse gas inventories are obviously important in giving city government bodies reliable information to work with, to share with their citizens and to determine where best to direct mitigation efforts. The study considers that while the making of inventories is still an evolving process it is robust enough already to be operated by all cities, at least by those with more than a million inhabitants. I thought of Mayor Len Brown’s plans for emission reductions in Auckland over the next fifteen years when I read this, and realised that this important pre-requisite should be within that city’s reach.

A striking feature in the study for me was the table which lists the policy tools available for city-level action on climate change.  Transport figures heavily in the policy goals.  Land use zoning can be used to reduce trip lengths, to encourage transit-oriented development zones and to introduce traffic calming to discourage driving. The quality and linkages of public transport can be improved and its services expanded. Employee transport plans can be facilitated. Driving and parking restrictions can be applied, and softened somewhat for fuel-efficient vehicles. The city fleet can be made up of fuel-efficient vehicles. All these are mitigation measures, some of them regulatory, some service provisions. Unfortunately in New Zealand at present those relating to public transport would come up against the Minister of Transport’s benighted determination to put public transport on short rations and spend the money on new roads, but at least in the case of Auckland there are signs of steel in the new Mayor’s public transport intentions.

Next on the list are policy tools relating to building efficiency. Zoning regulations can promote multi-family and connected residential housing. Energy efficiency requirements can be part of building codes. Public and private retro-fitting programmes can be co-ordinated.

The increase of the local share of renewable and captured energy generation can be obtained by building codes requiring a minimum share of renewable energy, by district heating and cooling projects and by waste-to-energy programmes.

Adaptation appears on the list with measures to reduce vulnerability to flooding and increased storm events and to extreme heat. Tree-planting programmes and green roof requirements figure here.

City officials and elected representatives don’t have to scratch their heads and wonder where they can start in the battle to reduce emissions or adapt to the climate change impacts which can’t be avoided. Nor do they have to join the ’after you’ brigade of international governmental negotiators. They can get under way immediately, either to lower their emissions substantially or, if they are already low to keep them that way as the city grows or becomes more prosperous. Cities can also work co-operatively in their endeavours. Some of the largest are already doing so. The study remarks on the C40 organisation, a group of large cities committed to tackling climate change, currently chaired by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York. Relative to the world’s top nations they are collectively a very big player and anything they prove able to achieve must be significant in global terms.

As we watch what looks like the sad spectacle of implosion in the US attempts to tackle climate change at the national level one is wary of sounding enthusiastic about mitigation prospects, but this paper is nevertheless a positive reminder that not everything depends on a handful of anti-science Republican congressmen. Cities can carry hopes which their countries currently largely deny.

[Nick Lowe]

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