World ill-prepared to face new climate threats
Climate change has brought “key risks” that endanger lives and health worldwide, including storm surges and coastal flooding worsened by rising sea levels; infrastructure destruction and the disruption of power networks, communications, and health services by extreme weather; and the depletion of crop production due to droughts and floods, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said.
“If you look around the world today, people, cities, businesses and nations aren’t prepared for the climate-related risk we face now,” said Chris Field, the US professor who co-chaired the 309 scientists who drafted the report
“The climate changes that have already occurred have been widespread and have really had consequences. It’s not the case that climate change is a thing of the future.”
The report is designed to guide politicians as they devise policies to reduce heat-trapping emissions and make their infrastructure, agriculture and people more resilient to a warmer world. It aims to influence climate treaty talks among 194 nations that are working to devise an agreement next year to rein in global warming.
“The IPCC is a bell tower,” said Prof Field. “It is trying to allow the world to climb up to a high point so that it can see far and clearly into the future and to let people make smart decisions for their own purposes to use science to build a better world.”
The researchers documented how climate change affects everything from retreating glaciers in east Africa, the Alps, the Rockies, and the Andes, to the bleaching of corals in the Caribbean Sea and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
Mussel beds and migratory patterns for salmon are changing off the US west coast, grapes are maturing faster in Australasia, and birds are flying to Europe earlier in the year.
“One message that comes out very clearly is that the world has to adapt and the world has to mitigate,” Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, said in Yokohama, Japan. “The sooner we do that, the less the chances of some of the worst impacts of climate change.”
Kaisa Kosonen, political adviser to Greenpeace International, said: “It is not just polar bears, coral reefs, and rainforests that are under threat: it is us.”
The word “risk” appears more than 5,000 times in the wider underlying report that spans thousands of pages, said Ms Kosonen.
“The choices we make now will affect the risks we face for the rest of the century,” the authors wrote, while warning that the uncertainty surrounding future vulnerability is large. The scientists “reformulated the challenge of managing climate change into a challenge of managing risks”, said Prof Field.
Since 2007, “several periods of rapid food and cereal price increases following climate extremes in key producing regions indicate a sensitivity of current markets to climate extremes”, the panel wrote. Fisheries in the tropics will suffer as species migrate towards the poles, they said. Under all warming scenarios, the global stock of fish is projected to decline by 2100.
“This shows climate change is not a distant future threat to food,” Tim Gore, a climate campaigner at the development charity Oxfam International told reporters in Yokohama. “It is a clear and present danger.”
Shrinking glaciers are affecting water resources, and rising greenhouse gas emissions will raise the fraction of the global population facing water scarcity this century, the researchers wrote. Changes in food and water availability “disproportionately” affect the welfare of the rural poor.
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Projected changes could trigger the displacement of people, help instigate wars and threaten the physical integrity of low-lying countries because of the encroachment of rising seas, the report found.
Impacts on human health include injury, illness and death due to more intense heat waves, wildfires, increased under-nutrition due to lower availability, and food and water-borne diseases.
While the poorest people in countries of Africa, Latin America, and Asia are those most at risk from climate change, richer nations are not immune to its effects and also have to adapt, according to Chris Field, the US professor who co-chaired the 309 scientists who drafted the report.
“Vulnerability is not just concentrated in poor pockets or coastal areas,” he said. “There’s vulnerability throughout the world, from the tropics to the poles and the deserts to the rainforests. You just have to look at something like the impacts of Hurricane Sandy on New York to see that even a very wealthy area can be vulnerable to an extreme weather event.
‘‘Vulnerability in rich countries is usually experienced as economic losses while in poor countries it’s often existential — you get huge amounts of deaths. It’s not like we’re prepared anywhere.”
Global economic losses stemming from further warming of about 2ºC range from 0.2% of income to 2%, and losses are “more likely than not to be greater rather than smaller than this range,” the researchers wrote, citing “incomplete” estimates.
“The true cost of climate change cannot be represented just in monetary terms,” said Sandeep Chamling Rai, delegation head for the environmental group WWF. “There can be no cost put to losing a husband, a mother, a son or a daughter, and loved ones. There can be no cost to losing the home where, often, our previous generations settled hundreds of years ago. This is the true cost of inaction on climate change.”
Prof Field said that the rising trajectory of greenhouse emissions is projected to lead to more than 3ºC of additional warming this century. That is on top of the 0.85ºC of warming already observed since 1880. UN treaty negotiators aim to limit the total rise to 2ºC.
Economic losses accelerate with greater levels of warming, the researchers wrote, warning that little analysis has been done for levels of warming of 3ºC more than present. That amount of additional warming would lead to “extensive biodiversity loss”, they said.
Richard Tol, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex in England and the Vrije University in Amsterdam, asked for his name to be removed from the summary document because it concentrated too much on the negative effects of climate change, he said. Prof Tol is still a convening lead author of chapter 10.
The new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sets out the impacts of rising temperatures. Here are some of the key areas where effects will be felt
Major crops — wheat, rice, and maize — will see production hit by temperature increases of 2C or more in tropical and temperate regions, although some areas may see an increase in yields. Wheat and maize have already seen reduced yields in many regions and across the world. Food security could also be affected by changes to fisheries.
Annual global economic losses are difficult to estimate, but the impacts associated with a 2C temperature rise could be between 0.2%-2% of income, and are more likely to be higher rather than lower.
Economic growth is expected to slow as a result of climate change, making it harder to tackle poverty, particularly in developing countries. Food prices are expected to increase.
Up to 2050, climate change will mostly exacerbate existing health problems, and, across the 21st century, will lead to increases in ill-health, particularly in poorer countries. Health impacts include more heatwave-related deaths, increased likelihood of under-nutrition due to reduce food production, and increased risk of water, food, and insect borne diseases. There could be positive impacts, including fewer cold-related deaths but, overall, the negative impacts are likely to outweigh the positives.
More people are expected to be displaced over the 21st century, for example, by extreme weather events. Climate change could lead to a greater risk of violent conflicts, including civil war, by worsening causes such as poverty. Impacts such as rising sea levels could also have an effect on the territory of nation states and their critical infrastructure, while changes to sea ice, shared water resources, and fish stocks could increase rivalries between countries.
Dry areas of the world will see a reduction in water resources, with droughts likely to become more frequent. The percentage of the world’s population affected by water scarcity will increase, but so, too, will numbers affected by major river flooding. Water quality will be affected, with risks to drinking water quality. Water resources are already being affected by extreme rainfall and melting snow and ice.
Sea level rises will increase the risk of submergence, flooding, and erosion in coastal and low-lying areas.
Fisheries could be hit by shifts in the range and abundance of marine species. Increased acidity in oceans is a risk to coral reefs and polar regions.
A number of species will be at an increased risk of extinction as they face a host of threats, including climate change, habitat loss, pollution, and invasive species. Habitats could be dramatically altered, and increases in tree death and forest dieback are projected for many regions as a result of drought and rising temperatures.
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