Paving the road to COP15: Adaptation and outreach

Climate Change brings remarkable modifications in weather events and climate, the last tending to a new climate geography. Should greenhouse emission rates continue to increase, society, which is already affected by climate change, will suffer these changes more severely.

Osvaldo F. Canziani, Doctor of Meteorology and former Co-Chairman of IPCC Working Group II 16/03/2009 15:30

The failure of the current policies and mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emisions and the IPCC’s conclusions make it clear that the still unattained stabilization of greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere brings hazards and risks, which already affect the water, food and physical security.

In this regard, the increasing world population – UN estimations bring the world population to 9.1 billion people about 2050 – and the fact that developing countries need to further progress, mean that GHG emissions will continue to increase. An additional word of warning arises from the fact that the quality of fossil fuels is decreasing and the return to dirty coal, replacing natural gas, is an adverse fact in many countries. This causes GHG emissions to build up, with the disadvantage of acid precipitations.

The crude economic interests, aiming at better living standards in every country, would continue reducing the possibilities of the COP to develop an operational UNFCCC protocol for a prompt reduction of GHG emissions. As such, a logical approach for COP15 is to devote time to activate adaptation actions and promote appropriate outreach. This suggestion does not mean that we leave out the mitigation issue. Since the entire human population will increasingly suffer the growing effects of the anthropogenic Earth’s warming, the present situation urges the adoption of adaptation strategies. In developing regions, these must practically start from scratch.

In this regard, in 1930, Niels Bohr stated that without observations there is no science. The current reduced availability of basic geophysical information, the lack of economic and social data, including health statistics, related to the climate impacts, as well as the faulty or inexistant monitoring of environmental processes, put many developing countries quite far from being able to react to climate change. Their capacity to know about their climate and climatic regions, to learn about their natural resources and services and to provide early warnings for adverse weather and climate events, cannot be viable without data. Therefore, the immediate step, just in line with the concepts lay down in the UNFCCC, is to bring the Parties of the Convention to implement in every detail UNFCCC Articles 4, 5 and 6.

At this moment and time, this suggestion may seem ridiculous to people regularly engaged in the scientific and political discussion related to the global environmental change. However, they are quite blind with respect to realities in developing countries. Experience gathered in many developing countries and the fact that objectives, like those stated in the UN Conventions, shall be basically implemented by society as a whole, make valid the principle that old people’s lack of consciousness about protecting the environment may be mitigated by an educated and informed young population. This implies that we should carry out outreach efforts at all levels of education, most probably also including the university and tertiary levels.

Furthermore, the lack of sound and reliable information put in serious doubt some estimated climate projections. This is heavily impacted by unrealistic future economic scenarios and the recent global financial crisis. They will need revision, which cannot be as quick as necessary because of the abovementioned shortcomings. This need puts more pressure on the UN bodies and, in particular COP15 and the developed countries to enhance the observation systems, implementing the three basic dominions: atmospheric, terestrial and oceanic, and building the necessary socio-economic information, as stated in the UNFCCC Article 5.

Osvaldo F. Canziani is a Doctor of Meteorology and former Co-Chairman of IPCC Working Group II.