WWF climate change adaptation expert Kit Vaughan talks about the limits of adaptation, and how climate change will shake the very foundations of our society.
 | Kit Vaughan, WWF Climate Change Adaptation Expert"People fear living up to the truth that they will have to adapt." (Photo: Vaughan) |
A certain amount of climate change is inevitable. How can we adapt to this?
That’s difficult to answer. We are not sure what the full extent of the effects will really look like and by when. What we are seeing now are the first easily observable effects, like glacial melt. But there is a certain scientific bandwidth regarding the projected changes. For example, there could be many meters of sea level rise or just 40 centimeters, although recently scientists said that current IPCC projections have underestimated sea level rise and we could be looking at as much as 1.5 meters by the end of the century and associated temperature increases. What we do know is that there is a scary future out there.
Mankind has met adaptation challenges before. What makes climate change different?
Adapting to climate change is not something new; we have been doing it as society for thousands of years. People and species have always adapted to changing climates. What is different is the speed and the scale of the changes we are facing.
In the last 300 or 400 years, we have built our society and economies on an assumed stable environment. If you look at houses built near a river, you see that they are all built in what people considered to be a fairly safe place, a few meters above the water, the highest tide, etc. But that is now changing, and so the baseline for our society changes.
So apart from thinking twice before buying waterfront property, what else will we have to consider?
We have been building houses to withstand a certain maximum of temperature change in the summer. What we are going to see in a world that is three, four, five degrees warmer is that our houses, hospitals, and schools will be too exposed to sun and heat. The same is true for biodiversity, ecosystems, and species. They have adapted to fit certain niches, and these niches are now changing and so will they. They are either forced to adapt, migrate, or go extinct.
The difficulty is how to support adaptation in a world with nine billion people, increased demands for food security and natural resources, and increasing climate stress, while you get more storms, more drought, and smaller crop yields and so on. The dynamics of our ecosystems and our societies are changing and we will have to learn how to adapt where possible. That is what adaptation is about: learning to live with these impacts, and learning to respond to these risks and building in resilience where possible.
What are the best ways to adapt?
For a society, good adaptation means good development. You would have to reduce other sources of stress on the system. Take a smallholder farmer society in Mali. They may have increased rainfall in the wetter season and less rain in the drier season. So they get more floods and then no rain and more droughts and temperature increases.
One of the ways to adapt could be to provide new seed varieties, and rainwater harvesting, but also develop new market and diversification opportunities to live with the new environment.
 | Picture Gallery (click on the image to start)See examples of how we can adapt to a changing climate |
And how can cities adapt?
If you look at adaptation in London, that would mean ensuring buildings are more resilient to heat extremes, changes in rainfall, and flooding. And you would have to build bigger infrastructure that helps control storm surges up the River Thames; better flood warning, more people with the capability to manage disasters at a local community level; and supporting people to respond more quickly and independently to disasters.
What can humans do to protect other species and ecosystems from the impacts of climate change?
The main thing would be to reduce the pressure that is already on these species and ecosystems. If we take a coral reef, for example, you would try to take the pressure off that reef. You would stop fishermen from dragging their nets, stop tourists from going there, remove the agricultural runoff - soil, toxics, and pesticides coming in there. But it would still suffer from climatic impacts.
But for many species, it will be very difficult to adapt, because if they move out of their original environment, they won’t find the other plants and flora that they depend on. If you think of a piece of woodland and you take 50 percent of all species out, many others will perish too, because they are interdependent on each other. Mostly the species that are not dependent will be able to adapt. Many varieties of plants, birds, insects and all wildlife will not be able to adapt in their current situation.
Is there a limit to adaptation? How much global warming can we tolerate?
Take the worst scenarios, that is six degrees Celsius of warming or more. What remains of society could be living towards the poles as there will be very little else that’s habitable. With six degrees of temperature increase, many environments will be difficult places to live in anymore.
In general adaptation, it depends on who can tolerate what changes. There are already many people in this world who cannot tolerate the level of climate change we are already seeing. That might be the very poor people in the Mississippi Delta when its flooded, the people in the Sahel region of Africa when there is a drought, the people on small tropical islands like Tuvalu when the sea levels are rising. They can’t afford the pumps and dikes to protect their environments or the new crop seeds, so they may have to migrate.
It critically depends on adaptive capacity. How much capacity an individual, economy, and society would have to adapt to these impacts and to reduce risk and build in resilience. And that very much depends on the resources available.
Why is adaptation not as talked about as mitigation?
In the past, climate change mitigation and adaptation have been separated, but increasingly this is changing. People are now starting to say that adaptation is not something that we might have to do; it is something we will have to do now and it is fundamentally linked to mitigation.
Adaptation also has a negative undertone – it means you acknowledge that we have failed to mitigate sufficiently. And people fear living up to the truth that they will have to adapt and that the earlier you reduce your emissions, the less you will have to pay to adapt, where possible. So we need to start now!
How much money would it cost to adapt to climate change, and who should pay?
There are very rough estimates for the costs of adaptation from anywhere between 50 to 130 billion dollars. The amount we have available at the moment is just paltry, just a few hundred million dollars. So the question is who is going to pay for this, and also how do we pay out this money. Which is the most vulnerable country? What mechanisms will generate this money?
Under the UNFCCC, people have signed up to something called the Principles of Common but Differentiated Responsibility and Polluter Pays. If I as your neighbor mess up your garden, I have to pay for it.
So, in a sense, the big hot political potato is pointing the finger and saying, “Hey, you guys caused this problem, and what you are doing is actually damaging large parts of the world and infrastructure, and as such you are liable for the damage, whilst at the same time incentivizing global society to rapidly reduce emissions.
editor: Thilo Kunzemann
publishing date: August 26, 2008
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