Climate Change Risks Part 1: Vulnerabilities, Risks, and Adaptation Strategies

The latest bad news for humanity has come out from the International Panel on Climate Change. Published on February 27, 2022, and entitled Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, it consists of 18 chapters providing an assessment of the natural, ecological, social and economic impacts unfolding as global warming increases. It looks at the interrelationship between nature and human society, the certainty that human activity is responsible for global warming, and the consequences of inaction to date. Finally, it looks at adaptation actions for climate change resilience.

In this posting, the first of two parts, I describe where are our vulnerabilities, and areas where we need to speed up the implementation of effective adaptation to limit the damage we have caused.

How We Are Vulnerable

What are the foreseeable hazards we face? What is reversible and what is not?

A number of certainties are manifest:

• Vulnerability is not evenly spread across the planet (worse in the Global South than in the Global North).
• Adaptation is subject to action with biophysical and socioeconomic limits and capacity for resilience exists to maintain our socioeconomic infrastructure if we act now.
• Transformation and socioeconomic system transition are essential in how we produce and use energy, and how we provide stewardship over land, oceans, cities, industry, and human society.

The report notes that climate change is already adversely affecting the physical and mental health of people everywhere. Extreme heat events alone are:

• increasing human mortality and morbidity.
• causing food-borne, water-borne and vector-borne diseases to spread.
• increasing physical trauma resulting from extreme weather events.
• increasing airborne pollutants including particulate matter from fires. dust from rising atmospheric turbulence, and the spread of aero-allergens.
• impacting livelihoods and cultures negatively.
• disrupting health services and their capacity to respond.
• causing climate migration and displacing vulnerable human populations.

Who is Vulnerable

• Geographical hotspots include West-Central and East Africa, South Asia, Central and South America, Small Island Developing States and the Arctic.
• Those practicing climate-sensitive livelihoods such as smallholder farming, pastoralists, and fishers.
• Indigenous peoples.
• Nations and communities where the capacity to provide basic services is already compromised including informal settlements found in the exurbs of large urban centres, smaller towns, villages, and rural habitations.

Where Nature is Vulnerable

• Biodiversity within forest, kelp and seagrass ecosystems.
• Warmwater coral ecosystems.
• Arctic sea-ice and terrestrial ecosystems.
• Coastal ecosystems as sea levels rise.

Undoubtedly, at the current rate of human progress in mitigating and attempting to adapt to global warming, we will blow past an atmospheric temperature rise of 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). This will make efforts to manage and mitigate climate change harder, compounding the overall risks across the planet. Overshooting the 1.5 Celsius target will cause additional greenhouse gasses to be released (melting permafrost and other natural and human sources) and will lead to irreversible changes. The duration of the overshoot is critical to what happens to the planet as these irreversible changes occur.

In addition to melting permafrost what are the irreversible natural changes and what will be their impacts?

• continental and large-island ice-sheet and alpine glacier accelerated melting will impact ocean salinity and river flows, and contribute to sea-level rise and the submergence of coastal areas where much of the world’s human population resides.
• additional incremental rises in atmospheric temperature will further contribute to wildfires, the mass mortality of forests, the drying of peatlands, thawing of permafrost, the weakening of natural land carbon sinks and the increasing release of greenhouse gasses to further amplify warming.

Inadequate and Insufficient Adaptation

Although adaptation planning is progressing, and in some places on the planet there is evidence of observed benefits, for the most part, the programs in place are inadequate, fragmented, and insufficiently funded to have a significant overall impact. The report further notes that growing adaptation gaps in planning and implementation are particularly noticeable in low-income population groups and countries.

The areas where progress is being made in adaptation are largely confined to water-related risks or the lack thereof. We are talking about flood abatement and control, and the management of drought conditions. Adaptation strategies include:

• Implementing flood early warning systems including levees and berms, and enhancement of natural water retention strategies through wetland and mangrove restoration.
• Implementing no build flood-plain regulations.
• Improving upstream forest management in river systems.
• Developing farm water storage, soil moisture conservation improvements, and spot irrigation systems.

The report cautions those implementing these strategies that the adaptation risks increase and the effectiveness of the responses declines with each incremental increase in global temperatures.

Effective food risk adaptation strategies include:

• Ecosystem-based management of fisheries and aquaculture.
• Increased agroforestry, urban farming, and selective breeding and genetic enhancements to food staple crops to harden them to drought, pest infestations, and temperature extremes.

Natural adaptation strategies include:

• forest conservation and restoration.
• Increased capacity of natural carbon sinks on land and water including seagrass, kelp forests, coral reefs, terrestrial forests, and peatlands.

Urban, small settlement and rural adaptation strategies need immediate attention. Why? Because sea-level rise will have a disproportionate impact on a large percentage of humanity through the rest of this century and beyond. And for the 3.4 billion who are rural dwellers, the need to provide basic services and infrastructure will become more compelling with each incremental temperature rise. Therefore, human settlement, wherever it may be will need:

• Provisioning for livelihood diversification and employment.
• Enhancing the livelihoods of the most vulnerable (low-income, marginalized and Indigenous populations).
• Integration of short and long-term planning to regulate, monitor, and provide for adequate funding and technological resources for urban and rural infrastructure and services.
• Including provisioning beyond the physical needs of human populations in settlements by extending enhancements to harmonize within the natural ecosystems we humans share with the rest of life on our planet.

In Part 2 of this analysis of the IPCC’s latest report, we will look at energy adaptation, the current limits to the strategies we are using, avoiding maladaptation, and creating conditions for climate-resilient development and success.