PARIS — A crescendo of deadly extreme weather is
outpacing preparations for a climate-addled world, according to a landmark
UN assessment of climate impacts released this week.
اضافة اعلان
Whether it is sustainable farming or
bioengineered crops to boost
food security; restoring mangrove forests or building
sea dams to buffer rising oceans; urban green corridors or air conditioning to
temper killer heatwaves — the search for ways to cope with the fallout of
global heating has become urgent.
“At current rates of adaptation planning and
implementation, the adaptation gap will continue to grow,” the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns.
At the same time, however, the 3,650-page
IPCC report raises red flags about how schemes to deal with climate impacts can
go wrong.
There’s even a word for it: “maladaptation”.
“We’re finding that there are many cases in
which adaptation projects don’t work,” said
Clark University professor Ed Carr,
lead author of a chapter in the IPCC report on climate resilient development.
“Some have actually made things worse.”
Building a dam, for example, to prevent urban
flooding may help protect a small area for a limited time period.
“But if the measure you put in place has
negative consequences along the rest of the river and makes things worse in the
long run, that’s maladaptation,” said Imperial College London’s
Friederike Otto.
Otto, a pioneer in quantifying the extent to
which climate change makes extreme weather more likely or intense, said people
often fail to recognize the role bad choices — building houses in a flood
plain, for example — play in disasters.
“Just blaming climate change alone can lead
to maladaptation,” she told AFP.
Sometimes coping measures have unintended
consequences.
Kwame Owusu-Daaku, an assistant professor at
the
University of West Florida, investigated the aftermath of sea barriers
erected in front of a modest fishing village near the Volta River estuary in
Ghana to prevent beach erosion due to storm surges and rising seas.
The sea walls worked. In fact they worked so
well that a large real estate developer — hand in glove with the local
government — took over the land to build luxury, beach-front chalets.
“The people who lived there were kicked off
the land,” Owusu-Daaku said in an interview, calling the outcome an example of
“maladaptation opportunism”.
No only was this unfair, it is probably
unsustainable too, according to the IPCC report.
Sea walls, dykes, and flood-control gates
“create long-term lock-in of vulnerability, exposure, and risks that are
difficult and costly to change,” it said.
And while hard engineered structures may
protect against hazards up to a certain point, they also create “an illusion of
no risk”.
Another source of maladaptation is lack of
data.
“You can only adapt to what you know,” said
Mohamed Adow, founder and director of the Nairobi-based
Africa Power Shift.
“In the case of Africa, we know very little.
How do you create early warning systems for extreme weather without data?”, he
told AFP.
In a world where new infrastructure — roads,
buildings, sewage systems — must serve both development and adaptation
objectives, a lot of construction is probably not fit for a 1.5C world, much
less one that could warm 2C or 3C above pre-industrial levels, experts say.
The Earth’s average surface temperature has
already risen 1.1C compared to that benchmark.
“Maladaptation happens when you try to solve
one problem and wind up creating another,” said
Patrick Verkooijen from the
Global Center on Adaptation.
“There are so many examples of
well-intentioned measures that are not thought through in a holistic way.”
A study of more than 300 initiatives for
coping with climate change cited in the IPCC report found that one-third may
have unintended and negative consequences.
Other types of maladaptation are recurrent,
especially in the global South. Eighty percent of land used to grow food is
rain-fed, and thus highly vulnerable to droughts made worse by rising
temperatures. In parts of Africa, more frequent dry spells will likely double
in length in a 2C world.
The most common adaptation response to
drought is irrigation, but this potentially vital solution can cause problems
of its own.
Read more Region and World
.jpg)
.jpg)
