Tag Archive for: IPCC

UN climate assessment warns of growing system-wide disruption

It’s ironic that the release of the latest authoritative UN climate change assessment on Monday coincided with historic flooding in both Queensland and New South Wales. Brisbane received a record 80% of its annual rainfall within three days, while NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet described flooding in his state as a ‘one-in-1,000-year event’.

Record-setting floods also struck NSW less than a year ago. At that time, Premier Gladys Berejiklian described it as a ‘one-in-100-year event’ that was ‘beyond anyone’s expectations’. The state dodged a bullet on that occasion; if spilling from Warragamba Dam had intensified, much of Western Sydney would have been inundated. And it dodged another bullet less than a year before that, in the same location, when the Black Summer bushfires threatened the Warragamba catchment, the source of 80% of Sydney’s water supply.

The new assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms that it is no longer useful or accurate to describe disasters such as the recent floods and fires as one-in-100-year or one-in-1,000-year events. Those determinations are based on Australia’s historical experience of floods in a stable climate, not one in which the global average temperature has now risen by more than 1°C and is probably on its way to at least 2°C.

The rapid pace of global climate change is completely outside of human experience. In a matter of only decades, for example, what has historically been a one-in-100-year extreme coastal flood will become an annual event in many parts of the world. The NSW premier was on stronger ground yesterday when he said, ‘Past experience doesn’t mean much in an unprecedented event.’

The IPCC assessment confirms another important feature of climate change that is also now emerging in Australia and elsewhere: it’s not simply an environmental crisis, or a crisis of natural disasters, but a whole-of-society crisis. The report notes: ‘Climate change impacts and risks are becoming increasingly complex and more difficult to manage. Multiple climate hazards will occur simultaneously, and multiple climatic and non-climatic risks will interact, resulting in compounding overall risk and risks cascading across sectors and regions.’

Disasters have always been a systemic crisis for individual families in remote parts of Australia and for many local communities, disrupting livelihoods, income and infrastructure, with cascading impacts on health, education and other arenas. Three factors have made these disasters manageable. The first is the great resilience of regional Australians, resulting from long experience adapting to Australia’s often harsh conditions. The second is the outside financial and other support provided by state, territory and Commonwealth authorities to help residents cope with the disasters and rebuild their communities. The third is the fact that the most extreme of these disasters happen infrequently, giving communities time to replenish their resilience.

Climate change is upending all three of these factors. In Queensland, 55 of the 77 local government areas have recently experienced three or more major disasters in three years. For many, it has been four or five disasters. We’re also now beginning to see these systemic impacts emerge at the state-wide level. The year before the Black Summer fires, a record drought and extreme temperatures in Queensland contributed to the outbreak of fires that burned one million hectares, the largest expanse affected since recordkeeping began. The fires, together with the record flooding that followed, had enormous cross-sectoral, cascading impacts across the state.

And Black Summer vividly demonstrated that these systemic impacts are also now appearing on a national scale. The fires destroyed 24 million hectares, with unprecedented cascading health, biodiversity and economic impacts.

One very important implication of the systemic nature of climate disruptions is that countries such as Australia will experience not just major domestic impacts but regional and global impacts as well. Indeed, the impacts from climate disruption occurring outside of Australia may undermine our national wellbeing as much as or more than the domestic impacts.

The IPCC assessment warns that the global systemic effects will be profound:

Weather and climate extremes are causing economic and societal impacts across national boundaries through supply-chains, markets, and natural resource flows, with increasing transboundary risks projected across the water, energy and food sectors … In cities and settlements, climate impacts on key infrastructure are leading to losses and damage across water and food systems, and affect economic activity, with impacts extending beyond the area directly impacted by the climate hazard.

Most countries, including our own, have failed to grasp the significance of these emerging systemic impacts. This is reflected in the fact that national adaptation strategies are generally developed by bureaucratically weak environment ministries and focus almost exclusively on domestic climate impacts. Even the domestic focus is often siloed, with poor integration across bureaucratic areas. Climate adaptation planning, for example, is rarely integrated with disaster risk-reduction planning (which is generally led by emergency management agencies) despite the enormous overlap between the two issues.

If we could put on a pair of glasses that somehow magically enabled us to see climate risks, the risks wouldn’t fit neatly into bureaucratic, sectoral or organisational silos, but rather cut across them, including at varying temporal and spatial scales (from local to global). The glasses would instantly reveal the inadequacy of the silo-based climate planning conducted by most governments.

The gathering and intensifying climate risks must be addressed through a comprehensive process directed by the highest levels of government, using the best available climate and hazard information, and applying a framework that incorporates local, national, regional and global-scale risks, impacts and connections.

Conducting an Indo-Pacific climate and security risk assessment should be an important early contribution to a national climate risk assessment. It would also be an opportunity to identify joint initiatives involving the aid program and the region’s militaries, finance ministries, disaster management agencies, multilateral development banks and others to reduce the climate and security risks to our neighbours and, as a consequence, to Australia.

Most fundamentally, the latest UN climate assessment highlights the enormous stakes involved in preventing dangerous climate change. We have a limited window of opportunity to avoid the systemic climate disruptions the report says have already emerged, and the far more devastating ones to come if the climate warms to 2°C and beyond. This is a systemic challenge that requires a systemic response globally as well as here in Australia.

IPCC warns of concurrent climate disasters

Media coverage of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released on Monday has highlighted many deeply disturbing findings, including that climate change is already contributing to extreme weather events in every inhabited region on the planet and that it’s probably too late to avoid global warming of more than 1.5°C, the lower target set in the Paris climate agreement.

But another important finding has received relatively little media attention. The IPCC has determined that we’re now entering an era of compounding extreme climate events, particularly droughts and heatwaves, that will increasingly emerge concurrently at multiple locations across the globe. The simultaneous impacts, particularly in crop-producing areas, will have serious consequences for human security.

Established in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, the IPCC is tasked with providing policymakers with regular scientific assessments on climate change, including developments in scientific understanding, assessment of the risks, and adaptation and mitigation options. These IPCC reports, which are issued every five to seven years, are the science-based foundation for climate policymakers.

Our understanding of the science of climate change has improved significantly since the publication in 2013 of the previous IPCC assessment report. These improvements include better climate model simulations; advancements in methodologies to understand human influence on a wider range of climate impacts, including weather and climate extremes; and new datasets with better spatial representation of changes in surface temperature, including in the Arctic.

Political action has also coalesced over this same period with the signing in 2015 of the Paris climate agreement, in which UN member states made commitments to reduce emissions in order to prevent dangerous levels of warming. The evidence suggests that they’re not acting ambitiously enough to achieve that aim. The last five-year period has been the warmest on record, and this latest IPCC report confirms that global temperatures have already risen by more than 1°C above pre-industrial levels.

The report’s confirmation that climate change impacts are now globally ubiquitous comes as no surprise, given the scale and magnitude of recent disasters. This year’s record-setting temperatures and fires in Greece, Turkey and the United States are reminiscent of Australia’s Black Summer bushfires, in which a record 24 million hectares burned. This past month, heavy rainfall triggered severe flooding throughout Western Europe, Bangladesh and Central China, killing hundreds and displacing thousands. These increasingly disruptive disasters are one reason UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has described the new IPCC report as a ‘code red for humanity’.

The report warns that these extreme events will increasingly occur simultaneously and has particularly highlighted the global risk to agricultural production. Of course, as the frequency of these hazards increases, the likelihood of their striking simultaneously or in close succession will grow. But important global climate ‘teleconnections’ also make simultaneous impacts more likely.

Simultaneous hazards periodically occur as part of natural climate variation, such as weather patterns linked to phases of the El Niño–La Niña cycle. The scale of the impacts is already significant. For example, in the 1998 El Niño-induced drought, 7.5 million Indonesians faced acute food shortages. Scientists expect 1.5°C of warming to double the frequency of extreme El Niño events and the IPCC report has concluded that continued warming is likely to magnify the rainfall variability related to both El Niño and La Niña events.

Some scientists also suspect that climate change is altering the northern hemisphere jet stream, contributing to simultaneous extreme weather events on a global scale (such as heatwaves, droughts and fires in some regions, and floods in others). These disasters in the northern hemisphere may be linked to changes in the jet stream, as might the 2010–11 global food security crisis that contributed to the outbreak of violence and the fall of governments in the Arab Spring.

The prospect of rapidly increasing, simultaneous extreme events affecting both global and local food security is deeply worrying. It will have major consequences for regional stability that will directly affect Australia’s national interests.

The scale of this risk underscores the urgency of more ambitious global action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. In this respect, it’s encouraging that a number of nations have significantly increased their climate commitments in the lead-up to November’s crucial COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. But, as the IPCC report suggests, existing inertia in the climate system has already committed us to more extreme events with ‘increased intensities, durations and/or spatial extents unprecedented in the observational record’. Australia will clearly need to scale-up its own adaptation efforts and should make it a high priority to help its near neighbours do the same.

The IPCC report is both a sobering reminder of the scale of the challenge we face and an affirmation that the worst of the climate impacts can be avoided with rapid and more ambitious global action to reduce greenhouse gases and prepare for climate impacts.

Climate change dominates the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report

The World Economic Forum has released its Global Risks Report 2019 to coincide with its annual meeting taking place this week in Davos, Switzerland. For the third year in a row, climate change and climate change–related risks dominate the list, accounting for five of the top 10 by both likelihood and impact.

The risks, which are drawn from the views of the WEF’s global network of leaders in business, civil society and government, included the failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation, extreme weather events, natural disasters, biodiversity loss and water crises. Food insecurity and large-scale involuntary migration also ranked highly.

The rankings shouldn’t be surprising. Greenhouse gas concentrations have continued to increase. The past four years have been the hottest on record, and the 20 hottest years on record have occurred in the past 22 years. And 2018 was another year of record-setting fires, floods, droughts and storms. The California wildfires were the largest and deadliest ever and record-breaking temperatures and drought across the northern hemisphere summer triggered the worst wildfires in Sweden’s modern history. Unprecedented rains in Japan and South Asia caused deadly flooding, and superstorms, such as Hurricane Michael, caused enormous damage.

2018 also ended with a bang here in Australia. The severe ongoing drought on the east coast contributed to the outbreak of more than 100 bushfires in Queensland, followed and exacerbated by an extreme heatwave, with temperatures in the 40s that smashed records for the month of November. Fire conditions in parts of Queensland were classified as ‘catastrophic’ for the first time since the rating scale was developed in 2009 (although experts observed that no bushfire in the state since 1966, when warnings were first introduced, would have been considered as dangerous). Tens of thousands of square kilometres of bush and farmland were destroyed.

Just days later, Tropical Cyclone Owen approached the Queensland coast, threatening significant flooding and raising the risk of severe mudslides from the charred hillsides. Owen set an Australian record in dumping 681 millimetres of rain in just 24 hours—more than Melbourne usually receives in a year.

Climate scientists warn that these and other events are the early indications of far worse to come. In a major, authoritative and widely publicised scientific study released late last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted that even a 0.5°C increase in warming (from 1.5°C to 2.0°C above pre-industrial levels) would have unprecedented global consequences in many of the areas of risk identified in the WEF report.

The impacts include the complete collapse of coral reef systems in all of the world’s tropical and sub-tropical oceans; several hundred million additional people falling into poverty; a 50% increase in the proportion of the global population experiencing water stress; 420 million more people frequently exposed to extreme heatwaves; 184 to 270 million more people exposed to an increase in water scarcity; and a 10-fold increase (from 8 to 81 million) in the number of vulnerable people affected by changes to crop yields (jumping to a 50-fold increase at 3°C of warming).

One disappointing aspect of the WEF report’s analysis is the huge disconnect between these environmental changes, the effects of which we are already feeling, and the immediacy of the risks. For example, the section titled ‘Short-term risk outlook’ overlooks climate change, focusing instead on factors such as economic friction between major powers and the erosion of multilateral trading rules. This is the tragedy of our climate change predicament: we seem only able to think of climate change as a distant problem, rather than as a crisis requiring urgent action.

This in part stems from a failure to appreciate the inertia in the climate system. Even if tomorrow we could somehow halt all greenhouse-gas emissions, the climate would continue to warm—irreversibly—for decades from earlier emissions released into the atmosphere. In this respect, the window of opportunity to head off climate tipping points and other devastating consequences is rapidly closing. Unlike the short-term risks identified in the WEF report, which can be managed and resolved even after they arise, only immediate and concerted action can prevent the global risk of climate change from becoming a deadly certainty.

A second, related reason for the complacency may be the assumption that climate-change impacts will continue to increase in the future at the same pace as in the recent past. However, the IPCC study demonstrates that this is not the case. It is more accurate to expect the impacts to increase exponentially, rather than linearly. We will be surprised not only by the scale of the impacts, but also by the rapid pace at which they begin appearing. Recent analysis suggests that rising greenhouse-gas emissions, natural climate cycles and other factors will combine over the next two decades to make climate change hit us faster and more furiously than previously realised.

The inertia in the climate system and the rapid pace and growing scale of climate-change impacts suggest that countries need to dramatically step up their adaptation and disaster risk reduction efforts. Ultimately, though, the risk of global climate change can be addressed only by a concerted global effort to greatly accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewables.