BC3. Basque centre for climate change – Klima aldaketa ikergai

A summary of the IPCC report on impacts of climate change has just been released and makes some important points.  The first is that scientists have more confidence of the presence of climatic impacts across a range of sectors, such as agriculture, fisheries and as a consequence of specific events, such as floods, droughts, storm surges and the like.  They also note that these effects will occur across all parts of the world -- nowhere is exempt -- although the low and mid latitudes are expected to be more severely impacted.  Indeed some of the climate-related changes actually favor countries such as those Northern Europe at the expense of the South and the tropics.

Second, it gives greater importance to the role of adaptation to addressing these impacts, compared to actions to reduce greenhouse gases.  It is still true that the greater the level of emissions in the future, the greater will be the extent of damages from climate change but even with strong policies to reduce these emissions we can expect significant impacts.  There is a lot of inertia already built into the system and the evidence so far is that measures to reduce emissions are having little impact.  So we will need to adapt our activities in a way that recognizes the presence of climate related changes.  This will require new approaches to the use of water, regulations on construction of building and other infrastructure to withstand climate impacts, changes in agricultural practices and so on. 

This leads us to the third key message and that relates to the scope for adaptation.  We can do a lot to make life easier and more pleasant if we undertake these adaptation measures and, moreover, many of them have relatively low costs compared to the benefits they provide.  To be sure this set of measures needs much work to be fully implemented.  These details will take considerable research as well as cooperation between nation states but the prospects are seen as positive and a key message is that adaptation is both feasible and necessary.

In the coming years therefore we need to devote considerable efforts on improving our understanding of the impacts of climate change at the local level.  While there is agreement that impacts can be expected, knowledge of where they will occur and with what degree of severity, remain highly uncertain.   Furthermore these impacts will be overlaid on, and will interact with, major demographic, economic and social changes that can be expected to take place over the rest of this century.   Our knowledge base relating to all of this has to be improved but it is unlikely that we will ever know with certainty what the consequences of climate change will be over such a long period of time.  We need therefore tools for planning that recognize this uncertainty and that select policies and measures that are robust under a wide range of possible outcomes.  That is a key challenge that we face now.

Another aspect of the adaptation is the international one.  Climate change hurts some countries and regions more than others and it is possible that some conflicts could result as a consequence of these differences.   One can certainly expect some autonomous actions to be taken to adapt that involve shifts in activity and location of population but we have little confidence in how these will play out and we need to better understand the links between climatic and other factors and determine factors such as migration.  But it looks increasingly likely that developing countries will face new challenges in their quest for development and there will be an important role for transfers of resources and technology to these countries to meet these challenges.