Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
•Panel’s Warning on Climate Risk: Worst Is Yet to Come •Conservative Climate Panel Warns World Faces ‘Breakdown Of Food Systems’ And More Violent Conflict •Big impacts: The main messages from today’s big UN climate report
Building resilience into our food systems is fundamental, if society is to adapt to the consequences of climate change.
Batten down the hatches; fill the grain stores; raise the flood defenses. We cannot know exactly what is coming, but it will probably be nasty…
This month our theme is "living with climate change". We’ll be exploring that from a variety of angles…
For the last few weeks, the south of England has been flooded, to a degree that hasn’t been seen for years – even though ‘the floods’ have become, quietly unacknowledged, an annual event now.
Cities and poor people living in cities are often forgotten in climate adaptation planning. How can we fix that?
Do climate change adaptation programs just shift climate vulnerability?
Cities have a central role to play in tackling climate change as well as in adapting to its effects…
What’s the best way to address the risks of climate change? Mitigation or Adaptation?
Mitigation or adaptation? It’s usually an either/or choice: either we work on ways to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or we find ways to adapt to new conditions created by climate change, including reducing society’s vulnerabilities and raising its resilience. Fighting to close a coal plant or developing green energy alternatives, for example, is a different job than translocating an imperiled species or planning for inevitable sea level rise. Same problem, separate responses. Different tribes. Mitigation and adaptation even have separate conferences!
“There are no experts.” This was my biggest take-away message from the inaugural National Adaptation Forum, held in Denver recently. Although it was my second major climate change adaptation conference in three weeks, I wasn’t sure what to expect. In Europe, there’s no need to whisper the words “climate change” in large gatherings for fear of offending someone, but America is different. Would people even attend a three-day conference on adaptation? And what would the presenters talk about in the sessions? I jumped into a rental car and drove to Denver to find out.
This is a blog about carbon, and by extension climate change mitigation, but there’s another big job that’s rising fast on a lot of people’s To Do lists. It’s called adaptation, and suddenly everyone’s talking about it – for good reason as I learned last week. And the reason is this: the future is now. Climate-related changes are bearing down on us faster than many scientists expected, requiring action by individuals, communities, cities, and nations to reduce their effects. Inaction (like so much else connected to climate change) will only magnify the challenges, making them much harder to solve later. In other words, our collective To Do list just got a lot longer.
