In 2023, the figure reached 26.4 million worldwide as a result of floods, storms, wildfires and other disasters, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

Climate change is not solely responsible, but the frequency and intensity of extreme weather is increasing as global temperatures continue to rise. As a result we can expect that more and more people will face losing their homes and their livelihoods.

It is commonplace to see people boarding up their homes and literally battening down the hatches before a major hurricane is predicted to make landfall. For those facing extreme weather, this mentality is no longer confined to one-off events, but a regular mindset as the climate crisis continues to bite. Many communities around the world know that building resilience against intense storms, floods and heat waves is now essential to daily life.

“No country is immune to disaster displacement,” Alexandra Bilak, IDMC’s director, said in a recent press statement. “But we can see a difference in how displacement affects people in countries that prepare and plan for its impacts and those that don’t. Those that look at the data and make prevention, response and long-term development plans that consider displacement fare far better.”

This kind of planning is happening in countries on the front line of the climate crisis. Some small island nations, for example – many of them low-lying – are seeing their homes permanently washed into the Pacific Ocean.

Paradise lost

According to Fiji’s government, disaster events in the Pacific island state over the past 40 years have led to annual economic damages of around US$16 million, with 40,000 people impacted each year. This is due to increase to an average of US$85 million per year in losses, as a result of cyclones and earthquakes. These figures are high for a country with a population of under 1 million people.

Many of the people most impacted by climate disasters live in informal urban settlements. Their homes are extremely vulnerable to the regular cyclones that hit the island nation, especially as they are often located near riverbanks or around the coast.

The subtle art of scaling up climate adaptation

A recent Adaptation Fund project in Fiji was designed to build resilience against regular extreme weather events and “climate proof” housing for the foreseeable future. The project, implemented by UN-Habitat, looked at ways to protect thousands of homes when storm surges overwhelm local water and sanitation infrastructure. The settlements were located across four main urban areas on the island: Lautoka, Sigatoka, Nadi and Lami.

Low-cost, high-impact

Constructing cyclone-resilient buildings was an essential component of the work.

Moving new homes away from vulnerable hot spots, such as foreshores, floodplains and riverbanks, was a first step. As many settlements are self-built, training local people in new construction methods ensures future homes can be built with extreme weather in mind. An innovative element from the project was so-called ‘stilted safe rooms’ – low-cost and simple raised structures intended to provide refuge during periods of intense flooding.

Flood control is a key component of climate-proofing infrastructure. In Fiji, priorities included building upgraded site drainage to reduce runoff; upgrading water sources and storage; and improving access ways, to ensure people can respond when cyclones put pressure on local infrastructure.

School’s out

In Haiti, a very poor and conflict-torn country beset with repeated natural disasters, climate-proofing infrastructure is still at an early stage. The country’s education sector, for example, has been repeatedly hit by extreme weather, including in 2016 when Hurricane Matthew damaged a quarter of its schools. Rebuilding after such frequent turmoil now requires new ways of thinking.

With the help of around US$10 million of funding from the Adaptation Fund, UNESCO is currently supporting the restoration of 620 schools across the country. Their work has included raising awareness of disaster risk reduction, improving knowledge of safety levels, and retrofitting existing buildings.

As climate disasters grow, early warning systems become essential

Panaroty Ferdinand Prophete, UNESCO’s national coordinator, told Climate Home that “nearly 200 technicians, students and experts received training on new construction techniques, an early warning system and the management of temporary shelters.” This training included working directly with the Ministry of Education to develop new construction standards for schools.

Over 150,000 students have so far benefited from the project, a success Prophete attributes to “very good synergy” between the different stakeholders. “This makes it easy to put in place a community emergency plan as well as the execution of the national action plan for resilient school infrastructure,” he added.

Best defence

Experts agree that we need to change the way we live in response to climate disasters. Moving settlements away from major water sources is, if possible, a simple solution. More projects supported by the Adaptation Fund – from Indonesia to Antigua and Barbuda – are focusing on blocking, redirecting or draining excess water as it comes in, to keep homes intact and habitable. These responses will remain some of our best defence against more unpredictable and extreme weather.

“A key sector for the Adaptation Fund is averting and reducing loss and damage through disaster risk reduction and early warning systems, which account for about 16% of the Fund’s current portfolio. Many additional multi-sector projects also include elements that are building resilience to disasters,” said Mikko Ollikainen, head of the Adaptation Fund.

“From climate-proofing homes and community centres to making informal settlements resilient to floods, it’s a vital aspect of the Fund’s work. Many of the projects are replicable and scalable so we hope they will also serve as models to create a larger positive impact on additional vulnerable communities beyond those served by the projects,” he added.

There is only so much adaptation can achieve if the flood waters get too high, or if cyclones increase in intensity and destructive force. But there are many cost-effective solutions to offer people a better chance of keeping their homes intact when extreme weather hits.

These investments can’t come soon enough for communities living in climate hot-spots and can serve to tackle long standing poverty issues at the same time. Fast-tracking these solutions will become ever more important if we want to reduce the millions of newly displaced people each year.

Sponsored by the Adaptation Fund. See our supporters page for what this means.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post Climate disasters challenge right to safe and adequate housing appeared first on Climate Home News.

Since 2013, China has been trying to make cities like Beijing more flood-proof by replacing roads, pavements and rooftops with natural materials like soil that soak up water and by giving more space to water bodies like lakes to absorb stormwater.

But despite these measures, massive amounts of rainfall in recent weeks caused floods which killed at least 33 people, destroyed tens of thousands of homes and shut down the Chinese capital’s second busiest airport.

Experts told Climate Home the flooding shows the limited progress China has made on its plan to invest $1 trillion into sponge cities by 2030 – with the city still largely concrete.

Sponge airport overwhelmed

Even new infrastructure, build with the sponge city concept in mind, could not cope with the rains.

Daxing airport opened a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic. Its builders described it as a “sponge airport” as it was equipped with plants on its roof, a huge wetland and an artificial lake the size of over 1,000 Olympic swimming pools.

Despite these measures, the runways flooded on July 30 and it had to cancel over 50 flights.

Floods engulf Beijing Daxing Airport, halting flightshttps://www.yenisafak.com/en/video-gallery/news/floods-engulf-beijing-daxing-airport-halting-flights-3668129 pic.twitter.com/YabfuQbC9Y

— Yeni Şafak English (@yenisafakEN) August 2, 2023

Waters diverted

The government tried to collect the rain in 155 reservoirs in the Hai River Basin, but the measure proved ineffective in controlling the deluge.

About 50 years ago, the basin –a natural sponge–was locked with embankments and reservoirs to manage the water flow.

In recent years though, these structures have made flooding worse as climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall. These structures lead to overflow, collapse and the authorities have blown them up to ease flooding.

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Reuters reported that flood waters locked in reservoirs were diverted to low-lying populated land in Zhuozhuo, a small city around 80km from Beijing, to flush out the stormwater from the country’s national capital.

Residents of Zhuozhou were angry at the government’s response, Reuters reported. The government reacted by shutting down criticism on social media.

More work needed

Experts argued that these problems show that, rather than abandoning the sponge city project, China and Beijing need to double down and make them better.

Kongjian Yu is the founder of Turenscape, a company involved in the project. He said that just “maybe 1% or 10%” of the city has been converted to a sponge city.

The government’s target is 20% by 2030. “We have a long way to go,” he said.

Yu added that sponge cities are worth doing not just because they control floods but for managing droughts and refilling groundwater supplies too.

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Tony Wong, professor of sustainable development at Monash University, said that progress was always going to be slow as “it takes a long time and a lot of money” to convert a city like Beijing, with lots of people and concrete buildings crammed into a small area, into a sponge city.

More work is needed, says Wong, because Beijing and many other cities lack effective urban planning, and there is no provision for a safe channeling of extreme floodwater.

“What the city needs is the inclusion of green corridors, just like Singapore – another high-density city- has done to transport excess stormwater into low-lying areas to prevent loss of lives and property.”

If China pulls this off it could become an example for many developing countries with high-density cities struggling to control urban flooding, added Wong.

The post Devastating Beijing floods test China’s ‘sponge cities’ appeared first on Climate Home News.

But the wealthy nations who bear most responsibility for causing climate change have yet to deliver all the funds they have promised, let alone enough funds to cover the damage done.

Immediately after the floods, Pakistan’s planning minister Ahsan Iqbal said a conservative estimate of the damage done was $10bn. “It is a preliminary estimate likely to be far greater,” he said.

Despite this, Pakistan and the United Nations (UN) put out an appeal on 30 August for just $160m, a figure roughly 60 times smaller than Iqbal’s estimate for damages.

Oxfam's humanitarian lead Magnus Corfixen told Climate Home this figure was low because the UN's assesment "didn't include some of the worst affected districts as they were not hit by the first floods".

Last week, the UN upped its appeal to $816m. “We need all of these funds, and we need them quickly,” said the UN's humanitarian coordinator for Pakistan Julien Harneis.

UN data analysed by Climate Home shows that rich countries have so far failed to deliver even enough aid to meet the UN's original appeal. This data relies on donor countries to report to it so is not comprehensive but it is used by the UN and updated daily.

A UN spokesperson told Climate Home that governments have pledged more than $160m, but the data shows they have only actually delivered $51m. They have signed contracts for a further $39m.

Of this, only $28m comes directly from governments, with $26m of that from the US government.

A further $16m comes from a group of British charities called the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), whose funding comes from the government and from ordinary citizens.

The UN's Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) donated a further $7m. They are funded by governments, mainly in northern Europe, and distribute funds to humanitarian relief as they see fit.

This lack of funding is having an impact on the ground. Gul Wali Khan leads the Catholic Relief Service's response in Pakistan. "It's a couple of months now," he said, "and assistance is not coming to the speed or to the level which is required."

After a recent visit to an affected area, Khan said: "There are 7.9 million people displaced, mostly standing on the road side. On one side it's a sea and the other side it's the sea and the vehicles cross in the middle, so there's not much privacy, not even a latrine available."

Khan said his NGO is prioritising handing out cash, trucking in clean drinking water, building latrines and providing shelter with funds part-provided by the US government.

Displaced people take refuge on the roadside in the village of Thatta (Photo: Islamic Relief)

If he had more money, he said he would expand this help to more areas of Pakistan and would try to enable more children to return to school, by fixing the sanitation in flood-damaged schools and by building temporary schools. UN data says no money has been donated for education.

Khan is not the only one making tough choices. A UN report found that "enormous needs" and "extremely limited resources" meant NGOs were having to hand out just one tarpaulin for households to shelter from the sun and rain under rather than two.

The World Food Programme's James Belgrave told Climate Home that the WFP, government and NGOs had assessed hunger across the whole of Pakistan, based on measures like how many people are skipping meals.

They prioritise the areas where hunger is most severe and, he said, "based on how much funding is forthcoming, we'd be able to scale up and provide more food to more people".

Funded by USAID, Concern Worldwide hands out cash in Pakistan (Photo: Concern Worldwide)

Sherzada Khan is Concern's Pakistan country director. He said his NGO has also had to do some "very unfortunate prioritisation" because the money is "insufficient".

He said the response has focused on giving out cash and, while this kind of "flexible assistance is very welcomed", people need more long-term help.

The floods wrecked many crops which were about to be harvested. If the next harvest is to be a success, farmers need seeds and fertilisers to plant crops in the next few weeks, he said.

With Pakistan being the world's fourth-biggest rice exporter, failure will bump up already high prices globally.

Children fill up water from a truck. (Photo: Action against hunger)

Needs on the ground have grown and changed over the last two months, Khan said.

Water-borne diseases have spread among displaced people and now, with winter coming, respiratory illnesses are likely to rise.

"Winterisation kits", like warm clothes for children, are also now needed as the country cools.

"We understand that [donor governments] will have their own mechanisms and bureaucratic procedures and administrative hurdles...but if you translate the impact of [relief] not hitting the ground timely and efficiently, it’s going to cost a lot more,” said Khan.

None of the humanitarian groups Climate Home spoke to said the slow pace of the donor response was unusual. "Funding for these things can often come fairly slow, it takes a while to trickle in", said Belgrave.

One solution, according to the International Institute for Environment and Development's Clare Shakya, is to scale up the CERF. While the damage caused by disasters has soared, its funding has flat-lined.

Donations to the CERF (Photo: CERF/Screenshot)

"Countries suffering loss and damage as a result of climate impacts that they can’t adapt to, should receive finance ideally in advance of a forecast emergency or at least within days of it happening," she said.

Shakya added that countries should be able to access sovereign insurance for disasters which are likely to happen once in every ten years or so and that Pakistan's lenders should suspend its debt repayments.

Pakistan has pled for debt relief with prime minister Shehbaz Sharif warning "all hell will break loose" without it. But his government dropped this call after credit rating agency Moody's cut its rating, meaning it will have to pay more to borrow.

Climate Action Network's Harjeet Singh said: "The response to Pakistan floods is a clear example of how impacted communities are now at the mercy of individual pledges that may or may not be delivered".

He called for a loss and damage financing facility to be set up, a key demand of many developing nations in climate talks which is set to dominate Cop27 next month.

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This would assess the needs after a climate-caused catastrophe and request specific amounts of money from governments based on factors like their contribution to climate change.

A spokesperson for Canada's development minister Harjit Sajjan said that the government was "ensuring that those funds are delivered in a timely manner to enable partners to respond to urgent needs" and "we remain in close contact with our humanitarian partners and continue to look at ways to provide support to the people of Pakistan.”

A spokesperson for the UK's foreign, commonwealth and development office said: “We have committed over £16m ($17.7m) of funding to deliver life-saving aid to those most affected by these devastating floods.” Asked if this includes DEC funding, the spokesperson had not responded at the time of publication.

This article was updated on 14 October to include a table showing pledges made against pledges delivered.

The post Funds for Pakistan flood relief come too little, too late appeared first on Climate Home News.

The government provided emergency relief to help people cope in the aftermath of the floods, but migrants told Climate Home News they are concerned about more flooding and extreme weather in the future in a country that is ill-equipped to deal with heavy rainfall.

Heavy rains began on 27 July, resulting in flash floods across the UAE. Seven people died in the floods, all of them Asian migrants. Five of the seven who died were Pakistani citizens, according to Pakistan’s embassy in the UAE. Neither the UAE or Pakistan have shared more details about the victims.

Sharjah, the UAE’s third most populous city, and the emirate of Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman, were among the worst hit.

“At first we were enjoying the rain but then it got dangerous quickly,” said Amir Bukhari, a migrant from Pakistan who works in sales and lives in Sharjah. “Roads started collecting water. I live on the ground floor and the water started coming inside and that was scary.”

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“I didn’t need to evacuate and there was not too much damage,” Bukhari told Climate Home.  “I cannot afford to buy new furniture or move somewhere.”

Two-thirds of UAE’s residents do not have home insurance. Almost 90% of the UAE’s population is made up of migrants, who often have difficult living and working conditions.

“I am worried about those who are very vulnerable, the migrant workers and undocumented migrants,” said Natasha Abaza, an urban designer and planner of Arab origins, who is now based in the UK and works at the architecture firm Prior + Partners.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think they are any resilience plans to prepare urban cities in the Gulf for flooding. They have money so they can help with the damages but I think that is the whole plan right now,” she said. “There is no resilience because of, well, racism.”

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UAE’s National Centre of Meteorology (NCM) told local press that climate change is responsible for the increased frequency of heavy rains, which can cause flooding – especially in the mountainous areas of the northern Emirates.

Such extreme weather events “may be even more impactful in a warming world” in the southeastern Arabian peninsula, according to a study by Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, in partnership with the UAE’s NCM. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour, meaning extreme events last longer, the study notes.

Faizal E, who would not give his full name as he fears “offending the government”, was forced to leave his home in Fujairah, with his wife and two children, along with hundreds of other families, when floods hit the region in July. The NCM issued a code red alert, signifying that “hazardous weather events of exceptional severity are forecast.”

“We stayed in a government facility for a few days but now I am back home,” he told Climate Home. “The government was very helpful and worked hard to rescue us.”

“Red Crescent and other charities have been providing free hot meals to [everyone], no questions asked,” he said. Over 500 volunteers are working in coordination with organisations such as the Emirates Red Crescent. “There was a lot of damage…the UAE is not a country that sees a lot of rain.”

Faizal praised the authorities for “quick and successful restoration efforts” but is concerned about similar outcomes if heavy rains occur again.

“I think heavy rains show the country’s strongest and weakest points,” he says. “They are so capable of offering help and saving people but there are no plans to prepare for this type of weather, which is rare but happening more and more now.”

Faizal is no stranger to heavy rains because he is a migrant from Kerala, India, which experiences monsoon rains for several months each summer.

“I think my town in Kerala sees this much rain usually during the summer but that is just how the weather is there,” he said. “The UAE does not see this type of rain. It is built better in many ways but it is not built to handle such weather.”

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Many of the large cities in Fujairah are located in valleys and have drainage systems that are not able to cope with heavy rainfall or dams to protect people from flash floods.

Large and expensive development projects are often built on flood-prone areas because the “likelihood [of severe floods] is very unlikely,” said Abaza.

“They know it, of course. They have access to this data, [but] they don’t care,” she said. “I am not talking about the UAE specifically, [but] about the region in general.”

The wealthiest cities of UAE boast record-breaking infrastructure, including some of the tallest buildings in the world. This might be part of the problem.

“Everything that has been built there has been built against nature. And nature will fight back,” said Abaza. “Over-engineering to fight these floods is never the solution.”

Instead, more drainage, ending developments in flood-prone areas and landscape restoration should be prioritised, she said.

A report from Khalifa University recommends the following infrastructure investments: “Drains need to be up to the job, or the roads will flood. Dams need to protect from flash flooding, especially in dry river bed wadi [valley] areas. Airport runways need to slope, so the rain runs off into the drains (which must work).”

The UAE was not the only country in the Arab Gulf to experience severe flooding. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia also witnessed heavy rainfall last month, something the arid region has not seen during the summer in over 30 years.

The UAE government did not respond to Climate Home’s request for comment.

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If “massive” is the word for the heatwave losses we experienced here in Pakistan, I struggle to find an appropriate one for the losses incurred from the ongoing monsoon floods. “Colossal”, “mammoth” and “gigantic” don’t do justice to what we are witnessing.

Before now, 2010 marked the year with the worst flooding in Pakistan’s history, directly affecting an estimated 14-20 million people, and killed over 1700. Nearly 1.1 million homes were damaged or destroyed, causing $9.7 billion in damages in 46 of the country’s 135 districts.

This year’s monsoon season is not over yet and the scale of destruction from the flooding is already expected to be far higher than 2010. One third of the country is suffering from floods: 30 million people.

The critical difference between the two is that the 2010 flood was mainly a riverine flood originating from the north of the country, providing a considerable lag time for regions downstream to take evacuation measures.

This time the deluge is caused by torrential rains which began in mid-June, seeing flooding outside areas that are usually prepared for such events. This is compounded by the no-less devastating riverine flooding, which has already caused the collapse of two dams in the north of the country.

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As of 29 August, Pakistan’s national disaster risk management authority estimates over 1,100 casualties. Over one million homes have so far been damaged or destroyed, 800,000 livestock have been killed, 3500 km of roads have been damaged and 162 bridges have collapsed. The economic damages are likely to go well above the $9.7 billion in damages from the 2010 floods.

Pakistan is at its nadir of political stability. Thirteen political parties joined forces to oust the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) government earlier this year, after which PTI resigned from the national assembly. PTI, however, remains in power at the provincial level and is ruling over 75% of the country’s population. In a recently-called all parties conference, PTI was not even invited, a reflection of the political bitterness, even during the time of worst flooding of country’s history.

One doesn’t need to think hard to understand how this would affect the relief activities carried out in the provinces where PTI is in power. This aspect is important to highlight because in May, the Pakistan Meteorological Department forecast a more than average rainfall in the country, warning of flash floods. But because of the political scenario, this information fell on deaf ears, including the country’s media.

To make the situation worse, Pakistan’s economy is also crippled. Pakistan was kneeling before the IMF to revive a bail-out package, including a disbursement of about $1.1 billion, to save the country from going bankrupt, funds which were released by IMF in the days after the flooding started.

With estimates of $10 billion in economic losses from the 2010 floods, a larger scale of devastation would lead to even higher level of losses.

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The record-breaking heatwave in March-April this year which gripped large parts of the country, and now the worst flooding in history, are back-to-back calamities which present a classic case of what we call “loss and damage” in climate circles. Loss and damage is the loss of lives, land and infrastructure from climate impacts that cannot be recovered, nor adapted to.

A recent climate attribution study has concluded that climate change has made a 2022 heatwave across India and Pakistan 30 times more likely compared to a world without climate change. It is too early to state unequivocally (as additional studies will be conducted once the monsoon is over) but climate scientists believe that climate change will most likely have had a role in increasing the intensity of the present flooding. It certainly fits with the models and predictions of climate change driving more intense monsoons.

Flood affected people stand in a long line with utensils to get food distributed by Pakistani Army troops in a flood-hit area in Rajanpur, district of Punjab, Pakistan, Saturday 27 August 2022 (AP Photo/Asim Tanveer)

For a long time now, developing countries have been asking for a separate finance facility for loss and damage in the international climate negotiations under the UNFCCC.

So far, there has been resistance from the developed world to talk about the costs of loss and damage. At Cop26 in Glasgow last year a finance facility could not be agreed, despite a push from developing countries, and only a formal dialogue on loss and damage made it into the final outcome of the negotiations.

Loss and damage is likely to be a hot topic during Cop27 negotiations in Egypt this year. In the wake of this year’s record-breaking climate catastrophes it has already witnessed, it would make sense that Pakistan, as the chair of the largest group of developing countries – the G77 plus China – could make a strong case to push developed countries to agree on the establishment of a loss and damage finance facility.

This flooding must also be a wakeup call for the global community to speed up its efforts towards climate action. Pakistan emits less than 1% of global greenhouse emissions, but it is bearing a massive burden from climate change. And the large majority of the people affected are the poorest of the poor.

The devastation faced by Pakistan now is a mere precursor of what we may see at higher levels of warming. Even at the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C warming limit, some of the impact of climate extremes will go beyond the tolerable limits of human and natural systems.

As the world continues on its go-slow in getting out of fossil fuels and decarbonising the global economy, the losses and damage will continue to mount, and countries like Pakistan – and those others suffering damage they cannot pay for – need financial support.

Dr Fahad Saeed is a climate impacts scientist at Climate Analytics, based in Islamabad. This article was originally published on Climate Analytics’ blog.

The post Pakistan floods must be a wake up call on climate action appeared first on Climate Home News.

Abnormally heavy monsoon rains led to flash floods in July which killed at least 550 people across Pakistan, with rural communities in the impoverished southwestern province Balochistan hardest hit. At least 77 children have lost their lives and more than 500 people were injured in the floods.

More than 34,000 homes were deluged and 977km of road infrastructure and 61 bridges were destroyed.

Zia Salik, head of fundraising at Islamic Relief UK, was in Balochistan when the floods hit. 

“The flash floods destroyed and demolished entire villages. [These are] impoverished villages, built entirely out of mud bricks… they had no chance against the heavy floodwaters,” Salik said, adding that 85-year-olds he spoke to said they had never seen that much water in their lives. “Most people have lost their livestock and their land – they will not be able to grow anything until next year.”

Villagers raised the alarm which led to mass evacuations, but there were no early warning systems in place, said Salik. “Considering the size of the floods, the loss of lives has been relatively low.”

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In Balochistan alone, over 150,000 people are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, according to Islamic Relief. 

“I spoke to families who had not washed themselves for over a week because all water pipes were destroyed by the floods,” Salik said.

Aid groups are on the ground distributing tents and food packs, but a lack of media coverage and aid cuts means there is little funding available to help communities rebuild, he said.

“Ordinarily the UK would allocate significant funds to such a disaster but I haven’t seen any announcement,” said Salik, attributing the silence to the government’s decision to freeze international aid over the summer.

Pakistan was the biggest recipient of UK bilateral aid 2015-19. It dropped to seventh place after the UK government decided in 2020 to scale back the aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of national income.

The US, Japan and Germany have also been major aid contributors to Pakistan in recent years, along with multilateral agencies.

Three children walk among the rubble in a village in Balochistan, Pakistan, which was badly hit by flash floods (Photo: Islamic Relief Pakistan)

Pakistan is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change, according to the Climate Change Risk Index 2021 by NGO German Watch.

This past month was the wettest in three decades, according to Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority, Reuters reports. Balochistan received 305% more rain than the annual average, according to the agency.

“Authorities in Pakistan have traditionally focused more on flood management and less on disaster risk reduction,” Aisha Khan, executive director for Civil Society Coalition for Climate Change in Islamabad, told Climate Home News.

“This is largely due to lack of resources for taking necessary adaptive measures and also due to inability to anticipate the sudden onset and intensity of floods,” she said. 

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In its latest climate plan, Pakistan estimated it needs $7-14 billion annually until 2050 for adaptation investments, primarily in infrastructure.

“Without access to climate finance for adaptation this will remain a recurring challenge beyond the country’s coping capacity,” Khan said. 

“Impact-based forecasting can help but indicative modeling is not precise and there is a limit to preparing for anticipatory adaptation as the scale, scope and intensity of climate induced disasters is highly unpredictable,” she said.

The most urgent adaptation needs are resilient infrastructure, which will require hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of investment, said Salik. Houses should be rebuilt with concrete foundations and steel girders, not with mud bricks which can be washed away, and the government should invest in dams, walls and channels to divert floodwaters, he said. “The real challenge is the infrastructure cost.”

The post Pakistan struggles to rebuild after deadly flash floods appeared first on Climate Home News.

Heavy rain began in northern Bangladesh and north-east India on Saturday, killing at least 32 people and forcing millions to flee from their homes.

The intensity of the rain took aid agencies and residents by surprise. “The flood caught us off guard because the extent was enormous,” WaterAid’s Bangladesh director Hossain Adib told Climate Home News.

“This is monsoon season but what climate change has resulted in is more than normal rainfall,” added Sudipto Mukerjee, Bangladesh representative at the UN Development Programme (UNDP).

A family in Sylhet sit in their flooded home (Photo: WaterAid/Drik/Sultan Mahmud Mukut)

Both Adib and Mukerjee told Climate Home that the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine had diverted funds away from their budgets.

UNDP’s disaster response and recovery facility, whose biggest funders are the UN, Sweden and Canada, had a budget of $11m in 2020. This fell to $7.5m in 2021 and $6.8m in 2022.

The dwindling funds are stretched increasingly thin. They have been used to provide protective equipment for Covid-19 and respond to the Rohingya refugee crisis as well as weather-related disasters.

The budget of the UNDP’s disaster response and recovery facility (Photo: UNDP/Screenshot)

With limited cash, mobile communications disrupted and the airport’s runway flooded, the Bangladeshi government and aid agencies are struggling to respond quickly to the emergency. Local community groups, including young climate activists affiliated to Fridays for Future, have stepped into the gap.

Siyam Afzal said he and other activists from YouthNet for Climate Justice launched an online appeal and used the money to buy food, medicine and drinking water to give people in overcrowded shelters. The intensity of the floods has left even designated ‘flood shelters’ flooded, meaning only a few are safe for people to us.

Hospitals too have flooded, making it harder for injured people to find medical care. Afzal met one child whose injured leg was splinted with a piece of bamboo and some plastic yarn.  “He was crying badly,” Afzal said.

An injured boy has a leg splint made from bamboo and plastic yarn. (Photo: Syed Afzal Siyam)

At the UN climate talks last week in Bonn, Germany, developing countries argued that the humanitarian aid system was inadequate to respond to climate disasters.

They pushed for a facility to be set up that would source funds from rich countries to help poorer ones respond and recover to climate disasters which they had a disproportionately small role in causing.

Developing countries pushed to get the issue on the formal agenda for the talks but were defeated by rich nation opposition.

In the wake of the floods, climate campaigners and humanitarian workers in Bangladesh called for developed countries to deliver loss and damage finance. Mukerjee, of UNDP, explained that Bangladesh has a good track record of rolling out measures that have minimised deaths from floods. But communities still suffer from losses and damages to infrastructure, including houses, schools, hospitals and roads.

“If there is a direct link between a disaster and climate change…there is a need for the global community to be able to help countries like Bangladesh deal with the consequences of climate change,” he said.

The post Ukraine and Covid leave aid agencies struggling to respond to Bangladesh floods appeared first on Climate Home News.

Heavy rainfall triggered severe flooding, landslides and sinkholes across western Germany, destroying houses and sweeping away cars. “The German language hardly knows any words for the devastation that has been caused here,” chancellor Angela Merkel said.

The government is facing mounting criticism that it was unprepared for the fatal floods. While the intense rainfall was forecast, many residents of affected areas did not get the message about how dangerous the impacts could be.

Michael Theurer, a member of the opposition centre-right Free Democrats Party, told German media that the death toll highlighted a “systemic failure” in the emergency response.

Ministers have played down the federal government’s responsibility for the disaster.

“It would be completely inconceivable for such a catastrophe to be managed centrally from any one place – you need local knowledge,” interior minister Horst Seehoffer said, rejecting the criticism.

The river Rhine burst its banks in Bonn, home to UN Climate Change headquarters (Photo: Ays Espiritu)

Climate scientists told Climate Home News that there was clearly a disconnect between the weather forecasts and the warnings communicated to residents in Germany.  

“More than 100 fatalities in a flood is a fair sign of a failure. Authorities should have put in action plans to evacuate people who were in the path of the water, and individuals needed to know what to do to protect themselves,” said Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading, who set up and advises the European Flood Awareness System.

In many areas authorities acted in time, evacuating people, erecting temporary flood defences, and moving vehicles to higher ground, Cloke told Climate Home News. 

“But if people did not hear the warnings, or failed to see the danger they or their communities were in, then the warning system has failed. It is like a smoke alarm in a fire that fails to go off because it has no batteries.”

Chileans look to new constitution to return water to communities

“There was some kind of breakdown in communication,” Hayley Fowler, professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University, told Climate Home News. 

“It’s shocking that so many people lost their lives in a developed western economy like Germany in this event which was well forecast. I hope that a much better system is put in place for warnings in the future,” she said, adding that in many countries it is unclear where the responsibility lies for dealing with severe flooding and other extreme weather events.  

Roads, houses and bridges were unable to withstand the severe floods in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia, two of the worst hit states. 

“Our infrastructure appears unable to change as fast as the climate is changing. This is the crux of the problem. We need to create agility and flexibility in how we design, manage, finance, and govern infrastructure,” Mikhail Chester, environmental engineering professor at Arizona State University, told Climate Home News.  

Examples of effective infrastructure built to withstand flooding include Kuala Lumpur’s Smart Tunnel, which doubles as a traffic and stormwater tunnel, and The Netherlands’ Room for the River programme which restores natural floodplains, he said.

Severe flooding in Meckenheim, near Bonn in Germany, on 14 July 2021 (Photo: Lars Lowinski/Twitter)

It is critical that governments incorporate climate risks, including increased rainfall and rising river levels, into planning regulations and infrastructure design, Fowler said. According to a recent review, efforts to do this remain in their infancy around the world.

One country that has adopted this mindset is the Netherlands, according to Fowler. The country’s southern provinces experienced extreme rainfall, but towns were not completely submerged and there were no fatalities.

“They have really thought about both climate change and preparing for flooding events. They have managed their systems so that they anticipate changes a decade ahead and ensure that they reduce the risk to the population from flooding,” Fowler said.

To increase their resilience to floods, countries could look to construct additional reservoirs and lakes upstream or natural flood management features, such as leaky dams, which slow down the flow of water. It is not as simple as raising the river banks, Fowler said. “If they do overtop, the flooding becomes more severe. You can only protect up to a point.”

The post Fatal floods expose gaps in Germany’s disaster preparedness appeared first on Climate Home News.

“The farm I had called home for nearly 30 years was completely submerged, I was in shock and afraid. For two weeks I walked by the roadside speaking to myself,” Yator told Climate Home News. “Questions ran through my mind without answers. How will my children survive? Where do I resettle? It was a difficult time.”

Yator is not the only Kenyan farmer to suffer from severe depression and anxiety. Kenya is facing a mental health crisis, triggered, in part, by climate change. Many sufferers told Climate Home News that losses caused by drought, flooding and other extreme weather contributed to their distress.

According to the World Health Organization, Kenya ranks fourth in Africa for the most number of mental health cases, with 1.9 million people, 4.4% of the population suffering from depression. In June 2020, the government declared a mental health emergency after a recommendation by a task force.

Yator received no psychological support and turned to prayer to cope. Now, a year later, she sustains her family as a fishmonger in Kambi ya Samaki area, along the shores of Lake Baringo. While looking for work, Yator relied on friends and well wishers for financial support.

“When I was at my farm, I had water, firewood all from my farm. Today, I cannot afford to pay my daughter’s university fees – something I did at ease with the farm produce,” she said.

Pauline Yator started working as a fishmonger after she lost her farm to flooding last year. Photo: Sophie Mbugua

Heavy rainfall in 2019 and 2020 amplified the swelling of the lakes in Kenya’s Rift Valley, displacing more than 5,000 people, Samuel Mutai, director of Baringo county’s meteorological department, told Climate Home News.

As a result, 150 households live in tents an abandoned airstrip while thousands of others depend on strangers, relatives, and friends for shelter, he said.

Homes, schools, roads, health centres, and farmlands were submerged. In November 2019 at least 120 people died and 18,000 were displaced by floods and landslides in Kenya, according to the United Nations office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.

The Baringo county deputy governor Jacob Chepkwony told Climate Home News that 3,087 households were displaced after flooding damaged their homesteads. More than 85 are disabled and older people, and overall damage to housing and shelter is estimated at 1.2 billion Kenyan shillings ($11m), he said.

Africa accounts for only 2–3% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions from energy and industrial sources. Data analysis shows that the one billion people who live in sub-Saharan Africa are responsible for just 0.55% of global emissions.

But despite its tiny contribution to global warming, cyclones, landslides, droughts and floods are becoming more intense and frequent in this region. The western part of the Indian ocean is warming faster than any other part of the tropical ocean while temperatures are rising 1.5 times faster in the Sahel than the global average, said Abubakar Salih Babiker, a climate scientist at the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Center (ICPAC).

Babiker told the Climate Home News that extreme events such as floods, droughts, and landslides are happening faster than the community’s ability to recover from previous natural disasters.

“Over the last 30 years, the minimum temperatures in most parts of East Africa have increased by 1.2C and the maximum by about 2C, higher than the lower target of the Paris Agreement, said Babiker.

Jeremiah Cheptirim, a 76-year-old father of seven, stands in front of his house destroyed by flooding from Lake Baringo, Kenya (Photo: Sophie Mbugua)

Yator is not the only one whose life was turned upside down by natural disasters.

Jeremiah Cheptirim, a 76-year-old father of seven, from Ng’enyin village has been displaced three times since 2018, when his 30-acre farm was entirely submerged. His 71-year-old wife, Targok Bartogos, and five grandchildren have been squatting in a tent at the edge of their neighbour’s land. Bartogos cannot sleep at night.

“It’s too cold at night. Questions run through my mind wondering when we will manage a decent house. The hippopotamus defecates outside the tent every night. I have grandchildren in this tent, what if some day it decided to attack?” said Bartogos.

Over the years, Cheptirim has lost 30 cows, 16 goats, and 24 sheep to pneumonia and crocodiles.

Shadrack Chalo from Garashi village in coastal Kenya supported his six children through farming. His village has experienced drought since 2019, but the river flooded following heavy rains upstream and broke its banks.

“The floods destroyed my farm, carried away the generators, the irrigation pipe, and all other farming equipment I had bought. Due to lost income, I had to transfer my children to public schools.

“The problem was – where do you start? It takes time to plant and wait for the coconut trees and bananas to mature and earn you money. When all these trees die suddenly, the entire farm is destroyed, all cows are dead overnight from floods, and given some of us are old without the energy to start over, stress and death are inevitable for most of the farmers. Stress is our biggest challenge,” Chalo said.

Jeremiah Cheptirim and his wife Targok Bartogos sit outside the tent they have been living in since their house was flooded. Photo: Sophie Mbugua

In December 2019 the Kenyan government established a task force on mental health. Its review found out that of all medical patients at least 25% of outpatients and 40% of inpatients suffer from a mental illness. Climate change is identified as a contributing factor to mental illness, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kenya is not the only African country with a heavy mental health burden. In Nigeria, Health Think Analytics says 7 million inhabitants suffer from depression. WHO estimates that while 650,000 Ghanaians have a severe mental disorder, a further 2.1 million suffer from a moderate to mild mental illness.

In Ethiopia, a national health survey on depression identified that 9.1% of the population suffers from depression.

“Mental health issues are often forgotten amid the other life-threatening disasters like coronavirus, storms, droughts, and floods,” Boniface Chitayi, a consultant psychiatrist with the ministry of health and president of the Kenyan psychiatrist association, told Climate Home News.

Chitayi said events such as loss of property, loved ones, job loss, and forced migration, tend to cause higher rates of depression, and anxiety.

“Stressful events can trigger most serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia, substance use and abuse as a way of coping with increased stress,” Chitayi said.

The task force on mental health report shows that 75% of Kenyans cannot access mental health care. Kenya has only 71 psychiatrists for almost 50 million people, despite the large number of mental health cases in the country. Nigeria has fewer than 300 psychiatrists for an estimated population of over 200 million.

Elias Fondo, the Kilifi County mental health clinical officer, told Climate Home News that only about 22 out of 47 counties offer mental health services. As a result, access to mental health services is a constraint for most Kenyans who either cannot afford or travel long distances in search of assistance. Fondo said most mental health cases are often misdiagnosed due to lack of specialists.

Sidi Toya from Kilifi County said since the floods, her two children wake up screaming at night. Over the years, their school grades, and ability to respond to the teacher’s questions have worsened.

“Before the flooding, they would sleep soundly uninterrupted at night. We have gone to the hospitals seeking professional help, but the medics say the children are not sick. As parents, we do not know what to do next. We are not able to seek help beyond this village,” said Toya.

Countries like Kenya do not have a separate budget for mental health.

“Mental disorders account for at least 13% of all diseases but its allocation has been 0.1% of the entire budget. Counties in Kenya are not fully sensitised about mental health and their role. As temperatures and mental illnesses rise, Kenya needs a mental health budget that is separate from the overall health budget whose percentage reflects the burden of mental health illness in our country,” said Chitayi.

Cheptirim is planning to relocate his family again. He has identified a piece of land on a safer ground but has no financial means to construct a house. He depends on friends to raise over 300,000 shillings ($3,000) to build the house and relocate.

“I have managed to purchase land in a safer ground, but I have nothing left to build. I have talked to a few friends hoping someone with a soft heart can help with whatever amount they can manage. My only wish is to get my family to safety and warmth,” he said.

This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists.

The post Flooding and drought fuels mental health crisis in Kenya appeared first on Climate Home News.

Flooded neighbourhood in the US state of Minnesota (Pic: DVIDSHUB/Flickr)

By Tim Radford 

Global average temperatures continue to rise, but new research shows that the extremes of heat and cold are rising even faster. 

Scientists report that heat waves have got hotter and cold snaps have got colder at a more extreme rate – and that continuing greenhouse gas emissions will mean that, in another two decades, Europe could experience once every two years the sort of lethal heat waves that occurred once in a thousand years.

Scott Robeson, professor of geography at Indiana University Bloomington in the US, and colleagues report in Geophysical Research Letters that they analysed a set of temperature records from 1881 to 2011 and graded them according to how near or far they were from the normal averages of any particular region of the globe.

They found that the temperature anomalies – extremes of heat and cold – increased more than the overall average temperature of the whole planet.

Report: 2014 likely to be Europe’s warmest since 1500s

They also found that cold anomalies – unexpected ice storms, blizzards and big freezes − increased more than the warm anomalies until about 30 years ago. Since then, the heat waves have started to outpace the cold snaps.

The study offers a new way to consider the much-debated “pause” in global warming since 1998. It could be that warming continued over most of the planet, but was offset by strong cooling in the winter months in the northern hemisphere.

Professor Robeson says: “There really hasn’t been a pause in global warming. There has been a pause in northern hemisphere winter warming.

“Average temperatures don’t tell us everything we need to know about climate change. Arguably, these cold extremes and warm extremes are the most important factors for human society.”

Robeson and his colleagues are not the first to identify the importance of extremes of temperature in the pattern of global averages. Nor is this the first time that UK Met Office scientists – this time led by Nikos Christidis – have forecast more, and more severe, heat waves, not just in Europe but in many regions.

In 2004, Met Office researchers looked at statistics since 1990 and decided that the 2003 European heat wave − estimated to have claimed at least 20,000 lives, and possibly many more − had been made more than twice as likely because of human influence on the climate.

Pattern of warming 

In a paper in Nature Climate Change, they look at the pattern of warming between 2003 and 2012. In that period, summers on average warmed by 0.81C.

This warming means, they say, that heat waves − and extreme heat waves such as the lethal event in 2003 − have become 10 times more likely.

“Extremely warm summers that would occur twice in a century in the early 2000s are now expected to happen twice a decade,” Dr Christidis says.

“Moreover, the chances of heat waves as extreme as seen in 2003 have increased from about one in a thousand to about one in a hundred years, and are projected to occur once every other year by the 2030-40s under continuing greenhouse gas emissions.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Rise in weather extremes linked to climate change, say scientists appeared first on Climate Home News.

Severe flooding has hit large parts of the Punjab in India and Pakistan (Pic: UN Photo/Evan Schneider)

By Ed King

India’s government plans to assess its vulnerability to extreme weather events linked to climate change, according to reports.

The news comes after parts of India and Pakistan were hit by extreme flooding, leaving 460 dead and thousands more homeless.

“We want to understand the reasons behind such events and are also exploring international cooperation, as extreme weather events are inter-related with changes in climactic conditions in North Pole impacting the Indian monsoon,” the New Indian Express quoted an official from the ministry of Earth sciences saying.

But in echoes of last year’s catastrophic flooding in Uttarakhand, critics have accused the Delhi administration of being underprepared for the heavy rains.

In one case, soldiers in Jammu and Kashmir arriving with supplies were pelted with stones by flood victims furious at the slow response.

Chandra Bhushan, deputy director general of the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said the scale of the crisis exposed the lack of climate adaptation planning at state level.

“The Kashmir floods are a grim reminder that climate change is now hitting India harder,” he said.

“In the last 10 years, several extreme rainfall events have rocked the country, and this is the latest calamity in that series.”

Since 2005 severe floods have hit Mumbai, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Leh and Uttarakhand, leading to thousands of deaths and millions of dollars of damage.

Research by the London-based Overseas Development Institute suggests natural hazards such as drought and flooding are likely to keep millions below the poverty line by 2030.

Planning

Officials at the Indian environment ministry say they have “no opinion” on the relationship between global warming and the rise in flooding, despite evidence the two are linked.

The CSE says it is clear seasonal heavy rains are getting stronger, and have been exacerbated by unplanned developments along river banks and on flood plains.

Earlier this year UN’s IPCC climate science panel reported an “increase in extreme rainfall events” across South Asia.

“All models and all scenarios project an increase in both the mean and extreme precipitation in the Indian summer monsoon,” it said.

In 2011 a special SREX UN study focused on managing risks from natural disasters concluded India was highly vulnerable to future climate impacts.

Response

The government says it plans to expand the country’s network of forecasting stations, building nine extra radars in Himalayan cities by 2017.

But it remains unclear whether the national government is willing to amend and enforce planning laws to make sure buildings and communities are better equipped to deal with intense events.

Other key concerns include inadequate government regulation of land use, rising levels of deforestation and a proliferation of hydropower plants in the Himalayas.

Sunita Narain, director general of CSE, said the Modi administraion needed to integrate climate change into all future development and infrastructure plans.

“To begin with, the Indian government must discard its ostrich-like policy and get out of its denial mode,” she said.

“We will have to see the linkages between climate change and the events such as those unfolding in J&K.”

The post After the floods, India investigates climate change links appeared first on Climate Home News.

Pic: Balkan Youth Climate Movement

By Sophie Yeo

In May 2014, almost two decades after the close of the Bosnian war, a mine exploded near the northern village of Cerik.

One of the 9,000 landmines left over from the 1992-95 conflict had been dislodged by floods, setting off a blast in which nobody was hurt.

The floods themselves were less benign. In early 2014, torrents tore through Bosnia and Serbia, bringing landslides and the death of around 80 people. Authorities say the damage will cost more to clean up than the three years of conflict in the Balkans.

Since then, recovery efforts have been hampered by more flooding caused by heavy rainfall.

Yet residents of the Balkans are still reluctant to talk about climate change, despite evidence that warmer temperatures could have been behind the record-breaking destruction, and may bring worse impacts in the future.

Three years of war in what was once a middle-income country in Yugoslovia have left their mark. As well as killing thousands of people, it cost around US $100billion and displaced around half the country’s 4.4 million pre-war population, plunging the nation into poverty. Youth unemployment is currently around 50%.

Flooding in May in Bosnia and Serbia killed around 80 people (Pic: Ian Bancroft/Flickr)

“It is hard to fight against climate change in a developing country like Bosnia, and it is hard to explain to people we don’t need the factories that are polluting the air and changing the temperature, because everyone wants more work,” says Maja Bradaric, a 22-year old climate activist from Bosnia, whose family home was destroyed in the floods.

Other countries across the Balkan region, including Croatia, Serbia, and Kosovo, face similar problems, where environmental concerns are drowned out in a tide of poverty, post-conflict recovery and the psychological thumbprint of Communism.

The lucrative layers of coal and other minerals sitting beneath the countries add another incentive for Balkan citizens to close their eyes to the problem, even if they can’t shut their lungs to the plumes of smoke and soot they bring with them.

For instance, in Kosovo, home to 1.8 million people and two power plants (with a third on its way), air pollution is estimated to cause 835 premature deaths every year.

Balkan Youth Climate Movement

In the wake of the floods, in a whitewashed house on the Croatian island of Šolta, around 50 young people from the Balkans assembled in July for a six day gathering on climate change in their region.

This meeting of the Balkan Youth Climate Movement was organised by Maruška Mileta, a 24-year-old Croatian who think young people should be at the vanguard of the fight against climate change in the Balkans.

It is the first time that a regional event on climate change has taken place in the region, where global warming remains off the radar for civil society groups – even environmental ones.

Pic: Balkan Climate Youth Movement

Across the region, the challenge is still to convert the dialogue to “Is climate change happening?” to “Let’s do something about it,” explains Mileta.

“But it’s hard because we are faced with many social and political issues,” she says, citing not only unemployment and the deep financial crisis, but also homophobia, nationalism, corruption and the influence of the Catholic Church.

“I thought that we needed to do something regionally, create a regional youth climate platform, as nationally in Balkans it wouldn’t really work,” continues Mileta.

High levels of poverty make it challenging for countries to face the problem individually, yet the region’s fractious history means it has been difficult to establish cross-border cooperation.

Communist culture

If the Balkans wants its own grassroots climate movement, it will be up to youth to lead the way. The under-30s are the first generation to have matured free from both the influence of divisive nationalism and the repression of Communist dictatorships.

Under Communism, which was established across Yugoslavia in 1946 following World War II, older generations fell out of the habit of rebellion, says Mileta.

“The experiences of living under Communism and then war left a huge mark on people in terms of not having the ”culture” of mobilising thousands of people on the streets,” she says. “Since the 90s, there hasn’t really been a huge protest with tens or hundreds of thousands of people, at least not for the right reasons. It is hard to get people on the street.”

During the old Communist regime, environmental organisations were a foreign concept, explains Nataša Crnkovic, a 26-year-old activist from Bosnia – and those harbouring anti-government sentiments simply did not exist.

“There were some, but more like mountaineering clubs or scouts – not something like what is present now. They were for nature lovers, not for people complaining about something.”

Following the Dayton Agreement in 1995, which brought peace to Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia, international donations came flooding into the region, aiming to rebuild the lives and the economy of the countries brutalised by three years of war.

Some of these funds went to civil society groups, which allowed a trickle of environmental organisations to well up within the countries.

Members of the Balkan Youth Climate Movement play in the sea around the Croatian island of Šolta (Pic: Balkan Climate Youth Movement)

Initially, these avoided tackling climate change directly – an issue that could compromise efforts to quickly rebuild the economy and get people back in work.

But it is only recently that young people, free from the lingering impressions of Communism and able to take advantage of advancing liberties, have started to make the connection.

“I don’t feel isolated because I have travelled, I have seen,” says Festë Isufi, a 19-year-old student from Kosovo, currently studying in Finland.

“In general, my generation are isolated because we have visa restrictions. Going to embassies and spending a couple of hours there is not something everyone is volunteering to do. But as an individual I have been very free to see places and listen to lectures about climate change everywhere.”

She adds that the new push towards regional youth collaboration could make a new beginning in another way: “I know in Balkans we have had a lot of history with wars. But our generation, we can get along with each other. We have moved forward and this is how we can do it.”

Crossroads

Mileta believes that the Balkan Climate Youth Movement is just the beginning. She hopes to lead the group to the UN’s climate conference in Paris 2015, raising the profile of the usually silent region.

But she, and other youth in the region, are working against the clock. The Balkans currently face another turning point: whether they lock into a future of dirty energy, or decide to harness their potential for clean, renewable energy.

“Basically, all the dirty projects are being dumped in this region,” said Mileta, highlighting the case of Kosovo C – a proposed 600 megawatt coal power plant.

It’s currently the only coal project to receive the backing of the World Bank following its decision to stop financing barring certain “exceptional circumstances”, which World Bank President Jim Yong Kim deems Kosovo C to be.

Meanwhile, Croatia plans to open the Adriatic Sea to further offshore oil and gas drilling, while Chevron has started fracking operations in Romania.

All the while, as Kosovo’s air pollution and the recent flooding shows, the impacts of these projects and of climate change generally are beginning to take their toll.

It is up to youth to dispel the lethargy of the past, said Bradaric. She hopes that the floods which destroyed her house could one day prove a tool in this mission, but it will have to be broached carefully.

“We think it’s still a bit fresh for us we walk in and talk about climate change while people are still fighting for their homes. It’s hard for people to talk about it.”

But she adds: “Maybe it’s just because we haven’t tried.

“Maybe I will be surprised with the reaction of people. Maybe they will be prepared to change.”

The post Youth raise climate awareness in flood-hit Balkans appeared first on Climate Home News.

(Pic: Richard Allitt Associates)

By Ed King

Drones could be deployed across the UK by water companies keen to avoid the severe floods that hit the country earlier this year.

Commonly known for their military role in Afghanistan and Iraq, smaller drones fitted with thermal imaging cameras have a range of domestic uses. The UK Civil Aviation Authority has approved the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to survey at-risk areas.

Flood risk consultancy Richard Allitt Associates has launched an aerial surveillance business with three UAVs.

The service will allow water companies to “to assess more accurately the impact of climate change and floods such as those caused during last year’s exceptionally wet weather”, director Martin Allitt said in a press release.

Earlier this year NASA deployed a drone to track climatic changes in the upper atmosphere. UAVs have also been used to assess damage to Peru’s cloud forest.

Climate risk

According to the UK Met Office, December to January 2014 was the wettest on record, leading to serious coastal damage and widespread flooding.

At one point an RAF Tornado surveillance plane was deployed to map the spread of floodwaters, as parts of the Thames outside London burst its banks.

Met Office scientists said that while the winter storms could not be directly linked to climate change, there was an “increasing body of evidence” showing heavy rainfall was becoming more common.

“The attribution of these changes to anthropogenic global warming requires climate models of sufficient resolution to capture storms and their associated rainfall,” they said.

“Such models are now becoming available and should be deployed as soon as possible to provide a solid evidence base for future investments in flood and coastal defences.”

A recent study in the journal Nature Climate Change suggested European flood damages could exceed €20bn by 2050.

The post UK could deploy drones to combat flooding appeared first on Climate Home News.

(Pic: Garrett Coakley/Flickr)

By Ed King

England is not prepared for future extreme weather events linked to climate change, say government advisors.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) warns around three-quarters of existing flood defences are not being maintained as they should each year.

It says this means this year’s heavy floods, which submerged parts of Somerset and the Thames Valley, could be repeated if the country experiences heavy rainfall.

The report’s lead author, Lord Krebs, says current planning assessments do not take climate impacts into account.

“Events such as last winter’s storms and floods illustrate the costs of a lack of resilience, with many thousands of people forced to leave their homes, businesses and transport disrupted, with the associated costs to the economy and to well-being,” he said.

“Building resilience for the future is an essential component of the nation’s strategy for a healthy population and growing economy.”

Railways, main roads and airports are also at risk the report says. A major rail link between London and the south west was out of service for four months this year after coastal erosion.

The government says it has allocated £3.2bn between 2010-2015 on flood management and coastal defences.

Download the report here. Below we’ve highlighted some of its key messages.

Flooding

“Continuing development on the floodplain is increasing the reliance on flood defences. Under-investment in these defences is storing up costs and risks for the future. Hundreds of flood defence projects are currently on hold. Despite recent improvements in asset management, three-quarters of existing flood defences are not being sufficiently maintained.”

Infrastructure

“Electricity transmission and distribution companies are implementing comprehensive strategies to safeguard the resilience of their networks to climate change. Network Rail is taking many of the necessary steps. However, there are shortcomings in the approaches being taken by water companies, and for strategic roads, ports and airports, and ICT services.”

Public health

“Heatwaves are likely to contribute to more deaths in the future, due to climate change combined with an ageing population. A Heatwave Plan has been introduced to reduce the public health impacts arising from periods of high temperatures. However there is a more fundamental need to adapt the existing building stock and design new buildings to be safe and comfortable in a hotter climate.”

Emergency Planning

“The capacity in the emergency response system to manage severe weather events needs to be evaluated, particularly in the context of climate change. This evaluation should include the required national capability for flood rescue, how budget reductions across a number of agencies might have affected the collective ability to respond, and the coverage of climate hazards in community risk registers. Failure to address these issues in a coordinated way between national and local responders risks inefficiency, confusion, and resource shortages in the event of a crisis.”

The post England unprepared for future climate risks appeared first on Climate Home News.

Flooding on the Somerset levels (Pic: Environment Agency/Flickr)

 By Tim Radford

The catastrophic floods that soaked Europe last summer and the United Kingdom this winter are part of the pattern of things to come.

According to a new study of flood risk in Nature Climate Change annual average losses from extreme floods in Europe could increase fivefold by 2050. And the frequency of destructive floods could almost double in that period.

About two thirds of the losses to come could be explained by socio-economic growth, according to a team led by Brenden Jongman of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Stefan Hochrainer-Stigler of theInternational Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

That is because more development and investment means there is more at risk from any flooding. But the other third of the increase will be delivered by climate change, and a shift in rainfall patterns in Europe.

From 2000 to 2012, floods in European Union countries averaged €4.9 billion (US $6.8 bn) a year in losses.

In the floods of June 2013, losses tipped €12 bn (US $16.6 bn) in nine countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The annual average losses could increase to €23.5 bn (US $32.4 bn) by 2050.

Unprecedented floods like those of 2013 occur on average once every 16 years now. By 2050, the probability will have increased to once every 10 years.

Floods widespread

The team looked at monthly peak river discharges in more than 1,000 river sub-basins to begin making their estimates: they also matched these peak flows with atmospheric circulation patterns. The point of the study was to deliver more accurate information.

“We brought together expertise from the fields of hydrology, economics, mathematics and climate change adaptation, allowing us for the first time to comprehensively assess continental flood risk and compare the different adaptation options,” said Brenden Jongman.

And Dr Hochrainer-Stigler said the new study for the first time accounted for the correlation between floods in different countries. Risk-assessment models tended to consider river basins as independent entities.

“But in actuality, river flows across Europe are closely correlated, rising and falling in response to large-scale atmospheric patterns that bring rains and dry spells to large regions.”

All of this points to greater strains on the pan-European Solidarity Fund that finances recovery from disaster within the European Union.

“If the rivers are flooding in Central Europe, they are also likely to be flooding in eastern European regions,” he said.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Europe’s flood costs could double by 2050 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Source: The Prime Minister’s Office

By Sophie Yeo

UK floods have opened up a window of opportunity for politicians to act on climate change, but it won’t last forever.

According to two YouGov polls, public opinion on climate change has shifted since storms and floods started to batter the UK three months ago, providing a political space for politicians to take ambitious action to prevent climate change.

But time is short, warns Dr Stuart Capstick, who researches the psychology of climate change at Cardiff University.

“I think these things probably open up a fairly short window,” he says. “What we see with these floods is that it has caused serious politicians to start talking about climate change again and that’s been quite striking, so we might find now or in the next few months is a very good time to be talking about climate change.”

The polls, conducted two weeks apart as flooding worsened at the beginning of February, show that public opinion shifted towards more people believing that the floods were caused by climate change than not.

Source: YouGov

This shift has given politicians a window of opportunity to take some of the “difficult decisions” necessary to decarbonising Britain’s economy, says Will Straw, an associate director at the Institute for Public Policy Research.

The damage caused by severe storms and floods since December, including a collapsed railway line in the southwest and hundreds of houses left underwater outside London and on the Somerset levels, has led to politicians donning their wellies and pledging financial relief to those affected – and adopting a stance on climate change.

Labour leader Ed Miliband warned on the weekend that climate change “threatens national security” while Prime Minister David Cameron says he “very much suspects” that it has caused the storms, and has talked of the need to build a country where the current weather is commonplace.

Defence Secretary Philip Hammond, previously regarded as a climate sceptic, told the BBC climate change was “clearly a factor” in the weather, while Energy Secretary Ed Davey said the floods “proved the case” for a tough UN climate deal.

But is this a sign of a significant trend?

Peter Kellner, president of YouGov, says the shift in public opinion is “clear but still only modest”. It must become larger and more sustained if it is to change the political scene, he writes, although this is something that politicians themselves can influence through how they treat the crisis.

“If the floods are to lead to a significant change in policy towards climate change, a special form of political leadership is needed. It will be vital, but not enough, for Cameron, Miliband and Clegg to think long-term, to work together and to resist temptations to score party points.”

It’s is a crucial time for UK climate change policy.

The country is deeply involved in EU discussions on how fast the region should cut carbon pollution, and also involved in negotiations on a proposed global emissions reduction treaty, set to be signed in Paris next year.

While the UK only releases around 2% of the world’s greenhouse gases annually, it plays an influential role at the UN, and supplies significant levels of funding to poorer countries to help them invest in clean energy.

Long term battle

Many have questioned whether strong words on climate change will translate into long term action to fight the problem.

Those RTCC has spoken to say that the response so far looks only to the short term, rather than recognising the long term threat that climate change poses.

“Some of the politicians’ comments have read rather like blaming the Great Fire of London on the fire brigade,” said Alistair Borthwick, a flooding expert at the University of Edinburgh.

Straw, who will stand as a Labour candidate for Parliament in 2015, agrees, but highlights the difficulty for politicians in communicating the potential threats of global warming: “It’s quite easy for people and politicians to grasp the need to prevent the worst impacts of flooding.”

“Politicians have strong incentives to respond to immediate disasters of one kind of another. What’s much harder is to create the political space and make a public argument for preventing something from happening in the first place.”

He highlighted that Miliband, as an opposition leader, could have “made more” of the current government’s rollback of energy efficiency policies and retreat from attempts to decarbonise the UK’s energy supply by 2030.

He said that Cameron needed to come under more pressure to explain where he stands on climate change and whether he is willing to take the “difficult decisions” that will prevent severe weather events in the future.

Difficult decisions

Incorporating long term action is likely to be a longer and harder task than announcing £130 million to repair flood defences, as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles did last week.

Influential Conservative voices have made it clear that they would fight against a policy shift from adaptation to mitigation.

Last week influential Conservative Party activist Tim Montgomerie tweeted that there was little point in the UK acting to reduce its own emissions before a global deal had been struck by the UN.

Further to last email, no point fighting climate change in absence of global agreement. Scarce resources should go to adaptation/resilience.

— Tim Montgomerie (@TimMontgomerie) February 15, 2014

The challenge for climate campaigners will be to demonstrate the scientific and economic case to act now, rather than waiting until the end of 2015.

Straw says the door is open, but political courage is needed to step through and sell this message to the electroate.

“With important negotiations coming up in Paris at the end of next year this could also be an opportunity for Britain and the European Union to take the lead on tackling climate change, and doing so in the face of these extreme weather events,” he says.

“It’s critical we use this opportunity at the moment to turn what is undoubtedly a crisis for many people into an opportunity to take this agenda more seriously.”

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Source: DECC

By Sophie Yeo

Flooding in the UK should “stiffen the arm” of British people arguing for a strong UN climate change treaty, the UK Energy Secretary said today.

Recent extreme weather events in the USA have “shifted the debate” there on climate change, said Ed Davey at a policy event in London, and a similar impact could become evident in the UK after a winter of powerful storms and major floods.

“If you go over to America and talk to Obama’s team, they’re clear that the debate on climate change has shifted in America due to extreme weather events,” he said.

“There were a number of people who were previously a bit sceptical about climate change who are now actually listening to what the President is saying, what Secretary (Of State) Kerry is saying.”

This could embolden moves that a strong international treaty that could be signed off in Paris 2015.

If all goes to plan, all countries would come together under the UN banner to sign a deal that would see major reductions in the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases.

However political leaders are mindful that similar hopes in the run up to the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen were dashed after major emitters failed to agree on who should shoulder the burden of carbon cuts.

Once again, the input of countries such as the UK, US and China will be crucial in raising ambition over the coming year.

Davey said: “I’m arguing for it very strongly both at Europe and at the UNFCCC (UN climate talks).”

Flooding in the UK and record cold temperatures in the US this winter have recently brought the issue of climate change centre stage, as politicians grapple with the potential economic damage of extreme weather.

The River Cherwell bursts its banks in Oxford. (Source: RTCC)

But the debate remains highly politically charged as critics of mainstream climate science maintain there is no link between wild weather and manmade carbon emissions.

Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Lawson, a key figure in the UK’s government during the 1980s, said today there is “no evidence” that climate change is leading to more extreme weather.

Lawson added that the government should use the current floods as a “wake-up call” to turn away from renewable energy.

Davey said some right-wing politicians have tried to “deliberately mislead” voters at a time when the public needs to know that “the science is robust”.

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(Pic: Martin Pettitt/Flickr)

By Alex Kirby

The British Government’s main climate science adviser, the UK Met Office, says the present exceptionally wet and stormy winter “could be a manifestation of climate change.”

Its chief scientist, Dame Julia Slingo, says the variable UK climate means there is “no definitive answer” to what is producing this winter weather, with the “most exceptional period of rainfall in 248 years”. But “all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change”.

She said there was no evidence to counter what the basic science says will happen as the world warms – that heavy, fierce downpours of rain will occur more often.

“Nobody has come forward to counter the basic premise that if you have a warmer world you are going to get more intense heavy rain rates”

Dame Julia told BBC Radio: “We know that warmer air holds more water…As scientists we always go back to the evidence base. I always challenge the climate sceptics to provide me with the same level of scientific integrity of the evidence base. I can’t see it.

“Nobody has come forward to counter the basic premise that if you have a warmer world you are going to get more intense heavy rain rates…as we’re beginning to detect now over the UK.”

The Met Office, with the UK’s Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH), has published a report, The recent storms and floods in the UK, which strikes a cautious note.

It concludes: “It is not possible, yet, to give a definitive answer on whether climate change has been a contributor or not” to the frequent and torrential rain, storms and floods affecting much of the UK since early December.

Growing concern

But deep in the detail of the report’s findings are clear statements by its authors showing they are convinced that climate change may be partly responsible, despite the well-known fickle nature of the British weather.

The report says, for example, that although the number of strong winter storms over the mid-latitude North Atlantic – the path of the current storms – has not increased since 1871, the storms’ average intensity has grown significantly. The continual run of deep depressions through December, January and into February is also unusual.

“What in the 1960s and 1970s might have been a 1 in 125 day event is now more likely to be a 1 in 85 day event”

There are questions as well about whether the jet stream “is making greater excursions north and south, and whether these waves in the jet stream are becoming more locked in one position.

“This is a critical question because it raises the possibility that disruption of our usual weather patterns may be how climate change may manifest itself.”

The report says there is now some emerging evidence that, over the United Kingdom, daily heavy rain events may be more frequent: “What in the 1960s and 1970s might have been a 1 in 125 day event is now more likely to be a 1 in 85 day event.”

It says there is an increasing body of evidence that shows that extreme daily rainfall rates are becoming more intense, and that the rate of increase is consistent with what is expected from fundamental physics.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Floods in Tewkesbury in 2007 (Source: Flickr/cheltenhamborough)

By Sophie Yeo

Cuts to government spending on UK flood defences will cost £3billion in damage that could have been avoided, putting houses and businesses at risk across the country.

The government’s independent Committee on Climate Change says that, even based on modest assumptions, limited spending over recent years will lead to future flood damage that will cost the same amount to repair as the disastrous flooding that hit the UK in the summer of 2007.

The advisory body derided recent claims by the government that total spending has increased over the most recent spending period.

“Not enough is being spent, and we can expect the number of households at flood risk and damages from flood events to be on the increase,” the committee wrote in a blog post.

Total central government expenditure dropped by £30 million over the current four-year spending period, compared with the £2371 million spend between 2007-2011.

A question mark has hung over the Coalition’s spending on flood defences since storms brought chaos across the country, prompting the Thames Flood Barrier to be raised eleven times in eleven days.

Heavy rainfall brought misery to thousands across the UK, as rivers burst their banks and water breached defences.

Campaigners have accused the government of cutting spending on vital services and failing to take into account the future impacts of climate change, while environment secretary Owen Paterson has rigorously assured them that spending has actually increased.

Spending shortfall

The latest figures from the Committee on Climate Change point out that the government’s projections of a 4.4% growth in spending is undermined because these figures assume external contributions to the pot of money that has yet to be secured, as well as failing to take inflation into account.

As a result, money flowing directly from central government will be less than it was in the previous four-year funding period, despite an extra £120million pledged by Chancellor George Osborne in the 2012 Autumn Statement.

In addition, the £129 million provided to local authorities ostensibly to bolster flood defences is not ringfenced, which means that councils are free to spend it as they wish.

Figures suggest that more than half of this money has not been spent on local flood risk management, yet the full amount is still counted in the government’s official flood expenditure.

In total, the Committee on Climate Change predicts that an extra three quarters of a billion pounds is needed to stave off the risk of increased flooding – the greatest risk to the UK as the world warms with climate change, causing greater storms surges as sea levels rise. Every £1 spend today on flood defences on average prevents £8 in future flood damages.

“The Government has left a gaping half-billion pound hole in the country’s flood defences by cutting investment when climate change will make flooding worse,” says Guy Shrubsole, a climate change campaigner at Friends of the Earth.

“Today’s figures from the CCC are clear that more needs to be spent on flood defence and that makes Owen Paterson about as suited to defending Britain from rising seas as King Canute.

“David Cameron must intervene to show he’s serious about protecting households and businesses from worsening flood risk – by investing enough to keep pace with climate change and commissioning an independent review of the country’s preparedness.”

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Source: Flickr/sheilabythesea

By Sophie Yeo

The heavy rains and floods that have besieged the UK over the last month will cost the insurance industry £400 million, says consulting firm PwC.

This could rise over the next few weeks, if the Environment Agency’s predictions of further flooding come to pass, warns Mohammad Khan, an insurance partner in the company.

“The impact of the extreme rain and floods of recent months has become progressively worse. For the UK insurance industry, although this may not be the final estimate of the full costs of all the weather we have had, indications are that this could leave the industry up to £400m out of pocket,” he says.

“This estimate could develop further, particularly given the further flood warnings in place in the UK this week.”

So far, about 1,800 properties have been damaged by the floods. Khan adds that, when taking into account the uninsured losses of the floods, the true cost of December and January’s freak weather is likely to rise above the £400m mark.

The Environment Agency warned today that communities across the south of England should prepare themselves for yet more flooding, as rivers including the Avon, the Parrett and the Severn continue to rise.

Last night London’s Thames Barrier was closed for the 12th time in as many days.

Political awareness

Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday linked the storms to climate change – a controversial statement within the increasingly sceptic Conservative party. He said he “very much suspects” that the unusual weather could be linked to a rise in temperatures.

Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour party, also drew on the connection, and called for a review of the country’s flood and climate plans.

The current Coalition government has come under fire for their proposed flood insurance plan, which fails to take into account their own projections of the increased risks caused by climate change.

The new scheme, called Flood Re, is likely to cover just 500,000 homes, while the government’s own Climate Change Impact Assessment reveals that 970,000 homes are likely to be at significant risk during the 2020s as the climate continues to change.

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Source: Environment Agency

By Sophie Yeo

Three million properties are at risk of surface water flooding in the UK, including Downing Street, home of the British Prime Minister, according the the country’s Environment Agency.

Taking into account the 2.4 million homes also at risk from river and sea water flooding, this equates to about one in six homes across the country which could be damaged.

New interactive maps reveal that many parts of central London faced a greater than one in 30 chance of surface water flooding this year, which occurs when intense rainfall overwhelms the drainage system.

This is much harder to predict than river or sea flooding, as it is difficult to forecast exactly where or how much rain will fall in any storm.

“Last week’s storm surge brings into sharp focus how important it is that people know if they could be affected by flooding,” Dr Paul Leinster, Chief Executive of the Environment Agency said.

Despite the government’s own projections for sea level rise of between 13 to 76cm by 2095 due to climate change, a new flood insurance plan, Flood Re, does not take into account the likelihood of the growing intensity or frequency of flooding.

The details of Flood Re are still being finalised, but the programme as it stands is likely to cover just 500,000 homes, and does not take into account the likelihood of increased flooding as the climate warms.

Guy Shrubsole, who is campaigning with Friends of the Earth for the new scheme to include the impacts of climate change, said: “Millions of homes across the UK are under threat from surface water flooding – and with scientists predicting more extreme rainfall as climate change takes hold, this number is set to rise.

“In the light of all the scientific evidence it is astonishing that the Environment Secretary’s new flood insurance scheme fails to factor in risks from both surface water flooding and future climate change.

“MPs must take action by insisting that the Government fixes its flawed insurance scheme, invests properly in flood defences and does more to cut carbon emissions.”

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Flooding in China. (Pic: SFTHQ)

By Saleemul Huq

In recent months, the world has seen some significant loss and damage from climate related events.

These have included losses of nearly US$100 billion in the US from Hurricane Sandy in the northwest coast and droughts in the south and mid-west, to over 10 billion from floods in Germany and many other parts of the world.

In northern China floods have caused loss of several hundred lives, and entire towns have been washed away.

When these events occur in developed countries the losses tend to be large in monetary terms but low in human lives lost.

When they occur in poorer developing countries the numbers of human lives and livelihoods lost are generally larger than the monetary loss and damage.

Nevertheless, both developed as well as developing countries are being affected quite severely.

Severity

Several recent scientific publications, including the special report on climate extremes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as well as a World Bank report (called Turn Down the Heat), have shown that the severity of such climatic events in future is likely to increase dramatically due to human induced climate change.

A more recent study looking at potential loss and damage in coastal cities around the world estimated that in New Orleans and New York alone the costs may go up to US$1 trillion over this century.

While every country has some national level mechanism in place to assess loss and damage and sometimes also provide compensation (either through private insurance or public purse), they are becoming strained, with insurance companies no longer willing to provide insurance against floods and droughts in many developed countries.

In some cases, where the country is unable to cope by itself, the international community steps in to provide funding. Although such funds are not called compensation, they are, nevertheless, given because of the sense of shared responsibilities between rich and poor countries.

COP 18

In the last Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in Doha, Qatar, last December, the parties agreed for the first time to look at options for a global mechanism to address loss and damage from climate change.

The developing countries, led by the small island developing states (SIDS) and least developed countries (LDCs), have been arguing for some time for an international mechanism on loss and damage , which has been resisted by the rich countries (largely out of fear that it will give rise to demands for compensation based on liability).

However, it is time that the developed countries realised that loss and damage will not be confined to poor countries only but that even the rich countries will suffer major loss and damage if temperatures continue to rise. Hence, it is their own interests to engage constructively with the poorer more vulnerable countries in trying to address this topic.

Thus, at the next conference of parties (COP19) to be held in Warsaw, Poland, in November this year, they should bring a positive response to the demand for an international mechanism on loss and damage and support the vulnerable countries in this demand.

One area for mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and information between developed and developing countries is research on loss and damage.

A good example of this has recently been set by the government of Japan, which has allocated nearly US$1 million for a research programme on loss and damage in the Asia Pacific region. Other developed countries could follow Japan’s example.

It is high time to move from a confrontational approach to a cooperative approach on loss and damage.

The writer is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development, Independent University, Bangladesh, Dhaka. This article first appeared on the Bangladesh newspaper The Daily Star.

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New Orleans has already suffered from catastrophic flooding this century. (pic: US government)

By Tim Radford

By 2050, flood damage in the world’s coastal cities is expected to reach US$1 trillion a year as sea levels rise and global warming triggers more extreme weather.

More than 40% of these costs could fall upon just four cities – New Orleans, Miami and New York in the US and Guangzhou in China.

Stephane Hallegatte of the World Bank in Washington and colleagues looked at the risks of future flood losses in the 136 largest of the world’s coastal cities.

Any coastal city is always at some risk – by definition it is at sea level, and often on an estuary or floodplain, and very often began as a seaport.

But risks increase as the environment changes: some coastal cities are subsiding; sea levels are slowly but surely rising as the oceans warm and the glaciers melt.

For two decades researchers have repeatedly warned that what used to be “extreme” events such as once-in-a-century floods are likely to arrive considerably more often than once a century.

Loss

But, Hallegatte and colleagues point out in Nature Climate Change, there is another factor: populations are growing, and even in the poorest nations there is greater economic development, resulting in more potential victims, with more investment to lose.

In 2005, average global flood losses are estimated to have reached US$6 billion a year. This figure is expected to grow to US$50 billion a year, and unless cities put money into better flood defences, losses could pass the US$1 trillion mark.

To make their calculations, the authors matched average annual losses (and in a city like New Orleans, much of it already below sea level, this is estimated at US$600 million) against a city’s gross domestic product, to provide a measure of how much should be set aside to pay for such losses.

Both New York and New Orleans have already undergone catastrophic flooding this century, and flood hazard can only increase.

Some cities – Amsterdam in the Netherlands is a classic example – are highly exposed to flood risk, and the once-a-century flood could cost the Dutch US$83 billion, but in fact Dutch sea defence standards are probably the highest in the world.

Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and Alexandria in Egypt have less to lose, but in relative terms both are far more vulnerable.

Prophecies such as these are intended to be proved wrong: the idea is that a prophet warns of horrors to come, people take steps, and as a consequence the horrors do not arrive.

Flood defences

But as disaster professionals have learned again and again, governments, city authorities, investors and even citizens tend not to listen to prophecies of doom.

Scientists and engineers repeatedly described what could happen to New Orleans if it was hit by a powerful-enough hurricane, and in 2005, as Hurricane Katrina arrived, the levees gave way, with catastrophic results.

But, the scientists warn, Miami, New York and New Orleans are especially vulnerable, because wealth is high but protection systems are poor, and governments should be prepared for disasters more devastating than any experienced today.

The paper’s authors argue that with systematic preparedness and adaptation, annual flood losses in the great global cities could be cut to US$63 billion a year.

Engineering projects can help, but will not be enough, so civic authorities should also be thinking about disaster planning and comprehensive insurance programmes to cover future losses.

Since risks are highly concentrated – any city piles millions of people and billions of dollars of investment into a relatively small area – flood reduction schemes could be highly cost-effective.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network.

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UK: The British Geological Survey has said UK shale gas resources may be far greater than previously thought but it is unclear how much could be extracted. Ministers are likely to announce plans for tax incentives to encourage investment in shale gas, and a streamlining of the process to award drilling permits. (BBC/Guardian)

UK shale gas resources may be far greater than previously thought. (Source: KA)

Australia: Climate policy is facing an uncertain future with Julia Gillard’s departure unlikely to abate Labor’s fall in popularity resulting in Tony Abbott becoming Australia’s next prime minister in September. Abbott has been extremely vocal in his opposition to the carbon tax and has promised its abolition if voted in. (BBC)

World: The World Bank plans to cease financial support for new coal power generation projects, except in rare circumstances where there is no alternative energy source or other financing options are available to meet basic energy needs. (Reuters)

World: A UN senior official today stressed that this year will be a “turning point” in how governments view and respond to flooding. According to UNISDR, approximately 250 million people have been affected annually by floods over the last 10 years. (UN)

Pacific: The tiny Pacific Marshall Islands are being inundated by record tides that have engulfed the capital Majuro leading the government to welcome a US emergency response team with the words “welcome to climate change”. (RTCC)

World: New research shows that species in the distant past have adapted to, and colonised, new and increasingly arid desert zones during periods of dramatic climate change. (RTCC)

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Really calamitous floods that, during the 20th century were considered once-in-a-century events could come round every 10 years or so by the end of the 21st century, according to Japanese scientists.

Yukiko Hirabayashi of the University of Tokyo and colleagues looked at the likely pattern of hazard in 29 of the world’s great river basins.

Widespread flooding in Pakistan in 2010 affected 18m people (Source: UN Photo/Evan Schneider)

They considered the risk in those places where greater numbers of people were settled, and used 11 global climate models to project flood dangers by the end of this century.

They warn in their report published in Nature Climate Change, that the frequency of floods will increase in Southeast Asia, Peninsular India, eastern Africa and the northern half of the Andes of South America.

More at stake

Conditions in northern and Eastern Europe – the scene of recent and current calamitous flooding – could get less hazardous, along with Anatolia, central Asia, North America and southern South America.

The predictions, of course, come with the usual caveat: that the real exposure to flooding will depend to a great extent on what governments finally decide to do about greenhouse emissions, how much the world warms, what water management or flood control plans are put in place and on population growth in the regions at risk.

But those lower latitude countries where both population and economic investment are on the increase will have more at stake in the decades to come, and should prepare for greater flood risks.

Floods in the last three decades have claimed 200,000 lives and caused around $400 billion in economic damage: they have also cost an estimated three billion people their homes, farms, businesses and livestock.

Great river basins

The most recent assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that overall, there was a “low confidence in projections of changes in fluvial floods. Confidence is low due to limited evidence and because the causes of regional changes are complex”.

The Tokyo team took a detailed look at all the available data for the world’s great river basins, from the Yukon, the Mackenzie and the Columbia in the North American west to the Mississippi and the St Lawrence; the Rhine, the Danube and the Volga in Europe; the Ob, the Yenisei and the Amur in Siberia; the Orinoco, Parana and Amazon in South America; the Euphrates, the Indus, the Ganges, the Mekong and the Yangtze in Asia: the Niger, Nile, Zambezi and Congo in Africa and even the Murray in Australia.

Their projections are just that: projections, to be tested by outcomes long after some of the authors have died. The researchers acknowledge the limitations in their methodology.

“The 20th Century 100-year flood event is projected to occur about every 10-50 years in many of these rivers in the 21th Century. Such a large change in return period is caused by a 10-30% increase in flood discharge,” they warn.

“Major attention should be paid to low-latitude countries where flood frequency and population are both projected to increase.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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While climate change negotiators at the Maritim Hotel in Bonn have been locked in a stalemate over the past week, the Rhine has raced by, inches from breaking its banks.

Swollen rivers are causing havoc from Austria to Hungary with Germany and the Czech Republic hit particularly hard. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the country was facing “the worst floods of all time”.

In a warming world extreme weather events such as flooding are set to become more common, making these floods an important test of Europe’s capability to cope.

Longer term, the EU climate change adaptation strategy report, published in April, warns the minimum cost of not adapting to climate change is estimated at €100 billion a year in 2020 and €250 billion in 2050 for the whole EU.

Between 1980-2011 it says floods killed more than 2,500 people, affected more than 5.5 million and caused direct economic losses of more than €90 billion.

“The EU is perhaps prepared,” says Åse Johannessen, research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute who focuses on flood resilience. “The tendency is to push important decisions that have very long term implications. We tend to wait until these kinds of disasters occur before listening to the voices calling for change.”

Prague’s ring of steel just about keeps the 2013 floods at bay. The city was devastated by flooding in 2002 (Source: Flickr/Khedara)

For the tens of thousands of people evacuated in central Europe last week, that is unlikely to be good enough.

Johannessen suggests that increasing the opportunity for vegetation to slow down water’s journey from the ground to the river and by returning rivers to their more natural state could reduce the impacts.

“The water needs to flow more freely, if you control it too much it will eventually break out,” she says.

Johannessen’s approach of prioritising prevention, would expose cities to far smaller flood events but more often, a process she refers to as safe fail.

Flood defences failed New Orleans during hurricane Katrina when a huge storm surge hit the city. Over the years the levee network drained the wetlands that sat between it and the ocean.

This would have acted as a brake on the encroaching seas. With the speed bumps removed high waters were able to race toward the city and break through the crash barrier that now stood in its path. Last ditch flood defences made the situation worse.

Land and climate

While a component of increased flooding can be traced back to climate change, poor river basin management and urbanisation have played their part too.

Swapping absorbent green spaces for concrete only helps rivers to react to heavier rainfall.

“One of the reasons is the increase in heavy precipitation that we have seen in the last 50 years. This is because the warming means there is more water vapour in the atmosphere,” says Johannessen.

“In terms of Central Europe the change in land use has been significant. If you look at the river Elbe basin in the year 1100, the floodplain was about 620,000 hectares and now it’s about 84,000 hectares.”

Rivers are being given less space to move around on and squeezed through shipping friendly channels that only serve to speed a surge in rainfall downstream.

As ever, making changes means finding the political backing and the investment.

“At the moment the voices that are heard tend to be advocating for big embankments and flood defences when they should be addressing the underlying causes such as land use change. It’s a harder thing to do. There are lots of interests involved so it is hard to find a political solution.”

Even once the investment is found to respond to flooding, it has to be channelled in the right direction.

“One of the hardest parts in any kind of disaster risk reduction is attracting investment. But the investment in the cities is more about curing the symptoms, than addressing the problem.”

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From a distance the favelas, or shantytowns, of Rio can look colourful and picturesque, clinging to the steep sides of the mountains which rise above the beaches. Some have even been added to the itinerary of the more adventurous tourist.

But for the millions who live in them, they can also be places of danger, fear and violence, because of the drug cartels which control them. They are also places of insalubrity and disease, with open sewers, precarious water supplies and overcrowding.

Among the tiny brick houses, crammed one on top of the other, there is no room for trees, gardens, plants or beauty.

As they have advanced ever further up the slopes and into the mountains, any remaining vegetation has been chopped down, paving the way for lethal mudslides when the torrential rains of summer strike.

One sixth of Rio’s population live in favelas (Pic: John Parnell)

There are an estimated 700 favelas in Rio, home to over a million of the city’s six million people. Global warming is expected to hit the poorest hardest, producing more extreme events like violent rainstorms. Favela dwellers are always the first victims of such downpours.

The Rio authorities have begun efforts to change this scenario, first with a programme of “pacification” – expelling the drug gangs and their militias and establishing community police bases.

This has allowed all the normal services enjoyed by other Rio inhabitants – rubbish collection, regular electricity and sewage and water services, and postal deliveries – to be installed.

The normalization of shantytown life has also permitted the beginning of an ambitious project to turn the cramped favelas with their narrow alleys into “green communities”.

Sharing their skills

The brainchild of Rio`s environmental department, working with a local NGO, the aim is to plant 34 million trees and plants in shantytowns over the next three years, not only to prevent future mudslides, but to provide jobs and incomes for some of the residents.

The project began in November 2012. Four communities in different parts of the city were chosen as pilot projects: Batan, in the Bangu district, Fogueteiro, in the central district of Santa Teresa, Formiga, in Tijuca, and in the huge sprawling Complexo do Alemão, which spreads over the districts of Bonsucesso, Ramos and Olaria.

These communities have not only been “pacified”, they have space for large-scale planting. Residents who volunteered have been training as community gardeners. Besides planting techniques, the gardeners learn how to plan the landscaping project in each shantytown.

They will also be expected to pass on their new awareness of the environment to the other residents. The plants grown in the shantytown nurseries will be transplanted to the bare hillsides, not only to stop erosion but to improve the microclimate in the favela.

Rio’s environment secretary Carlos Minc, a veteran environmental campaigner and former federal environment minister, is very enthusiastic about the project.

“We want to put green roofs on the houses to reduce the temperature, and plant vegetable gardens,” he says. “We want to reforest the slopes with fruit trees to attract birds, instead of having this dry, cracked earth, which whenever it rains can start landslides.”

Supplying big customers

Minc said they will use abandoned parts of the shantytowns that were previously used as rubbish dumps and as scrapyards for stolen cars: “The idea is to take an abandoned area and transform it into a social meeting place, with lovely gardens and nurseries.”

This, he believes will also help to diminish the day-to-day violence in the communities.

By the end of the first four-month course in the favela of Fogueteiro, the new gardeners had planted 540 trees, all native species, and had also started producing vegetables and salad greens.

Once it gets going, the project has wider ambitions, says Ingrid Gerolimich, the Rio environmental department’s project coordinator. She wants the community gardeners to learn all the stages of the process, from growing the plants to their commercialization, and to form cooperatives.

Besides the environmental aim, there is a social aim – the generation of jobs and income. She explained: “There is a space for improving the technical ability of the people involved in planting the saplings and in producing ornamental plants. We want to have partnerships with the big hotel chains, so we can supply them.”

For the moment, the emphasis is still on recruiting and training the community gardeners – 120 are needed for the four chosen shantytowns in the first stage of the project. Those that complete the course will then earn a monthly wage of £40, for what, at first, will be a part-time job.

If this ambitious and innovative project works it could be copied in other Brazilian cities. But it is early days, and it will depend a lot on the continuing support of the authorities, whoever wins the next elections, and on the enthusiasm and involvement of the shantytown populations themselves.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

RTCC Video: Rio’s favela communities look to make their lives more sustainable 

The post Rio’s favelas set climate adaptation example appeared first on Climate Home News.

As 2012 comes to a close, the effects of the year’s weather are not yet over.

Drought and heatwaves wreaked havoc with harvests and we will only feel that particular pinch next year.

Typhoon Bopha’s death toll has already passed the 1000 mark and Cyclone Evan has just passed through Samoa and Fiji. By the end of October, 2012 had already yielded the average number of tropical storms expected.

Add this to record lows in Arctic Sea Ice, floods, wildfires, temperature extremes and the fact that November was the 333rd consecutive month that temperatures were higher than the 20th century average and a compelling picture emerges.

“Naturally occurring climate variability due to phenomena such as El Niño and La Niña impact on temperatures and precipitation on a seasonal to annual scale,” says Michel Jarraud, WMO Secretary-General.

“But they do not alter the underlying long-term trend of rising temperatures due to climate change as a result of human activities.”

An estimated 9.2 million acres, an area just smaller than Switzerland, was burned by US wildfires this year. (Source: Flickr/National Guard)

“The extent of Arctic sea ice reached a new record low. The alarming rate of its melt this year highlighted the far-reaching changes taking place on Earth’s oceans and biosphere. Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records,” he adds.

Extreme weather events cannot be singularly attributed to climate change but observations of their regularity and distribution suggest something is changing.

Eric Pooley, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund in the US, uses an excellent analogy to explain the relationship between climate change and extreme weather.

“We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.”

Science and politics

Despite a year of “global weirding” and some often harrowing physical evidence, the climate politics of 2012 showed no sign of shifting to close the gulf between observed climate impacts and urgent policy action.

“It’s a gap as wide as the Grand Canyon,” says Kelly Rigg, executive director of the Global Campaign for Climate Action, more commonly referred to as tcktcktck. “The science tells us that the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive it will be to keep temperature rise in check.”

The conclusion of the UN climate change talks in Doha left many unsatisfied that the urgency of the process and the change it is meant to deliver, are not matching up to its founding principles.

“There’s a reason why emissions reductions targets are pegged to 1990 as a base year – that was the year we drew a line in the sand; the year governments acknowledged the science and negotiated a treaty to address it. But sadly, global emissions still have yet to peak,” she told RTCC.

With developing countries bearing the brunt of most of climate changes impacts, it is perhaps no surprise that that is where the greatest urgency can be found.

“Many people in developing countries are very aware of the changing climate, and are directly experiencing the impacts,” says Rigg. “But they don’t necessarily associate it with excessive fossil fuel use in other countries. That said some of the strongest leadership on climate action is being taken by developing country governments.”

WMO State of the climate in 2012

Sea ice: Summer sea ice extent in the Arctic shrunk to a new record low in September. “We are now in uncharted territory,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Center (NSIDC) in Colorado, US.

NASA: Data reveals how Arctic sea ice extent, from Sept. 16, 2012, compares to the average minimum over the past 30 years (yellow).

Temperatures: During the first ten months of 2012, above-average temperatures affected most of the globe’s land surface areas, most notably North America (warmest on record for 48 lower US states), southern Europe, western and central Russia and northwestern Asia.

Much of South America and Africa experienced above average temperatures during the first ten months of the year, with the most anomalous warmth across parts of northern Argentina and northern Africa. Most of Asia had above-average temperatures, with cooler-than-average conditions across parts of northern China.

South Asia and the Pacific were also predominantly warmer than normal, except for Australia.

Extremes: Notable extreme events were observed worldwide, but some parts of the Northern Hemisphere were affected by multiple extremes during January–October 2012. Superstorm Sandy made landfall in New York, having already devastated Haiti, attracting global attention on climate change. Concern about the climate in the US shot up to 80% post-Sandy.

Heat waves: Major heat waves impacted the Northern Hemisphere during the year, with the most notable in March–May across the continental United States of America and Europe. Warm spells during March 2012 resulted in many record-breaking temperatures in Europe and nearly 15,000 new daily records across the USA.

Russia witnessed the second warmest summer on record after 2010. Numerous temperature records were broken in Morocco in summer.

Drought: According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, nearly two-thirds of the continental United States (65.5%) was considered to be in moderate to exceptional drought on 25 September, 2012.

Drought conditions impacted parts of western Russia and western Siberia during June and July, and Southeast Europe, the Balkans and some Mediterranean countries during summer.

In China, the Yunnan and southwestern Sichuan province experienced severe drought during winter and spring. Northern Brazil witnessed the worst drought in 50 years. The April–October precipitation total, in Australia was 31% below normal.

Corn and soybean harvests plummeted as a result of the hotter drier condition.

Haiti has suffered a succession of extreme weather events in recent years. (Source: UN/Logan Abbasi)

Floods: Many parts of western Africa and the Sahel, including Niger and Chad, suffered serious flooding between July and September because of a very active monsoon.

Heavy rainfall from the end of July through early October prompted exceptional floods across Nigeria.

Parts of southern China experienced their heaviest rainfall in the last 32 years in April and May.

Devastating monsoonal floods impacted Pakistan during September.

Central and parts of northern Argentina suffered from record rainfall and flooding in August, and parts of Colombia were affected by heavy precipitation for most of the year.

Snow and Extreme Cold: A cold spell on the Eurasian continent from late January to mid-February was notable for its intensity, duration, and impact.

Across eastern Russia, temperatures ranged between -45°C to -50°C during the end of January. Several areas of eastern Europe reported minimum temperatures as low as -30°C, with some areas across northern Europe and central Russia experiencing temperatures below -40°C.

Tropical Cyclones: Global tropical cyclone activity for the first ten months was near the 1981–2010 average of 85 storms, with a total of 81 storms (wind speeds greater or equal than 34 knots, or 63 kilometres per hour).

The Atlantic basin experienced an above-average hurricane season for a third consecutive year with a total of 19 storms, with ten reaching hurricane status, the most notably being Sandy, which wreaked havoc across the Caribbean and the USA East Coast.

Throughout the year, East Asia was severely impacted by powerful typhoons. Typhoon Sanba and Bopha caused severe damage and loss of life with the Philippines particularly badly affected.

The post 2012: Another year of global weirding appeared first on Climate Home News.

Australia’s infrastructure is badly prepared for the growing threat posed of climate change, according to a new study.

The report by The Climate Institute found that as the frequency of extreme weather events increases, the country will face an infrastructure bill of at least A$9bn in 2020, rising sharply thereafter.

“Australians are no strangers to extreme weather events. With these events likely to get more frequent and more unpredictable, Australia should be better placed to adapt to our changing climate,” said John Conner, CEO, The Climate Institute. “But we are poorly prepared to bear its impacts on major infrastructure, whether it’s roads, property, or electricity networks.”

The report calls for a nationally coordinated approach to help lift the burden on local councils that are currently responsible for addressing climate risk.

The flooding across Queensland in 2010/11 cost the economy an estimated A$10bn. (Source: Flickr/Julia Gillard)

Assessing five infrastructure related sectors, the report found three to be underprepared for the risks of climate change.

Electricity networks are impaired by regulatory obstacles to improvement, road and rail planning suffers a number of inconsistencies across, and even within, the same jurisdictions while the financial sector was said to have failed to have translated the need for climate action to the markets.

Insurers are at particular risk in Australia. In the past five years the country has represented insurance losses three times greater than would be expected from its global market share.

“All organisations, whether public or private, should be identifying the potential damages and costs today, so that infrastructure projects are built to be resilient,” said Connor. “We need to consider physical damage and repair, interruptions to supply chains and operations, and insurance and reputational damage.”

In late 2010 and early 2011 flooding of the Brisbane River caused damage described as being of “post-war” proportions.

Related articles:

Hurricane Sandy: the climate change alert the USA was fearing

Extreme weather cost US insurers $34bn in 2011

Pressure grows on Australia to sign Kyoto Protocol II

Extreme weather events in the US during 2012, culminating in Superstorm Sandy causing widespread damage along the east coast of the US, have led to a surge in pressure on US politicians to address climate change.

With more than 80% of the country’s population living along its coast, the country is at particular risk to rising sea levels, increased storminess and coastal flooding.

“For us, a world of more than 2°C of global warming will require a much more radical change to infrastructure and our daily lives,” said Connor.

The Australian Government is taking action to reduce emissions at homes with the introduction of a carbon price of A$23 per tonne of CO2 applied to its 300 biggest emitters.

The Government has yet to reveal whether it will take part in international binding emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol. A second commitment period will be discussed at the upcoming climate change negotiations in Doha, with Canberra so far remaining tight-lipped on its intentions.

The post Australian infrastructure not up to facing new climate reality, according to new report appeared first on Climate Home News.

A new atlas has been published to help reduce the impact of extreme weather events and climatic variability on human health.

The atlas, compiled by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), tracks shifting patterns of disease and identifies regions that could become more prone to outbreaks associated with extreme weather events.

Major flooding events have more than doubled since 1970 and extreme weather events have tripled since 1960.

Haiti has suffered at the hands of several tropical storms and an earthquake in recent years, with outbreaks of cholera and the H1N1 virus developing in the aftermath.

The atlas, launched at the World Meteorological Congress in Geneva, shows how improved climate data can improve early warning systems to reduce the impact of climate variability on health.

In the aftermath of a major earthquake and several severe tropical storms Haiti has also experienced outbreaks of cholera and H1N1. (Source: UN Photo/UNICEF/Marco Dormino)

“Stronger cooperation between the meteorological and health communities is essential to ensure that up-to-date, accurate and relevant information on weather and climate is integrated into public health management at international, national and local levels,” said Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General, WMO.

The spread of some infectious diseases including cholera, malaria and dengue can vary by a factor of 100 depending on climatic conditions.

Adding these variables to existing health risk assessments can improve the identification of potential hotspots increasing the lead time for a public health response.

Related articles:

Who knows if climate change is to blame – but Sandy is a wake-up call

One year on: Building resilience in the Horn of Africa

Experts: Climate change to increase lung disease

Increased cooperation can also help responses to impending periods of extreme heat. With continued urbanisation and an increase in the frequency of these events, extreme heat is a growing concern, but one that can be mitigated for.

The success of early warning systems for natural disasters such as cyclones has already been proved as an effective measure to reduce deaths.

Comparable cyclones in Bangladesh in 1970 and 2007 killed 500,000 and 3,000 respectively.

In the case of meningitis, spread of the virus is facilitated by dry and dusty conditions. By pre-empting where and when these will occur, allows targeted vaccination programmes to limit the disease’s impact.

The post UN agencies target climate health impacts as extreme weather events triple in 50 years appeared first on Climate Home News.

Whether or not Hurricane Sandy is the direct consequence of climate change is a moot point.

But New York has already been identified as a climate vulnerable city and the Frankenstorm could prove to be an unwelcome demonstration of weaknesses that were not expected to be exposed for some time.

It might not be as ferocious as hurricanes that have made landfall further down the US Eastern Seaboard but its 75mph winds are likely to run for two days. And a storm surge exacerbated by a high tide will replicate some of the most likely challenges predicted for New York in a world beyond the estimated safe level of warming of 2°C.

The current science on the interaction between climate change and the frequency and intensity of hurricanes and storminess in general, is far from conclusive. Linking one weather event specifically to climate change simply cannot be done robustly.

What can be said on the science is that a trend is emerging. In warm years, there are more big cyclones. Therefore the warming earth will likely exhibit a growing number of these big storms.

Hurricane Sandy heads for the east coast of the US. (Source: Flickr/NASA Goddard Photo and Video)

The science behind Hurricane Sandy, is complicated further by the addition of an Arctic cold front that has wrapped itself around the hurricane. The result is a very large storm hundreds of miles across. So is New York ready for this kind of extreme weather event and a future riddled with increased storminess?

A report by Cornell University, assessing the potential changes on New York State under a scenario with 3°C of warming by 2050, said that storm surges could flood subways and other transportation tunnels within an hour. At the time of writing, New York City’s subway is shut down in anticipation of the Hurricane Sandy’s arrival.

The report also recommended moving crucial utility infrastructure to higher ground, advice that appears to have been taken with one new power plant being rebuilt four feet higher above the ground.

Earlier this year the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said that the 2005 hurricane season alone had cost the US emergency services $18 billion. Dealing with the new reality using a ‘business as usual’ mindset, was no longer working.

“We cannot afford to continue to respond to disasters and deal with the consequences under the current model. Risk that is not mitigated, that is not considered in return on investment calculations, often time steps up false economies,” said Craig Fugate FEMA’s Administrator.

What the Hudson River has done so far ; it has yet to rain #Hoboken God bless ; pray ! instagr.am/p/RWej23DSiz/

— Melissa Jimenez (@Official_Mello) October 29, 2012

Most devastating pic I’ve seen so far. Up to the top of the sea wall. Very scared for OC instagr.am/p/RWg-yrJqX7/ — Matt Hein (@The_Hein_Line) October 29, 2012

Even before the storm had reached New York, pictures on twitter showed the River Hudson spilling over and seawalls already at capacity. Paying for improvements to this infrastructure now, would help reduce the unsustainable costs referred to by Fugate.

The real question is whether New York, along with other low-lying world cities like London, Calcutta, Shanghai, Amsterdam, and Manila are prepared to invest to offset the risk of future climatic shifts and sea level changes that are coming our way.

Insurance firms, specialists in quantifying risk, are not satisfied with the progress so far and are raising prices to account for climate change.

Hurricane Katrina led to $40bn in claims. The value of property at risk from Hurricane Sandy is thought to be as high as $88bn. But insurers are unwilling to take the hits repeatedly and want to see more adaptation work by governments and business to build resilience to the new normal.

They have already begun shifting the risk of hurricanes northwards up the US coastline as storm tracks deviate from more familiar paths. In the UK insurers are looking to withhold coverage for homes in at-risk flood areas.

There are a number of options available to cities.

Building flood defences protects what is already in place, changes to planning laws can stop the areas at risk from becoming more densely populated. Some have argued that rebuilding these cities is not the right option and instead populations should be moved on.

Related articles:

One year on: Building resilience in the Horn of Africa

UNICEF: We must teach urban kids how to deal with disasters

PHOTO GALLERY: 10 cities at risk from Climate Change

An IPCC report into managing climate extremes and disasters refers to “low-regrets” measures. If a city is prepared for the worst case scenario of future sea-level rise, it will be protected from storm surges in intervening years.

In the developing world, the benefits of acting now are even greater. better defences can also mean improved irrigation, protected ecosystems, reduced spread of disease and a number of other development benefits.

The 2011 floods in Thailand have been determined to have fallen within normal ranges.

The rainfall in the build-up was not unusual, and despite claims to the contrary climate change effectively played no visible part. The problem was largely with Bangkok’s flood defences and changes in land use that gave the water nowhere to go.

The country’s government has responded with a $11bn round of improvements to its flood defences. If a city is prepared, it will be protected from all unfriendly storms and flood events, climate induced or otherwise.

RTCC Video: Nick Davidson from the Ramsar Convention describes the role mangroves can play in boosting resilience to storms

The post Hurricane Sandy: the climate change alert the USA was fearing appeared first on Climate Home News.

Green roofs have seen a surge in popularity in recent years as cities look for ways to limit the impacts of climate change.

Green roofs – also known as living roofs – are where the top of a building is partially or completely covered by vegetation and a growing medium, planted on top of a waterproofing membrane.

They serve several purposes, including absorbing rainwater (helping to prevent flash flooding), providing insulation, creating a habitat to encourage wildlife to urban areas and helping to lower urban air temperatures and mitigate the ‘heat island’ effect.

In Herne Hill, South London – where localised flooding has been a problem, the Urban Wild Project aims to improve the local area by encouraging local businesses to install green roofs.

A before and after shot of the Herne Hill roofs, put together by an artist to show what they could look like at the end of the project (Source: Urban Wild Project)

I spoke to Caroline Noble and Katy Obregon about what gave them inspiration for a green roofs project on this scale.

RTCC: Why green roofs…?

Caroline Noble (CN): It all started with an idea to respond to climate change by installing green roofs on as many businesses in Herne Hill as we could.

Normally people are approaching this kind of thing as individuals, greening their shed roofs or, on the other end of the scale you have companies putting them on big buildings in London. It is one of the first times a project of this size has been attempted at a community level in the UK.

RTCC: What have you achieved so far?

CN: I think the biggest achievement has been getting so far in such a short space of time. It has been a real challenge to communicate with so many people with different levels of interest and understanding. Addressing everyone’s issues has been key. We had a public meeting where a green roof expert explained the benefits of living roofs and dealt with concerns that people had.

We now have such a large number of people interested in the project that we have had to put together a website, as a way of providing information and updates.

The community has been incredibly supportive and the whole thing has snowballed. We are now hoping to install more than 30 roofs.

The Herne Hill roofs run alongside the railway line, and people will be able to see the living roofs from the passing trains (Source: Urban Wild Project)

Katy Obregon (KO): Despite a lot of support from shop owners, it is essential to get the freeholders who own the leases to approve the project also. Without it, greening Herne Hill roofs can only ever be a dream! Ensuring freeholders understand how living roofs might benefit them as a business, is a crucial aspect to this project because they’re not always based in the community. Many people don’t know what living roofs are, or about the services they provide. For example savings on energy bills, increased roof lifespan and reducing damage caused by flooding.

So far we are happy to say that the responses from the freeholders have been encouraging!

CN: In the background to all this is the London Plan by the Greater London Authority which talks about urban greening as a way of dealing with climate change. It specifically mentions green roofing, so the political will is there. There is also funding out there for the right project and we have managed to get enough so far to complete the first stage.

RTCC: What have been the challenges so far?

CN: I think it has been coordination. I don’t think either of us realised how big it would get and just how fast. To coordinate that many people – we are dealing with shop owners, freeholders, surveyors, council and the community in general. We just didn’t anticipate the level of work which would be needed and how hard it would be to fit it in around our daily lives. We’ve had to take a more systematic approach to allocating time to the project.

We now need to make sure we are in the right place organisationally. So we have had to set up a board and sort out all of the bureaucratic nuts and bolts. That has been quite a steep learning curve!

RTCC: How engaged have the local community been? How did you go about engaging with the local community?

KO: We have been awarded £2000 from the Timberland Earthkeeper’s Grant, which we are using specifically to connect the community with the project. We are organising living roof workshops for people who want to green a roof that can be enjoyed by their community, so, for example a school roof like a bike shed, or perhaps a shed on an allotment.

Some of the money will go towards research being carried out by a PhD student investigating the social benefits of green roofs.

One of the issues is not being able to see the roofs to enjoy them. Our aim is to find ways to make the inaccessible accessible! We are buying time lapse cameras and we’ll feed the information back to our website so people get the chance to watch the roofs in action. This will be especially exciting when David Perkins and the team from Roots and Shoots begin building habitats to encourage wildlife to move in.

CN: There have been all sorts of spin-off projects. We are currently trying to get funding for an art installation which is specifically designed to encourage community interaction with the roofs.

Using a large piece of green roofing, the group were able to use the Lambeth Country Show to spread the word about green roofing (Source: Urban Wild Project)

We also recently had a stall at the Lambeth Country Show in Brockwell Park outside the Cooperative Council tent. Lambeth have been very supportive of our attempts to publicise the project and we are now the proud owners of new display boards! A company donated a large piece of green roofing which was covered with wild flowers and stopped everyone in their tracks and we ran a workshop for children, green roofing shoeboxes with mustard and cress.

KO: People have been very generous with their expertise and time putting together leaflets, logos, films and photos…. Herne Hill as a community seem to be as excited as we are about the project!

RTCC: How much support have you seen from the local council?

CN: There is a lot of talk at the moment about the Big Society and the importance of community-led projects and certainly, Lambeth Council has been very interested in the project from the start. One of their sustainability engineers gave us a lot of good advice which helped us secure our first lot of funding.

It can be difficult to know who to talk to in the council because it can be such an amorphous blob but the Green Community Champions team have been very helpful and we are now on their mailing list and are building connections with lots of great people and projects.

They have more of an overview of what is happening across other London boroughs too and I think they have been really excited by the scale of the project and the level of community cooperation.

The group have used green roof doll houses to help engage people with the project at the Lambeth Country Show (Source: Urban Wild Project)

RTCC: Why did you get involved in the project?

KO: I spend a lot of time reading and worrying about the state of the planet! What gives me hope is getting up in the morning knowing I can do something about it.

CN: I loved the idea. I am fascinated by all things horticultural and the idea of making an urban space a little greener really appealed to me. We also work really well together which makes all the tricky stuff a little easier.

KO: It’s just as well we’re having so much fun as our to do list keeps on exploding!

RTCC: What advice would you give to anyone wanting to set up a similar scheme?

KO: If you have an idea and you are on your own, tap straight into what’s already out there. I think if it’s the natural world you want to protect you won’t be alone for long. There’s a well established network in place full of people supporting our environment in an extraordinary number of different ways. We’ve found it refreshingly easy to access expertise and support. I think it’s because people are passionate about protecting biodiversity and mitigating climate change.

My advice? Let your love for the planet drive you and enjoy the ride!

CN: Nothing ventured nothing gained! Even if your idea seems too big or too difficult there’s nothing to lose so just send that email or make that call… I have been constantly amazed by the people we’ve met. People who aren’t cynical, who want to give something back and who are happy to help. There’s a network out there of community minded people who are trying to bring about positive change and it’s a great thing to be a part of.

Related Articles:

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Carpet tiles, bike powered generators & bio-degradable cars: Five sustainable designs to change your world

The post Adaptation focus: Making the business case for living roofs appeared first on Climate Home News.

The US insurance industry racked up losses of $34bn during 2011, according to a new report.

The Ceres sustainable investment coalition said the losses are the largest in a single year since 2005.

Extreme weather triggered widescale drought, wildfires and tornadoes in the West and Central States while the East coast was battered by storms and flooding.

Click to enlarge. (Source: Ceres)

The report outlines evidence linking climate change to the extreme weather and makes suggestions on how the industry could buffer itself against the increasing risks.

“Insurance is the first line of defence against extreme weather losses, but climate change is a game-changer for the models that insurers have long relied on,” said Washington State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler, who contributed to the report. “Companies will need to adapt if insurance is to remain available and affordable.”

“Just as the insurance industry asserted leadership to minimize building fire and earthquake risks in the 20th century, the industry has a huge opportunity today to lead in tackling climate change risks,” said Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres.

US droughts this summer have driven up food prices while extreme weather has also caused hundreds of deaths.

Related articles:

Scientists link British winter heat & Texas drought of 2011 to climate change – but not Thailand floods

Deloitte climate expert says business must wake up to extreme weather threats

Analysis: Drought-hit Middle East ripe for conflict

The post Extreme weather cost US insurers $34bn in 2011 appeared first on Climate Home News.

South Asia’s emerging economies have the highest financial risk from natural hazards, such as flooding and tropical cyclones, according to risk analysts Maplecroft.

Their Natural Hazards Risk Atlas suggests Bangladesh, the Philippines, Myanmar, India and Vietnam are among 10 countries with the greatest share of their economic activity exposed to such hazards.

They say this is due to high exposure of cities and trading hubs to natural disasters, coupled with their poor capability to recover from events such as flooding and tropical cyclones.

Japan, USA, China, Taiwan and Mexico were identified as having the highest risk in absolute terms, but Maplecroft say these countries have the capacity to recover quickly to natural disasters due to their economic strength, strong governance, building regulations and disaster preparedness.

The warning comes a month after a team of scientists from the UK’s Met Office and the USA’s National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration became the latest scientists to find climate change to be increasing the chance of extreme weather events.

Report finds some of South Asia's key economies to be most at risk financially from natural disasters (Source: Maplecroft/Asia Natural Hazards Risk - Economic Exposure 2012)

Maplecroft also warned these events could exacerbate social unrest, food security, corruption and ultimately could lead to political risk.

“High exposure to natural hazards in these countries are compounded by a lack of resilience to combat the effects of a disaster should one emerge,” said Helen Hodge, Head of Maps and Indices at Maplecroft.

“Given the exposure of key financial and manufacturing centres, the occurrence of a major event would be likely to have significant impacts on the total economic output of these countries, as well as foreign business.”

Resilience

It could take years for countries such as Bangladesh and the Philippines to bounce back from disasters, say the analysts.

The Philippines’ resilience is being tested this week as severe floods affecting the northern island of Luzon, including the capital Manila have affected nearly two million people.

Similar floods in in Thailand wiped out 9% of the country’s GDP, and a year on much of the infrastructure has still not been repaired. In contrast Japan, a year after the fourth largest earthquake ever recorded, the economy has returned to the economic output levels and growth forecasts seen prior to the event.

Related Articles

Scientists link British winter heat & Texas drought of 2011 to climate change – but not Thailand floods

Photo Gallery – 10 cities at risk from Climate Change

Emerging economies most vulnerable to climate change

Video: Lead Bangladesh negotiator Quamrul Chowdhury talks to RTCC at the Bonn Climate Talks about the importance of equity for a vulnerable country such as Bangladesh…

The post New report reveals Bangladesh, the Philippines, Myanmar, India and Vietnam at acute risk from climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

– The day’s top climate change stories as chosen by RTCC
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– Updated at 0900, 1300, 1700 BST (GMT+1)

Wednesday 11 July

Last updated: 1700 BST

Latest news

An international team of scientists have reconstructed the climate in northern Europe over the last 2,000 years using the information provided by tree-rings. It is assumed that the warmer summer temperature make for wider rings and the team say they have found a long term cooling trend that lasted right up until the Industrial Revolution.

BP has announced that it is going to halt its plan to drill for 100 million barrels of oil off the coast of Alaska saying: “The project, as it’s designed right now, doesn’t meet BP’s standards.”

The European Commission put forward proposal today to implement targets to further reduce emissions from car and vans. Commenting on the plans, Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said:

”With our proposals we are not only protecting the climate and saving consumers money. We are also boosting innovation and competitiveness in the automotive sector. And we will create substantial numbers of jobs as a result. This is a clear win-win situation for everyone. This is one more important step towards a competitive, low-carbon economy. More CO₂ reductions beyond 2020 need to be prepared and these will be considered in consultation with stakeholders.”

BONN UPDATE: Bernadittas Muller from the Philippines delegation has said there is no trust between countries on climate finance because of bad experiences with development aid. She also stressed the importance of a stable, continuous funding system in the future: “Finance must be predictable, we can’t make long term adaptation plans if the finance is not predictable.”

BONN UPDATE: Jessica Brown from the US State Department has questioned why countries are not acknowledging the fast-start finance the country has donated: “It’s counter productive. When governments don’t acknowledge our support it makes it harder for us to go back to our government and get more support.”

The European Commission is expected to publish plans to tighten limits on how much CO2 cars and vans can emit. It is the latest in a series of measure aims at meeting EU goals on cutting fuel bills and curbing emissions. The binding 2020 targets have so far divided the industry.

UK consumers have around £30 billion worth of clothes that hang in their wardrobes having not been worn for over a year, according to a new report. The study aims to offer a look at the impacts of clothing on the environment.

BONN UNFCCC #LTFchat: Watch live coverage via webcast

Could climate change be behind the rainy summer being experienced in the UK this summer? Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office Hadley Centre says it could as global warming causes more water to evaporate into the air, causing increased chances of heavier downpours.

And with more downpours meaning more flooding – over 3,000 properties have been flooded since May in the UK– Ministers are warning flood protection could cost the country £860 million by 2015 – at a time when public money available has been reduced.

Climate change could be driving the evolution of salmon.  Records over the last 30 years show nature has increasingly selected in favour of fish that migrate from the ocean, upriver to spawn, earlier in the year. Researchers say it is very difficult to tell if a species is changing its pattern or evolving genetically – or both.

Following news last week that Apple had removed its products from a green certification scheme designed to identify electronic devices environmental impact, city officials in San Francisco have announced they plan to block local government agencies from buying new computers from the company.

Top tweets

With rain and flooding in the UK, and heatwaves and wildfires in the US, extreme weather is still the hot topic of conversation this week…

3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the US in the month of June, 40,000 since Jan 1. ht.ly/c9quT #climate

— Oxfam International (@Oxfam) July 11, 2012

The weird weather events in 2011 that we *can* blame on climate change bit.ly/LFdHk8

— New Scientist (@newscientist) July 10, 2012

Photo of the day

Yesterday saw scientists from across Canada march in their white-coats in protest over cuts to science and environment research. This picture came from @ZoeCaron on Twitter…

Video of the day

To celebrate the introduction of cycle routes on Google Maps, Sustrans released this great little video…

And with the International Coral Reef Symposium taking place in Cairns this week scientists are warning that accelerated climate change are putting increased pressure on the world’s coral reefs. The World Resources Institute have put together this cartoon video to help explain the threats to the corals….

The post Climate Live: Climate change driving salmon evolution, UK flooding to cost £860m by 2015 and San Francisco officials ban Apple appeared first on Climate Home News.

In the Netherlands, if the dykes broke, the floods would extend far into Europe.

The Dutch coastal defence system will protect the country against rising sea-levels.

The system is a good example of coastal management that also translates into early, proactive action on adaptation, which significantly increases the potential of managing climate change impacts.

Increasingly, such adaptation technologies will have to be transferred to developing countries, given that these nations have limited resources to adapt, but will be hit the hardest by climate change impacts.

The Rio Conventions Calendar is published annually by Entico in partnership with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

The post Photo of the week #18 – Defending the coastlines appeared first on Climate Home News.

Emmanuel Okella, news editor/environmental journalist at Radio Simba-Uganda.

In 2007 heavy rainfall led to severe flooding in eastern and northern parts of Uganda, affecting nearly 400,000 people.

In the first of a series of UNFCCC CDM Radio Club reports that RTCC will be hosting, Emmanuel Okella, news editor at Radio Simba-Uganda, discusses the impact the floods had on his country.

Many homes built with mud bricks were washed away, while two-thirds of all families lost nearly 90% of their crops.

Globally analysis suggests that increased incidences of flooding are likely to become more common as a result of climate change – although there are other key contributing factors, including deforestation and desertification.

Okella explains how recent reforestation and sustainable development efforts implemented to prevent future floods are taking shape.

These efforts could be a good model for future Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects in the country.

This broadcast won the first prize in the 2011 UNFCCC/CDM African Radio Contest.

The radio club aims to spread the word about the CDM in Africa and extend the benefits of the mechanism to communities that have not yet benefited from the scheme.

The post Podcast: Impact of 2007 floods in Uganda appeared first on Climate Home News.

Pakistani PM Gilani described the effects of climate change in his country as "horrible". (Source: Flickr/IIP State)

Pakistan could cooperate with India to combat climate change, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told the World Economic Forum on Thursday.

Speaking at a panel event on climate change, Gilani said his country had an “excellent” relationship with India and described collaboration between the two nations as “doable”.

Asked whether the two could work together he said: “Yes, certainly there can be cooperation. We have excellent relationship with India and we want to work together”.

“[There] have been having a number of delegations from both countries on various matters like finance and industry. Certainly cooperation is doable,” Gilani said at the annual WEF meeting in Davos.

“[Climate change] is quite visible in my country. We have suffered both drought and heavy rains in the past year. It was horrible, not just by our estimates but also as per the estimates of World Bank and Asian Development Bank,” said Gilani.

The Prime Minister also advocated a global approach to dealing with climate change and called on the acceleration of the establishment of the Green Climate Fund (GCF). The GCF was expected to be finalised in Durban at the UN climate change talks but progress was slower than expected.

“If the glaciers in Himalayas melt, there will be huge floods in Pakistan,” he said adding that Pakistan has created a disaster management unit, overseen personally by Gilani.

The post Pakistan hints at climate change cooperation with India appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Defra report calls for more flood and coastal defences such as the Thames Flood Barrier (Source: Flickr/LeonardoEastHastings)

The net effects of climate change in the UK will be negative, however there will be some benefits, according to a new report.

The first UK Climate Change Risk Assessment released by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) identifies several benefits such as fewer deaths in winter and the possibility to grow new crops.

However it also identifies a significant increase in the cost of flooding, a rise in water scarcity and indirect damage from climate change effects overseas.

The ten main findings of the report are below:

1. Body of evidence

The latest evidence shows that the UK will have higher average temperatures in summer and winter. There will be more rainfall in the winter and less in the summer.

2. Flooding risk to increase

Increased flood events are the single greatest tangible financial cost of climate change in the UK. The report estimates that the current annual flood damage bill of £1.3 billion will soar. The projected cost for England and Wales alone will reach £2.1-12 billion by the 2080s. These figures only account for property damage.

3. Already vulnerable to extreme weather

The UK has already shown itself to be vulnerable to extreme weather events. The DEFRA reports states that even if you don’t take climate change into account, more action is needed to protect against heavy rains, storms and extreme temperatures.

4. Less winter deaths, more heatwave deaths

Deaths in related to the cold during winter will fall by 3900-24,000 by the 2050s. However, premature deaths in the summer will increase by 580-5900 by the same period.

5. Sensitive ecosystems

Ecosystem health will not fair as well as human health. While some species will benefit, many more will be negatively affected.

Seasonal drought and new diseases will impact forestry and agriculture negatively (Source: Flickr/JoostJBannerIJMuiden)

6. Not a drop to drink

Water resources will be under increasing pressure in the UK, by 2050s, 27-59 million people will live in areas suffering from water scarcity. Water efficiency action will be required.

7. New opportunities for business and agriculture

Again, while new doors open, they won’t outweigh the damage. If successful water management can be implemented there will be opportunities for new crop growth. Businesses will find new markets for products that directly serve mitigation and adaptation.

8. Indirect effects

Larger climate risks internationally will have indirect consequences for the UK such as supply chain interference, global health and political stability

9. Flexibility required

Evidence sufficient to accept identify a range of possible outcomes to inform policies. Policymakers must allow a degree of flexibility

10. More work needed

Significant gaps in evidence still exist. Defra says further work is required to understand the relationships between different climate risks and pressures such as population growth and land-use change.

The post 10 climate change lessons for the UK appeared first on Climate Home News.