A joined-up approach to fighting climate change

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One of the most important is actually comparing different possible futures that the world might enter into in the 21st Century, and in particular I’m comparing, using the models that I work with, futures in which there is no action to address climate change, and by that I mean no action to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gasses that are causing climate change.  And I compare those with futures in which there is a lot of action to reduce those emissions that are coming from fossil fuel burning and deforestation.

So in particular I’ve been bringing together work from a wide range of institutions and modellers actually around the world and also in the UK to look at projections of impacts on human systems and on ecosystems and to show how much climate change we can avoid and how much climate change impacts we can avoid.  So this word avoid is actually part of a project called Avoid which is a collaboration with the Met Office, the Walker Institute, the Grantham Institute and several other prominent UK institutes who are working together on this.

Earlier I did a measure analysis of impacts on biodiversity, and so myself and others in the IPCC worked together to estimate the impacts of climate change on biodiversity and came up with the projection that you’ve probably seen elsewhere of the species study that 20 to 30% of them would be at increasingly high risk of extinction if global temperatures increase by two or three degrees.

So this is talking about potentially very large effects on not only biodiversity and all the efforts for conservation but also on the functioning of those ecosystems and providing what we call services, that’s the essential things that those ecosystems do for people so in preventing floods and providing food and the natural cycles of the atmosphere and so on, carbon cycle, and so on.  And so a key challenge for the future is actually getting a better handle on how might that ecosystem functioning be affected in the future.

It is possible that some people might, faced with those extreme shortages of land and water, would think that the priority has to be to divide that land and water between agriculture and urban uses and domestic use.  Unfortunately that won’t work because humans actually depend on ecosystems.  So, for example, the preservation of forests is very important because forests actually prevent the release of a lot of carbon into the atmosphere and if those forests are not preserved more carbon goes into the atmosphere, the climate change becomes worse.

So forests also produce a lot of the oxygen that is in the atmosphere and then other ecosystems like mangroves for example they are very important because that’s where marine fish actually breed in much of the tropical oceans and coral reefs actually protect coasts from the damaging impacts of storms.  So for the areas that did best in the big tsunami in 2004 were actually the areas that had intact coral reef ecosystems.  So this means that there is a great need to take into account in the modelling how would we under such circumstances divide land, water and ecosystems’ needs, and it’s important I think for us to begin to think about that in the context of people adapting to climate change as well, so that I see as a major challenge in thinking about such a future.

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Some of the things that I feel strongly are needed in the next ten years is we need to have a global agreement on reducing emissions, and the reason we need that is because even though many businesses and individuals may have the will to reduce emissions many of them are actually constrained by the economic realities of the world we live in, and issues of competition and red tape are quite significant obstacles to them for carrying them out, and they need strong policy signals from government in order to do that.  Now obviously the UK has taken a lead through the Climate Change Act in providing such policy signals, but in order for many countries to follow, they need to feel that their development and their competitiveness in the world economy is not threatened, and that can really only happen if there’s a global agreement.

Now that doesn’t mean that I think that other efforts are not useful, but I do think that would be a tremendous advantage, and I also think that there needs to be a lot of technology transfers to the developing world to help its development to be clean, and I also think that with all the funding coming online for adaptation there needs to be very careful thinking about the most effective spending of that money.  Where should it go, who’s going to control that money, and also I think that on mitigation there needs to be very careful thought about which technologies to invest in, where and what is the best place to put new renewable energy schemes and so on.

I also wanted to touch on the efforts for afforestation.  Now obviously in places where there used to be forests it’s a very good thing to replant forests.  But you can’t actually in carbon terms trade off an acre of deforestation by an acre of afforestation because it actually takes several decades for those trees to accrue that amount of carbon.  In fact it could even take a century or more.  Whereas when you deforest you’re actually losing the carbon in the trees and in the soils to the atmosphere instantaneously so there’s a temporal imbalance there.

And just returning to this whole question of achieving the target that many nations have called for, now our analysis is showing that in order to do that global emissions need to peak at about 2016.  Now that’s really soon and basically you’d then need to reduce emissions at a few percent a year after that.  And you can’t simply peak global emissions today.  Basically you have to put policies in place and then watch emissions continue to go up for a while those incentives actually work through the economy until they achieve their desired effect.

So basically I think the next ten years needs to see massive efforts to put those policies in place to get that turnaround asap and if we don’t manage to peak global emissions until 2030, you know, the chance that we get three degrees of climate change is starting to become rather significant, and then if we don’t do anything, as I said before, are likely to reach four degrees with a very, very large impact.

I actually don’t think, the fact that someone is asking that question almost means that they consider themselves powerless to influence the situation, and I would say that the only way we’re going to solve this is if enough people consider themselves empowered to do their own little piece to reduce emissions and help their community adapt and to lobby governments and other communities to work towards a global solution to this.  I think we have to rather than standing by asking if anyone else is going to act, we all have to act ourselves, and we all have to work towards a common solution and remain optimistic that that will happen.