Transcript Adaptation - Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable

CC Adaptation Framework:
Reminder--Complex Systems
“A complex system,” wrote NASA Goddard
Institute climatologist David Rind in 1999, is
literally one in which there are multiple
interactions between many different
components.”
CC Adaptation:
Reminder--Complex Systems
•Complex systems contain many constituents interacting
nonlinearly.
•The constituents are interdependent.
•A complex system possesses a structure spanning several scales,
each of which has a structure.
•A complex system is capable of emerging behavior at a
particular scale leading to self-organization that changes the
structure at that scale.
•Complexity involves interplay between chaos and non-chaos.
•Complexity involves interplay between cooperation and
competition.
--Michael Baranger MIT
CC Adaptation:
Reminder--Complex Systems
• Local processes may govern transitions of the
state of the whole system due to dependence
on the initial conditions or what is known
intuitively as the “butterfly effect.”
• Due to their non-linearity, the effects of these
interacting processes across scales, including
positive and negative feedbacks, are
inherently unpredictable.
Complex Adaptive Systems:
The essence of complex adaptive systems is that agents,
in this case, human beings, act upon and are affected
by the systems and its complex feedbacks and
transitions, and can adapt to these changes, including
inducing further changes by design.
The consequence of such complexity in human worlds is
that history matters—really matters because historical
problems resulting from the co-evolution of complex
human systems with climate and each other have
memory and cannot be simply undone.
Climate Change Is Not Alone
Rischard, High Noon, 2002, p. 66
20 Global Issues to
Solve in 20 Years
UIA Problem Groupings
Basic universal problems (170 )
Cross-sectoral problems (575)
Detailed problems (2,162)
Emanations of other problems (3,857)
Exceptional problems (3,072)
Very specific problems (2,153)
Problems under consideration for inclusion (214)
Total world problems described: 9,832
Climate Change shares the
stage with many other
competing global problems;
and is interrelated (inter-linked,
as UNEP and Global
Environment Facility put it)
with many of them.
1.
Global Commons (Sharing the
Planet)
Global Warming
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Losses
Fisheries Depletion
Deforestation
Water deficits
Maritime safety and pollution
2.
Global Commitments (shared
humanity)
Massive step-up in fight against
poverty
Peacekeeping, conflict prevention,
combating terrorism
Education for all
Global infectious diseases
Digital Divide
Natural Disaster Prevention and
mitigation
3.
Global Regulatory Approach, Shared
Rules
Reinventing taxation
Biotechnology rules
Global financial architecture
Illegal drugs
Trade, investment, competition rules
Intellectual property rights
E-commerce rules
International labor and migration
rules
BINARY THINKING…
Source: United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change, Climate Change: Impacts, Vulnerabilities
and Adaptation in Developing Countries, Bonn, 2007, p. 9
ADAPTIVE
RESPONSE
Source: United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change, Climate Change: Impacts, Vulnerabilities
and Adaptation in Developing Countries, Bonn, 2007, p. 9
ADAPTIVE
RESPONSE
GEF: Common Problems, Solution Synergies?
Source: Scientific and Advisory Panel, a Conceptual Design Tool for Exploiting Interlinkages between the Focal
Areas of the GEF, Global Environment Facility, GEF/C.24/Inf.10 November 10, 2004
Escape from Complexity-GEF Stovepiping
Source: Scientific and Advisory Panel, a Conceptual Design Tool for Exploiting Interlinkages between the Focal
Areas of the GEF, Global Environment Facility, GEF/C.24/Inf.10 November 10, 2004
Shift to Integrated Mitigation and Adaptation
Vulnerability 1: to biophysical impacts
Vulnerability 1: Breaks down in developing
countries
V2: Social Risk Assessment: Matrix of climate trends,
associated hazards and vulnerability factors
Social Risk Assessment
Source: Andrew Thow and Mark de Blois , Climate change and human vulnerability: Mapping emerging trends and risk hotspots for humanitarian
actors, Summary for decision makers, Maplecroft Report to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs with CARE, March 2008,
at: http://www.careclimatechange.org/files/DiscussionPaperHumanitarianImplicationsofCC.pdf
Climate Hotspots
Source: Andrew Thow and Mark de Blois , Climate change and human vulnerability: Mapping emerging trends and risk hotspots for humanitarian actors, Summary for decision makers,
Maplecroft Report to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs with CARE, March 2008, at:
http://www.careclimatechange.org/files/DiscussionPaperHumanitarianImplicationsofCC.pdf
Combined Social Vulnerability
Source: Andrew Thow and Mark de Blois , Climate change and human vulnerability: Mapping emerging trends and risk hotspots for humanitarian
actors, Summary for decision makers, Maplecroft Report to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs with CARE, March 2008,
at: http://www.careclimatechange.org/files/DiscussionPaperHumanitarianImplicationsofCC.pdf
Overlay of Climate Hotspots
Source: Andrew Thow and Mark de Blois , Climate change and human vulnerability: Mapping emerging trends and risk hotspots for humanitarian
actors, Summary for decision makers, Maplecroft Report to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs with CARE, March 2008,
at: http://www.careclimatechange.org/files/DiscussionPaperHumanitarianImplicationsofCC.pdf
Down scale: Urban CC
Vulnerability
Overall:
•
Delhi, India has the highest average risk score, followed by Dhaka,
Bangladesh.
•
The next two cities are Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and Dongguan,
China.
•
Delhi’s average score is 3, suggesting that for some of the risk impacts,
its risk is low compared to the other cities.
•
Number two and three cities have no risk impact for which they have
the highest risk (a score of 5).
•
Most of the cities have an average score below 2. ie relatively low
exposure on average
•
But, some of these cities, such as Jaipur, India, and Handan, China,
have the highest score on at least one risk impact.
•
It is difficult to say which city is at greatest risk.
•
On average, Delhi scores highest and Bandung, Indonesia the lowest.
•
But, the rankings differ quite considerably based on which risk impact
is considered.
Caveats:
The table also presents average scores across all the risk impacts, applying no
weighting of individual factors.
Note that application of a cardinal scoring system, in our case applying scores
of 0 to 5, as well as no weighting, can introduce distortions. A city with
a score of 5 does not necessarily have five times the risk of a city with a
score of 1.
Not all of the risk impacts will equally affect people.
It does not consider how much a city would suffer from climate impacts, nor
the past, current, or future adaptive capacity of a city to respond to
impacts.
Source: Stratus Consulting, Screening Asian Megacities to Estimate Relative
Exposure to Climate Change, unpublished report to Rockefeller
Foundation, September 11, 2007.
Types of Adaptation
•
•
•
•
•
Routine coping
Autonomous adaptation
Reactive vs proactive adaptation
Anticipatory, planned, adaptation
Incremental adaptation
Adaptation Costs
No-one has a good estimate of the incremental cost of adaptation, due
to inherent uncertainty because:
– the range of climate scenarios and related impacts and adaptive costs
is great;
– current cost estimates (often in the range of 10-50 billion $/year) do
not account for autonomous adaptation (which would reduce the
cost), nor for disruptive mitigative and adaptive technologies (that
may further greatly reduce the cost).
– Conversely, these costs do not account for the upgrade of basic
infrastructure such as housing that may be necessary for adaptation in
poor parts of the world; nor for possible very high costs arising from
dangerous climate change.
Existing estimates have a high range that do not provide the basis for
consensus; and no consensus exists as to the computational basis
for burden sharing, or even who should be sharing the costs of
adaptation
Table 1: Characteristics of mitigation and adaptation
MITIGATION-ADAPTATION SYNERGIES
MITIGATION AND ADAPTATION DIFFER
Benefited systems
Scale of efforts
Life time
Lead time
Effectiveness
Ancillary benefits
Polluter pays
Payer benefits
Administrative
scale/implementing
bodies
Sectors involved
Monitoring
Mitigation
All systems
Global
Centuries
Decades
Certain, in terms of emission reduction;
less certain in terms of damage reduction
Sometimes
Typically yes
Only a little
(Mainly) National
governments/international negotiations
Adaptation
Selected systems
Local to regional
Years to centuries
Immediate to decades
Generally less certain, especially where local
knowledge of likely climate-related changes is weak
Mostly
Not necessarily
Almost fully
(Mainly) local managers/authorities, households (&
community organizations)
Primarily energy and transport in highincome nations, forestry and energy in
low/middle-income nations
Relatively easy
Potentially all
More difficult
Source: Bosello et al, 2007, cited in D. Satterthwaite et al, Building Climate Change Resilience in Urban Areas and among Urban Populations in
Low- and Middle-income Nations, prepared for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Global Urban Summit, Innovations for an Urban World, in
Bellagio in July 2007 and published as: Adapting to Climate Change in Urban Areas The possibilities and constraints in low- and middleincome nations, Human Settlements Discussion Paper Series, online at: http://www.iied.org/HS/topics/accc.html, p. 51
Adaptation-Mitigation Linkages
Source: R. Klein, S. Huq et al, “Inter-relationships between adaptation and mitigation,” chapter 18, 2007.
Barriers to Integration
The IPCC authors called for more research to explore whether
bridges can be built between the two categories of activity.
The barriers should not be under-estimated.
At RMIT University, for example, an effort by a water pollution
chemist to engage with building design specialists on
whether water-storing structures could be built into walls
and contribute to distributed water supply (adaptive
measure), reduction in flammability, and to provide
thermal mass (mitigation) in the building met with a cool
response.
As the chemist put it, “the people there were primarily
scientific and into gadgets rather than structures...”
Conclusion
“Everything changes; all that varies is the rate of
change, ranging from infinitesimal to
incremental to very fast to abrupt. From a
normative viewpoint, what is acceptable
change or stable to one person or social entity
is overwhelming and objectionable to another.
Resistance to change could be adaptive or
maladaptive.”
– James Rosenau