Snooze? Hibernate? Migrate? Hide like an Ostrich or simply sit like a Duck?

It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change, it has been said of the theory of Natural Selection.

Yet another wake-up call was sounded by the fifth assessment report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-IPCC.  Since its first report published in 1990, the world community has received such wake-up calls almost regularly. This report, entitled “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability – the product of a total of 309 coordinating lead authors, lead authors, and review editors, drawn from 70 countries. Further, help of 436 contributing authors, and a total of 1,729 expert and government reviewers were taken to address more than 50,000 review comments.

The wake-up call on 31^st March 2014 sounded the most blaring ringing tone ever to describe the climate impacts described as ‘severe, pervasive and irreversible’.  The report categorically states that adverse impacts of climate change are happening everywhere, in all continents, across the oceans, and even in our garden and they are there for all of us to see. Worst impacts are yet to come and they are coming with accelerated speed. There is now risk of ‘feedback’ loop that will result into climate-surprises i.e. uncontrolled and sudden rise of GHGs due to melting of permafrost. And most shocking assessment is that world is ill prepared handle such changes.

What do we do?  Snooze again? Become sitting duck? Follow Ostrich policy? Or just migrate like birds to the better place? Or just hibernate like marmots?

Responding to the dangerous level of climate change will now require making choices about nature of risks arising from rising sea levels and temperature. The tropics as per the report, is more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. That’s where most of the developing countries and poor people are located. Here comes the issue of ‘climate ethics and environmental justice’ as these poor people have done nothing to cause climate change.

As climate change is already here and as stabilization of the carbon dioxide concentration in atmosphere is still a dream, the world community has to transform into  ‘climate resilient society’. Developing countries, for example, have to undertake climate-resilient agriculture i.e. adapting to seeds, crops, and practices for the higher temperature using less water. As crop yield will decrease, as per the report, there is need to find the crop which, with lower production can still give same or better nutrients. Building climate-resilient society while deploying low carbon technologies would provide double edge tool i.e. mitigating while adapting.

Apart from such adaptation, there is also important and real window of opportunity for developing countries to slow down the rate of global warming over the near term by cutting short-lived climate pollutants-SLCPs-to complement carbon dioxide reductions for the long term. Black carbon from the open burning of biomass for cooking, methane and Hydroflurocarbons  (HFCs) are such pollutants.

 A number of recent studies, including that by UNEP and WMO have concluded that cutting SLCPs can prevent a significant amount of additional warming in this century. Reducing SLCPs has the potential to avoid up to 0.6°C global average warming by 2050. By the end of the century, cutting SLCPs could avoid as much as 1.5°C of warming, comparable to an aggressive mitigation effort for carbon dioxide. Cutting down SLCPs should be taken up not in isolation but in conjunction with cutting CO2 emissions. Developing countries will need substantial financial and technology assistance from developed countries, to the extent of USD 100 Billion per year.

There are further important benefits to the developing countries for reducing black carbon, (reducing air pollution that is reported to cause 7 million deaths every year as per WHO), methane (production of energy from waste) and HFCs (improving energy efficiency in room ACs) that will drive the reductions of SLCPs.

Not the sitting duck, nor the migrating bird nor hiding ostrich   but what we need to do is to mimic the reptile that changes the color to camouflage as per the threats and the changing surroundings.

But time is precious commodity in this exercise. END

– By Rajendra Shende, Chairman TERRE Policy Centre and former director, UNEP