Too late to stop climate change, so adapt to it
Environmentalists have been saying for years that we need to prevent climate change but the emphasis is changing to adapting to it because of the mounting evidence that global warming is happening faster than expected and that it’s already too late to avert the most dangerous consequences.
Al Gore is one of those who has made this change.
For many years green groups have said that adaptation, or coping with climate change, rather than stopping it, was a bit like putting out a fire on the Titanic: desirable, no doubt, but the main thing was to change course.
Two things have changed attitudes:
- Evidence that global warming is happening faster than expected. Manish Bapna of the World Resources Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, believes “it is already too late to avert dangerous consequences, so we must learn to adapt.”
- Evidence is growing that climate change hits two specific groups of people disproportionately and unfairly. They are the poorest of the poor and those living in island states. That is 1 billion people in 100 countries.
Tony Nyong, a climate-change scientist in Nairobi, argues that people in poor countries used to see global warming as a Western matter: the rich had caused it and would with luck solve it. But the first impact of global warming has been on the very things the poorest depend on most.
The victims share two characteristics. They are too poor to defend themselves by expensive flood controls or sophisticated public-health programmes. And (unlike China or Brazil) their own carbon footprints are tiny. Kirk Smith, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, calls climate change the world’s biggest regressive tax: the poorest pay for the behaviour of the rich.
If sea levels go up, do you build sea walls or rehouse people? If infectious diseases are rising, do you spend money trying to eradicate the worst ones, like malaria, or on health and nutrition in general? The latter makes sense but most donors concentrate on single-disease efforts. George Soros, a financier who runs a chain of philanthropic organisations, says that in their experience, few people in poor countries have a clear idea about climate change and how to cope with it.
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