There is a new readiness to talk about how to adapt to climate change, underlining the urgency of action. But a shift in focus to local impacts may have global implications, argues Paul Hohnen.
A generation of Victorian women was supposedly brought up with the marital advice that they should “lie back and think of England”.
This cheerless counsel was brought to mind by the conclusion in a recent leader in the Economist magazine, which concluded that “global action is not going to stop climate change” and that the world would need to “look harder at how to live with it”.
The leader raises some disturbing trends and questions, not only for negotiators at the UN climate conference in Cancun but also for business and investors in the longer term.
The first point to be made is how quickly perceptions are changing of how the risk of climate change should be tackled.
While pockets of sceptics still attract more than their share of coverage, the mainstream business media has long since accepted the grim implications of atmospheric physics. Humankind is changing the global climate. In turn, this will have a range of impacts on how and even where we live.
Mitigation vs adaption
For the last two decades, the balance of attention has being given to mitigation (ie how to stop or slow climate change) rather than to adaptation (how to live with it).
This approach had several obvious advantages.
The mitigation agenda provided a convenient platform to profile the power of technology and played to the doctrine of free marketers that there are no problems, just opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship. Importantly, it also avoided the disempowering “doom and gloom” pessimism that talk of disruptive change arouses.
The popularity of the mitigation agenda is manifest in advertising iconography, where wind turbines have almost completely replaced dolphins and tigers as the most popular image.
However since the failure to reach agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009, increasing attention has been given to adaptation. Prompted largely by the continuing inability of governments to forge a new international consensus on action, let alone implement past commitments, the talk is less that of how serious climate change is, but rather how to absorb the impacts of the changes that will inevitably come.
The Economist leader was in this regard a marker of the formal mainstreaming of this discussion. This process is likely to have a number of implications.
Early action advantage
The first is that it seems probable to underline the importance of global efforts to mitigate climate change. Climate science shows the advantages of early action to reduce emissions, and the dangers of allowing emissions to rise. While it is not clear how the international negotiations might evolve, there will be less scope for treating climate change as a remote and theoretical concept.
Floods in Pakistan, fires in Russia and melting Arctic sea ice will increasingly be seen as interconnected events. There will be less talk of there being winners and losers. (Try telling Pakistanis to look on the bright side of having more fresh water every year.)
The second implication is that it seems likely that analysts, both government and private, will be spending more time looking at local impacts. Public officials will be looking harder at what climate models say for their own territory and coastlines, and financial markets assessing risks to investments.
This process, which has already started, may see major long-term shifts in finance, as governments look at how local industries and infrastructure are to be protected and reinforced. An irony here is that local solutions are likely to receive more attention. Policies aimed at adapting to climate change will almost certainly give preference to securing local sources of services such as energy, food and fresh water.
Home guard
There is a risk that as public concerns increase, governments may be under pressure to prioritise what will come to be seen as local climate “self defence” measures over investments in, say, climate action abroad. This may make it more difficult, for example, to explain investments in avoiding deforestation in developing countries.
The response of the business sector will also become more dynamic. No longer limited to the insurance sector, businesses will increasingly look to shifting climate sensitive industries, such as water-dependent agriculture and manufacturing, to regions likely to get more rain and to withdraw from those expected to receive less.
Investors will amplify this trend by seeking more information about business climate adaptation strategies.
Perhaps of even greater concern in the longer term, however, is the “beggar thy neighbour” effect. Any trend to prioritise the local in the adaptation agenda could make it progressively harder politically to forge a global agreement built on an open global trading system, as countries seek to make their domestic economies and infrastructures more climate-resilient.
The recognition that we will have to adapt to climate change reflects a new – and overdue – maturity in the debate. It may help us in taking the issue more seriously and to seize the historic opportunity of a global approach while it is still available.
Amsterdam-based, Paul Hohnen consults, speaks and writes on sustainability and CSR issues. Hohnen is a member of Ethical Corporation’s advisory board. www.hohnen.net