Although the phase out of fossil fuels has got most of the attention at Cop28, the outcome that will likely make the biggest difference to most people on the planet in the short- and medium-term is if countries come to an agreement on the global goal on adaptation.
This global goal is a playbook for how the world is going to adapt to a climate that is changing rapidly and will continue to change, even if we ended fossil fuel use today. Across the world millions of people, most of whom are least responsible for carbon emissions, are attempting to adapt their lives and livelihoods to a distorted climate.
This adaptation playbook is about more than money. It covers adaptation plans for a host of sectors, including farming, nature, health, water and transport among others. To be useful, this playbook needs a series of targets to plan actions, track investments and assess the effectiveness of adaptation measures and spending. These metrics need to specify what changes are needed to be in line with the science, by when and how to measure progress.
Funding gap
Although it isn’t just about money, funding is important and severely lacking. The goal for 2023 was to raise $300m for the Adaptation Fund, but at Cop28 we’ve only seen $169m in pledges, a mere 56% of the intended amount.
This is particularly galling considering that only last month, the UN’s Environment Programme published its Adaptation Gap report which calculates the difference between the world’s adaptation need and the amount of finance that has been committed. It found that this gap stands at around $387 billion. This is 10-18 times the actual finance flows to the countries and 50% more than the previous estimate.
Considering emissions are still going up, it’s a travesty that adaptation spending is falling. We are on course for a humanitarian crisis if this adaptation funding doesn’t match the rise in emissions. And adaptation finance is great value for money. As Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley pointed out at Cop28, every $1 invested in adaptation saves $7 in loss and damage.
For example, small-scale family farms are especially vulnerable and need urgent scaling up of adaptation finance; 2.5 billion people rely on them for a livelihood. They produce a third of the world’s food and as much as half of the calories consumed globally but receive just 0.3% of climate finance.
US blocking
The problem is that here in Dubai, rich countries, especially the US, are blocking progress on the adaptation playbook. To some degree that’s understandable. It is rich, high emitting countries like the US that need to contribute most to adaptation funding and take responsibility for the climate harm they have caused and continue to cause.
But by dragging their feet, these countries are playing games with people’s lives. The adaptation talks at Cop28 are crucial as we’re not going to reduce emissions fast enough and therefore do actually need to tackle the impacts of climate change. We can’t just settle for vague and aspirational objectives, we need a concrete plan that spells out how adaptation will be implemented for the people that need it most.
African countries are the biggest cheerleaders for adaptation. It is Africans who are facing some of the most damaging impacts from the climate crisis. It’s no wonder that Africa’s chief negotiator in Dubai said agreement in Dubai on adaptation was a matter of life and death.
The Cop28 host nation’s close ties with the fossil fuel industry understandably makes for an easy story, but when it comes to whether this Cop did enough to help the world’s climate vulnerable, it will be on whether it delivers strong language on a robust global response to the adaptation crisis that will be the real test.
Mohamed Adow is the founder and director of Power Shift Africa
The post Adaptation playbook is the true test of Cop28 for world’s vulnerable appeared first on Climate Home News.
Adaptation playbook is the true test of Cop28 for world’s vulnerable
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Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
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