Adaptation to a variable and changing climate: challenges and opportunities for national meteorological and hydrological services

A scientific lecture delivered to the 61st session of the WMO Executive Council, (EC-XLI) in Geneva, Switzerland last week by John W. Zillman, Chairman of the Steering Committee for the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) and of the World Climate Conference-3 International Organizing Committee (WIOC).

Extract - The adaptation imperative

As I asserted at the beginning, there is nothing new about the challenge of living with a variable and changing climate. It has been one of the most formidable and ubiquitous challenges for society since humans first walked the Earth. And much of the work of NMSs and of the IMO/WMO Commission for Climatology, since it was first established in the year that I was born, has been focused on collecting, supplying and applying climate information to help the many climate-sensitive sectors of society to plan for, and better manage, the risks and impacts of the natural variability and extremes of climate.

What is new is the threat of human-induced climate change, resulting from the build-up of greenhouse gases from fossil fuel burning and the like. This has added new and daunting challenges for science and society and it was this human-induced change which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established to assess and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was established to avert, or, at least, mitigate. (I observe, parenthetically, that one of the greatest sources of confusion in the climate change debate over the past 20 years, and in the formulation of strategy for dealing with it, has resulted from the different definitions of the term “climate change” employed by the IPCC and the UNFCCC, with the IPCC definition including all change and variability, whatever their cause, and the UNFCCC using the term solely to refer to the human-induced component of change. I believe that, until we achieve harmonization of the IPCC and UNFCCC terminology, we would all help greatly, when speaking of “climate change”, if we make clear in which sense we are using the term.)

It is informative and satisfying to look back on the Declaration of the 1979 (First) World Climate Conference, which insightfully foreshadowed both the adaptation and mitigation dimensions of the subsequent climate change debate.

“Having regard to the all-pervading influence of climate on human society and on many fields of human activity and endeavour, the Conference finds that it is now urgently necessary for the nations of the world

* To take full advantage of man’s present knowledge of climate;
* To take steps to improve significantly that knowledge; and
* To foresee and to prevent potential man-made changes in climate that might be adverse to the well-being of humanity.”

It is even more satisfying to look back on the early years of the World Climate Programme (WCP) 1979-1991 to see how thoroughly the World Climate Data and Applications Programmes focused on the challenges of adaptation to climate in the food, water, energy, health and other social and economic sectors. Through the initiation of National Climate Programmes and in other ways, many NMSs made a major contribution to increasing community awareness of the need to adapt to climate (change).

While the initial focus of the UNFCCC bodies in the early 1990s was almost entirely on mitigation, there was a rising tide of opinion in the professional climate community that, regardless of whether it was of natural or human origin, more attention was needed to the challenges of adapting to climate change. Using as their definition of adaptation “all adjustments in behaviour or economic structure that reduce the vulnerability of society to changes in the climate system”, the participants at the May 1995, St Petersburg International Conference on Climate Change Adaptation called on the Parties to the UNFCCC “to pay more attention to the options to adapt to climate change, while continuing their efforts to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations”. They also called on IPCC “to provide more guidance on the options available to countries to adapt to climate change and to assess their adaptations”.

For its Third Assessment Report (TAR), initiated in 1997 and completed in 2001, IPCC included “adaptation” explicitly in the title of one of its Working Groups (Working Group II) for the first time and adaptation became a major theme in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) in 2007. But it was not until the 2005 initiation of its Nairobi Work Programme that the UNFCCC, which had hitherto focused almost exclusively on mitigation strategy under the Kyoto Protocol, really shifted its priority attention to adaptation.

Now, four years later, as negotiations proceed this week in Bonn on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention, the Parties are considering how to give effect to the call in the 2007 Bali Action Plan for “enhanced action on adaptation, including consideration of international cooperation to support urgent implementation of adaptation action; risk management and risk reduction strategies; disaster reduction strategies and means to address loss and damage associated with climate change impacts in developing countries …………..”

I think it is fair to say that adaptation to climate change (in its broadest sense) is now seen, at the highest level of most governments, as a national imperative for the coming decades.