Climate change to drive weather disasters: UN experts

Richard Ingham | AFP Yahoo News 28 Mar 12;

Climate change is amplifying risks from drought, floods, storms and rising seas, threatening all countries but small island states, poor nations and arid regions in particular, UN experts warned on Tuesday.

In its first-ever report on the question, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said man-made global-warming gases are already affecting some types of extreme weather.

And, despite gaps in knowledge, weather events once deemed a freak are likely to become more frequent or more vicious, inflicting a potentially high toll in deaths, economic damage and misery, it said.

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri urged countries to prepare more for climate-related disasters.

Many defence options are of the "no regret" type, meaning they are relatively low-cost but effective, he said.

"Reducing disaster risk should be a priority in every country," said Chris Field, a US scientist who was one of the 592-page report's lead authors.

A summary of the report was approved last November. The full document was published on Wednesday ahead of a worldwide campaign to advise governments, policymakers and grassroots groups.

The report made these points:

-- Since the 1950s, record-breaking daily temperatures and heatwaves have become more frequent or lasted longer, according to strong evidence. There is a 90-100 percent probability that this will continue through the 21st century.

"The hottest day, which today occurs once every 20 years, is expected to occur once every second year by the end of the 21st century," said climate physicist Thomas Stocker.

This scenario is based on the assumption that today's high emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, he explained.

-- Extreme rainstorms have intensified over past decades and are likely to become more frequent in this century, although with big differences between regions.

-- Southern Europe and West Africa have already experienced bigger or longer droughts. This century, central Europe, central North America, central America and Mexico, northeast Brazil and southern Africa could follow suit.

-- Whether hurricanes or typhoons have changed in intensity, frequency and duration over the past 40 years is hard to gauge. But warmer seas suggests these storms will pack a higher wind speed, yet may also become less frequent.

"There is disaster risk almost everywhere, in the world's developed regions as well as in developing regions, in areas where the problem is too much water and in areas where the problem is too little water and in areas where the problem is high sea level," said Field.

"But the report does point out areas that are particularly vulnerable, and that does include large cities, particularly in developing countries, coastal areas, it includes small island states, and it includes much of the world that is chronically short of water resources."

The report pointed in particular at coastal megacities.

A rise of 50 centimetres (20 inches) in sea level would make much of the coastal and low-lying areas of Mumbai -- inhabited in particular by slumdwellers -- uninhabitable.

The panel stressed that it had exhaustively collected information, checked it and consulted with experts working outside the forum.

The report was drawn up by 220 scientists and economists from 62 countries, who pored over thousands of published studies. Their draft was then submitted to external review by experts and governments, drawing nearly 19,000 comments in three rounds of consultation.

The IPCC was criticised for closed mentalities and lacking transparency after several mistakes were found in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report.

Climate sceptics seized on the errors. They accused the panel of distorting data in order, in their view, to invent a problem.

The report -- Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation -- acknowledges shades of uncertainty.

For storms, for instance, longer-term data is needed to say whether they have already become more frequent or intense, said Stocker. Another variable is how effective countries will be in curbing the carbon gases that cause the problem, he said.

Mumbai, Miami on list for big weather disasters
Seth Borenstein Associated Press Yahoo News 28 Mar 12;

WASHINGTON (AP) — Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of climate scientists said in a new report issued Wednesday.

The greatest threat from extreme weather is to highly populated, poor regions of the world, the report warns, but no corner of the globe — from Mumbai to Miami — is immune. The document by a Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heat waves, deluges and droughts.

The 594-page report blames the scale of recent and future disasters on a combination of man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty.

In the past, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, founded in 1988 by the United Nations, has focused on the slow inexorable rise of temperatures and oceans as part of global warming. This report by the panel is the first to look at the less common but far more noticeable extreme weather changes, which lately have been costing on average about $80 billion a year in damage.

"We mostly experience weather and climate through the extreme," said one of the report's top editors, Chris Field, an ecologist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "That's where we have the losses. That's where we have the insurance payments. That's where things have the potential to fall apart.

"There are lots of places that are already marginal for one reason or another," Field said. But it's not just poor areas: "There is disaster risk almost everywhere."

The report specifically points to New Orleans during 2005's Hurricane Katrina, noting that "developed countries also suffer severe disasters because of social vulnerability and inadequate disaster protection."

In coastal areas of the United States, property damage from hurricanes and rising seas could increase by 20 percent by 2030, the report said. And in parts of Texas, the area vulnerable to storm surge could more than double by 2080.

Already U.S. insured losses from weather disasters have soared from an average of about $3 billion a year in the 1980s to about $20 billion a year in the last decade, even after adjusting for inflation, said Mark Way, director of sustainability at insurance giant Swiss Re. Last year that total rose to $35 billion, but much of that was from tornadoes, which scientists are unable to connect with global warming. U.S. insured losses are just a fraction of the overall damage from weather disasters each year.

Globally, the scientists say that some places, particularly parts of Mumbai in India, could become uninhabitable from floods, storms and rising seas. In 2005, over 24 hours nearly 3 feet of rain fell on the city, killing more than 1,000 people and causing massive damage. Roughly 2.7 million people live in areas at risk of flooding.

Other cities at lesser risk include Miami, Shanghai, Bangkok, China's Guangzhou, Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City, Myanmar's Yangon (formerly known as Rangoon) and India's Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta). The people of small island nations, such as the Maldives, may also need to abandon their homes because of rising seas and fierce storms.

"The decision about whether or not to move is achingly difficult and I think it's one that the world community will have to face with increasing frequency in the future," Field said in a telephone news conference Wednesday.

This report — the summary of which was issued in November — is unique because it emphasizes managing risks and how taking precautions can work, Field said. In fact, the panel's report uses the word "risk" 4,387 times.

Field pointed to storm-and-flood-prone Bangladesh, an impoverished country that has learned from its past disasters. In 1970, a Category 3 tropical cyclone named Bhola killed more than 300,000 people. In 2007, the stronger cyclone Sidr killed only 4,200 people. Despite the loss of life, Bangladesh is considered a success story because it was better prepared and invested in warning and disaster prevention, Field said.

A country that was not as prepared, Myanmar, was hit with a similar sized storm in 2008, which killed 138,000 people.

The study forecasts that some tropical cyclones — which include hurricanes in the United States — will be stronger because of global warming. But the number of storms is not predicted to increase and may drop slightly.

Some other specific changes in severe weather that the scientists said they had the most confidence in predicting include more heat waves and record hot temperatures worldwide and increased downpours in Alaska, Canada, northern and central Europe, East Africa and north Asia,

IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri told The Associated Press that while all countries are hurt by increased climate extremes, the overwhelming majority of deaths occur in poorer, less developed places. Yet, it is wealthy nations that produce more greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, raising the issue of fairness.

Some weather extremes aren't deadly, however. Sometimes, they are just strange.

Report co-author David Easterling of the National Climatic Data Center says this month's U.S. heat wave, while not deadly, fits the pattern of worsening extremes. The U.S. has set nearly 6,800 high temperature records in March. Last year, the United States set a record for billion-dollar weather disasters, though many were tornadoes.

"When you start putting all these events together, the insurance claims, it's just amazing," Easterling said. "It's pretty hard to deny the fact that there's got to be some climate signal."

Northeastern University engineering and environment professor Auroop Ganguly, who didn't take part in writing the IPCC report, praised it and said the extreme weather it highlights "is one of the major and important types of what we would call 'global weirding.'" It's a phrase that some experts have been starting to use more to describe climate extremes.

Field doesn't consider the term inaccurate, but he doesn't use it.

"It feels to me like it might give the impression we are talking about amusing little stuff when we are, in fact, talking about events and trends with the potential to have serious impacts on large numbers of people."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://www.ipcc.ch

Plan Now For Climate-Related Disasters: U.N. Report
David Fogarty and Deborah Zabarenko PlanetArk 29 Mar 12;

A future on Earth of more extreme weather and rising seas will require better planning for natural disasters to save lives and limit deepening economic losses, the United Nations said on Wednesday in a major report on the effects of climate change.

The U.N. climate panel said all nations will be vulnerable to the expected increase in heat waves, more intense rains and floods and a probable rise in the intensity of droughts.

Aimed largely at policymakers, the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes clear nations need to act now, because increasingly extreme weather is already a trend.

The need for action has become more acute as a growing human population puts more people and more assets in the path of disaster, raising economic risk, the report said. The report's title made the point: "Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaptation."

Asia was most vulnerable to potential disasters, with East Asia and the Pacific facing the highest adaptation costs.

The 594-page report, with authors from 62 countries, is the world body's most up-to-date assessment of climate change risks. Its general message is that enough is known about these risks for policymakers to start making decisions about how to deal with them.

It follows the release of the report's executive summary in November after an extensive review by scientists and government officials and is based on the work of thousands of scientific studies.

"Few countries appear to have adopted a comprehensive approach - for example, by addressing projected changes in exposure, vulnerability, and extremes," the report said. Building this into national development planning is crucial.

Global reinsurer Munich Re says that since 1980, weather-related disasters worldwide have more than tripled.

Lindene Patton, chief climate product officer for Zurich Financial Services, said the report was particularly useful for insurers who rely on its scientific assessments "to assist our customers to live and work successfully in the natural world."

But the report sidestepped the politically divisive issue of tougher action on curbing greenhouse gas emissions blamed for stoking global warming. U.N. climate talks have become bogged down over who should take most responsibility for action.

Instead, it aimed to push adaptation to a warmer world, offering a range of strategies.

Chris Field, a lead editor of the document, acknowledged this is a change from previous IPCC reports, which largely focused on plans to mitigate climate change by limiting heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.

In part, Field said in a telephone interview, this is because the world's governments asked the scientists to see what could be done in the next few decades.

"BAKED INTO THE SYSTEM"

"That's a time frame where most of the climate change that will occur is already baked into the system and where even aggressive climate policies in the short term are not going to have their full effects," said Field, director of the Carnegie Institution's department of global ecology.

But the head of the U.N. panel, Rajendra Pachauri, stressed at a briefing that climate-warming emissions must be curbed: "Whatever we do, we have to adapt, of course, but also at a global level, we need to mitigate the emissions of greenhouse gases so that we ensure that these thresholds or tipping points are not exceeded."

The report looks for "low regrets" strategies that not only protect those in the path of natural disasters but also boost sustainable development. These include early warning systems, better drainage, preserving ecosystems such as mangroves, forests and water catchments, plus better building standards and overhauling health systems.

Spreading financial risk of disasters was another tool to limit the already-strained cash reserves of many poorer nations.

Micro-insurance, catastrophe bonds, national and regional risk pools could help to finance rebuilding and recovery. While take-up rates for insurance were increasing in poorer nations, the rate was still low compared with wealthier states.

Remittances, officially estimated at $325 billion in 2010, were another crucial form of finance and risk sharing, but more steps are needed to cut transaction costs.

Insurance groups said the report confirmed their experience of rising costs from climate-related disasters.

"U.S. property and casualty insurers, who are on the front line on this issue, saw catastrophe-related losses double in '11, while their net income was cut in half," Cynthia McHale, insurance program director at Ceres, an investor coalition, said in a statement.

Mark Way, head of sustainability Americas at re-insurer Swiss Re, called the report "yet another reminder of the pressing need to tackle climate risk in both the near and long term."

Nations need to do a better job in assessing people and places vulnerable to climate disasters, such as mega cities expanding further into flood plains or along low-lying coasts. Key was treating the causes, not the symptoms of vulnerability.

Risks also vary widely, from the threat of more droughts and wildfires in Australia and melting permafrost damaging buildings and roads in the Arctic to heat waves in southern Europe.

The report also said some populations are already living on the edge, given the projected increases in the magnitude or frequency of some extreme events in many regions.

"Small increases in climate extremes above thresholds or regional infrastructure 'tipping points' have the potential to result in large increases in damages to all forms of existing infrastructure nationally and to increase disaster risks," it said.

Most deaths from natural disasters - 95 percent between 1970 and 2008 - still occur in developing countries, the report found.

It said current spending on adaptation projects in developing countries is about $1 billion per year, a fraction of the estimated range of $70 billion to $165 billion per year on technologies to curb greenhouse gas pollution.

Yet losses from disasters were substantially higher for developing nations, with middle-income countries suffering losses of 1 percent of GDP between 2001 and 2006, compared with 0.1 percent for high-income countries.

The report's release dovetailed with an unprecedented March heat wave in the continental United States and a London conference where scientists warned the world was nearing tipping points that would make the planet irreversibly hotter.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)