IPCC to help ("how to" manual for policy-makers) prepare for short-term climate extremes

[Henk Elegeert]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

"
IPCC to help prepare for short-term climate extremes

JOHANNESBURG, 21 July 2009 -

In a significant move, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), an international body of climate change experts, is set to
produce a "how to" manual for policy-makers and disaster officials on
managing the risks of extreme weather events and bolstering
resilience, to promote adaptation to global warming.

 "Years of lobbying the IPCC have finally paid off," said Maarten van
Aalst, leading climate specialist at the Climate Centre of the
International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
(IFRC).

 The IPCC has assessed the long-term impact of climate change. The
panel has now acknowledged that measures and policies identified as
adaptation in their previous reports had not taken into account the
full range of activities that need to be undertaken to reduce the
risks of extreme events and disasters.

 The special IPCC report, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and
Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, will provide methods
and tools to manage climate risks. It will also provide 25 case
studies to show how extreme events and vulnerability interact to
result in disasters, with lessons learnt from vulnerable countries
such as Bangladesh in Southeast Asia, and others in Southern Africa.

 The report is expected to be released in 2011.

 Besides integrating adaptation and disaster risk reduction (DRR),
which both "aim to reduce the impacts of shocks by anticipating risks
and addressing vulnerabilities", van Aalst told IRIN, the IPCC's
special report would help agencies like IFRC, which are trying to draw
up plans to help communities prepare for extreme weather events,
especially in areas where climate change forecasts are uncertain.

 He cited IFRC's experience in West Africa, where various climate
change projections have predicted increasingly uncertain rainfall. "As
forecasts give only probabilities, not certainties", it leaves IFRC
disaster managers like those based in Dakar, Senegal's capital, to
make "judgement calls to utilize seasonal forecasts to apportion
scarce resources".

 Countries attending the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007
recognised the relevance of disaster-risk reduction to advance
adaptation.

 The IPCC special report is a response to their calls for "enhanced
action on risk management and risk reduction strategies, including
risk transfer mechanisms such as insurance ... to lessen the impact of
disasters on developing countries", said a scoping paper on the
forthcoming report by IPCC officials.

 Integrating disaster risk reduction and adaptation

 "There is significant overlap between DRR and climate change
adaptation. However, these agendas have evolved independently until
now," wrote van Aalst in a paper he co-authored with Tom Mitchell, a
researcher at the Climate Change and Development Centre of the
UK-based Institute of Development Studies.

 DRR deals with the short-term changes in climate variables, such as
temperature, but "can be the first-line defence against climate
change" and become an essential part of adaptation, which has tended
to focus on long-term impacts, van Aalst and Mitchell argued in their
paper.

 It is a point often made by the DRR community as well as some of the
world's least developed countries and small island states, which view
a distinction between adaptation and DRR as "problematic, given their
experience of the increased magnitude and frequency of disasters
impacting their countries".

 These nations have regularly asked what "portion of disasters can be
attributed to anthropogenic climate change [caused by man] compared to
existing climatic variability?, said van Aalst and Mitchell.

 In the IPCC scoping paper, the panel's officials acknowledged that
reducing vulnerability to climatic variables could improve resilience
to the increased hazards associated with climate change.
"

Dit is toch (op zichzelf al) een ramp?!
Een "how to" manual for policy-makers, ze zien een economische ramp
niet eens aankomen ...
Gaan straks zelfs beweren dat zie die ook goed te lijf zijn gegaan.
Lissabon akkoorden, of niet.


http://www.d66.nl/europa/nieuws/20041105/advies_kok_over_lissabon_strategie
"
vrijdag 5 november 2004

Advies Kok over Lissabon-strategie steun in de rug

Investeringen in de kenniseconomie en structurele economische
hervormingen zijn nú nodig om de concurrentie en de vergrijzinggolf in
heel Europa het hoofd te bieden. Dat zijn de belangrijkste conclusie
van het rapport Kok. Oud premier Wim Kok heeft op verzoek van de
Europese Commissie een rapport uitgebracht over de stand van zaken in
de Unie over de voortgang het Lissabon akkoord. In dit akkoord hebben
de lidstaten afgesproken dat Unie in 2010 de meest concurrerende
kenniseconomie van de wereld moet zijn.
..."

... de werkeloosheid neemt intussen gestaag elke dag nog verder toe !!

Ik geef het toe, 2010 is nog ver weg, maar het is wat mij betreft ook
*zo'n* sprekend voorbeeld van hoe zo'n : "how to" manual for
policy-makers, uitwerkt.

Henk Elegeert

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