Lakhasly

Lesson: Impacts from Climate Change

This lesson explores the impacts of climate change, focusing on how the phenomenon is assessed and the key climate-sensitive sectors affected.

Climate Risk Framework:

• Climate risk is a combination of hazards, exposure, and vulnerability.
• Increasing any of these factors elevates the overall climate risk, as outlined by the IPCC's Climate Risk Framework.

Regional Impacts:

• Polar Regions: Permafrost thawing, coastal sea ice melting, rising sea levels, increased weather intensity, and faster temperature increases than other regions.
• Small Islands: Sea-level rise inundating low-lying areas, changing rainfall patterns, warming and acidification of coastal waters, storms and flooding, land erosion, changes in the global water cycle, saline intrusion, ecosystem degradation, and climate-induced diseases.
• Oceans: Rising sea surface temperature and heat content, sea-level rise due to thermal expansion and melting ice, changes in ocean circulation, ocean acidification, changing salinity, and decreasing oxygen concentration.
• Mountains: Stronger temperature increases than over the ocean and at high latitudes, shifting snow lines and freezing lines, changing precipitation patterns, and more frequent and intense extreme events.

Impacts on Humans and Economies:

• The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage aims to minimize and avert climate change-related losses.
• The ECLAC methodology quantifies impacts of climate events on various sectors (social, productive, and infrastructure) by assessing damage to assets and converting it into economic losses.
• Climate-sensitive sectors:
  • Food and Agriculture: Crop region shifts, impacts on global food supply.
  • Health: Waterborne, vector-borne, and airborne diseases.
  • Energy: Impacts on energy systems and challenges for transitioning to renewable sources.
  • Human displacement: Inundation of low-lying areas forcing people to relocate.
• Gender, age, and economic well-being influence the way individuals and communities experience climate change impacts.

Activity:

• Examine a map of weather and climate events for 2018 to understand how your region has been affected.

What You've Learned:

• The IPCC's climate risk framework highlights the diverse aspects of climate change impacts.
• We need to understand how social, economic, and ecological systems can adapt to these impacts and implement appropriate measures.

Think about: What measures would you like to see in your region to address climate change impacts?

Lesson: Impacts from Climate Change (Length: 7 min)
Instructions: scroll down within the window to read the entire lesson.

 
As Maxx explained, climate risk is a function of hazards, exposure and vulnerability. Increasing vulnerability, exposure, or severity and frequency of climate hazards increases the climate or disaster risk, as the IPCC’s Climate Risk Framework shows. Let's look at some examples. Can you identify the category before you flip the card?

Heat waves, sea-level rise, cyclones, changes in precipitation. -------- hazards
Road networks, irrigation systems, livestock. ---------------------- exposed assets
Climate risks in different regions

Climate change is not the same everywhere. Learn how the climate changes in the main regions of the world.
Polar regions:
There are two polar regions, the Arctic (North) and Antarctica (South).

The Arctic is a region, centred around the North Pole, which includes the ice-covered Arctic Ocean and landmasses from Scandinavia, Greenland, Canada and Alaska. It is the warmer pole and parts of it are habitable year-round.
Antarctica is a continent centred around the South Pole. It holds 90% of the world's ice and 70% of the freshwater and is the world’s coldest corner. The continent doesn’t have native people or large terrestrial mammals but boasts an incredibly diverse marine life with microscopic plankton, whales and about 100 species of fish.

How is the climate changing there?
• The permafrost is thawing
• The coastal sea ice is melting
• The sea level is rising
• Weather intensity is increasing
• All of these are happening at very high rates
• The temperature is increasing faster than any other regions (especially the Arctic)
• A nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in September is likely before 2050
Small island :
Small Island and Developing States or SIDS are a distinct group of 58 countries located in the Caribbean Sea, Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans and the South China Sea. SIDS have a special case status because of their small size, remoteness and narrow resource base which, in comparison with other countries, make them inherently vulnerable to climate change. Their total population of around 65 million people has contributed less than 1% of global GHG emissions.

How is the climate changing there?
• Sea-level rise inundating low-lying areas
• Changing rainfall patterns
• Warming and acidification of coastal waters (coral bleaching)
• Storms and flooding (destroying tourist resorts and residential area)
• Land erosion
• Changes in the global water cycle (moving fisheries away)
• Saline intrusion into terrestrial systems
• Degrading ecosystems and habitat loss
• Species shifts in terrestrial systems
• Climate-induced diseases
• Increased weather intensity (casualties and damage)
Oceans :
The Earth has one big ocean. It is often thought of as different ocean basins, such as the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern, and Arctic. Holding 97% of all water on Earth, the Ocean is a key physical feature of our planet. It constantly interacts with the atmosphere, cryosphere and biosphere and is ultimately what makes the Earth habitable. The Ocean is actively involved in the Earth’s climate system and the carbon cycle. Changes affecting the Ocean have profound consequences on many physical, chemical, biological, economic, and social processes on the Planet.

What is sea-level? Sea-level is the average height of the ocean with respect to land, irrespective of tides. Plate tectonics, ice caps on land melting or growing, ocean water warming/expanding, and cooling/contracting can affect the sea-level by changing the volume of ocean basins.

How is the climate changing there?
• Sea surface temperature and heat content of ocean water increase (sensitive marine species and ecosystems; temperature plays a key role in many biological processes, such as reproduction and migration)
• Sea-level rise due to thermal expansion of the Ocean due to warming plus water from melting glaciers and ice sheets (coastal flooding, increasing penetration of storm surges into coastal areas and saltwater intrusion of aquifers)
• Changes in the ocean circulation, wind and waves (ocean circulation moves towards the poles and changes the way nutrients are transported from the deep ocean)
• Ocean acidification, with lower pH (sensitive marine organisms, coral bleaching)
• Surface salinity is changing (largely unknown impacts)
• Oxygen concentration is decreasing (sensitive marine organisms, leading to seasonal ‘dead zones'
Mountains:
A mountain typically refers to a landform, possibly underwater, that rises significantly above its surroundings. Some famous mountains are the Alps in Europe, the Himalayas in Asia, the Andes in South America, the Urals in Central Asia and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the Atlantic Ocean. Mountains are home to about 800 million people and are crucial for the provision of water and ecosystem services. Along their altitude mountains create different microclimates. On a bigger scale, they can also affect the local climate by acting as a climatic barrier to air currents or the monsoon flow.

How is the climate changing in mountains?
• Temperature increases are stronger over land than over the ocean
• Temperature increases are stronger at high latitudes than in the tropics
• Temperature increases in the tropics are stronger at high altitudes than near the ground (glaciers retreating, snowpack reducing, albedo effect, permafrost decay and glacial lake formation)
• Important environmental boundaries such as snow lines and freezing lines will move higher up in the future (shifts in vegetation up or down)
• Changing seasonal precipitation patterns and increasing rainfall at the expense of snowfall (affects access to water)
• Shorter snow season
• Extreme events such as storms, landslides, avalanches and rockfalls may become more common and intense in mountain areas.

Video: Impact on Humans and Economies (Length: 6 min)
How do we assess the impacts of climate and climate change on human life? Maxx Dilley explores how those impacts can be quantified and what the key climate-sensitive sectors are.
In this lecture, I'm going to cover how we assess the impacts of climate and climate change on human life. And from 2 points of view, 1 is how can those impacts be quantified and measured and documented and then go a little bit more in some of the details about what are some of the key climate sensitive sectors and what are some of the impacts that we can observe and also would expect to continue to see in those climate sensitive sectors. So with respect to how impacts are assessed, there is a policy vehicle within the United Nations Framework on Climate Change called the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage. And that mechanism seeks to minimize and avert loss and damage associated with climate change. And they divide the loss and damage into loss and damage associated with what they call the slow onset phenomena, things like desertification and acidification and sea level rise, and the more rapid onset event types of losses.

There are methodologies that have been used in hundreds and hundreds of cases to assess what the impacts have been of any kind of climate phenomena or event. This methodology was invented, in fact, by the United Nations, the Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean, to measure losses associated with floods and droughts and other kinds of extreme events that were occurring in the Latin America Caribbean region and that method which fills 4 volumes is now being expanded to be used all around the world. So the way it works is we have a set of social sectors, productive sectors, and infrastructure sectors. And within each 1 of those we have a set of subsectors, housing, education, and health, social, infrastructures, things like roads, bridges, water and sanitation, energy systems, and then the productive sectors would be things like agriculture, industry, trade, and so on. So, when an event strikes, there are collections of assets that produce the value within those sectors.

And those assets, because of their exposure and their vulnerability characteristics, to 1 degree or another can be damaged or even destroyed or lost. So the ECLAC methodology is basically an accounting system. It says, okay, let's count how many of these assets, how many schools lost their roofs, how many books, how many chairs, how many days were the teachers not there, how many days could we not have classes, and so on. And then you convert those damages and losses into their economic equivalencies. What was the cost of those assets and what is the loss to the economy going forward until those assets are repaired or replaced?

You put all of that in a giant macroeconomic model, you mumble some hocus-pocus, and out comes the macroeconomic loss to GDP from all of that. So there are many examples that you can find online of how this is done. So we can apply those same metrics to any event which occurs even if it has a large, you know, signal of climate change in it. So when we look at how those sectors have been affected and how they are being affected, we can get a sense of what some of those impacts really are. Climate sensitive sectors include things like food and agriculture, for example.

Whole crop regions now, which are bread baskets of the global food economy, could begin to move. The climate conditions that allow 1 crop to be grown currently may move somewhere else and we either have to change the crops or we have to move the crops to those new places. Extreme temperatures and precipitation can have big impacts on crops and that can affect global food supply and we've seen some cases of that in recent years. Health is another 1. You have waterborne diseases, you have vector-borne diseases, you have even airborne diseases related with dust and things like that, and when those conditions are prevalent, people become to a certain extent immune to those or there may be low levels of endemic incidence of those diseases, but when those conditions migrate to somewhere else where people are not usually exposed to those things, you can have epidemic conditions, malaria outbreaks or dengue fever outbreaks, Zika outbreaks that have some kind of climate component that can cause a big spike in morbidity and mortality.

The energy sector is a very interesting 1 for 2 reasons. 1, extreme events of course have impacts on energy systems, power lines, hydro power, and all of those things. But also, in order to mitigate climate change, there must be a wholesale transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. And when we look at those renewable energy sources, solar, wind, hydro, they are all extremely climate sensitive. So those systems themselves will be affected by climate variability as well as climate change over the lifetime of some of those installations and assets.

And finally, when it comes to people, of course, inundation of low-lying areas, where are all those people going to go? They can't stay there and get flooded time after time. There are lots of people, billions of people even, living in areas that will become uninhabitable. They will have to move somewhere else. And I should not fail to mention that there are gender dimensions to these impacts as well.

Men and women are not all affected in the same ways and so and neither are different kinds of communities and economies so the impacts of these extremes and these slow onset events will play out very differently in different cases depending on things like gender age and economic well-being

Activity: How is your Region Affected in 2018?
Examine the map which charts weather and climate events for 2018. Reflect on how your region has been impacted.

 
What Have You Learned?
IPCC's climate risk framework helps us to differentiate between the different aspects of climate impacts, such as specific hazards, exposed assets and local vulnerability. Through this lens, we see the different ways in which the planet, as a whole, and different geographical regions are affected by the changes in climate.
How do social, economic and ecological systems prepare to meet and withstand these impacts? What measures would you like to see in your region?