Adapting and Mitigating Climate Change: A Deeply Nuanced Approach

Reporting from Copenhagen

It is clear that one of the major sticking points in any agreement at Copenhagen will be adaptation and mitigation finance.

So emotional are the positions behind this particular issue that Lumumba Di-Aping, chief of the Sudanese delegation and chairman of G77 plus China group, told reporters this week:

“The question of adequacy is really a question of what is the finance necessary to carry out actions or to implement programs commensurate with the risk we face.”

Those risks are “condemning” developing countries to non-development, he said. “Ten billion dollars will not buy developing countries enough coffins."

Before the Copenhagen summit, developing countries demanded $395 billion a year minimum in technology transfer, adaptation and mitigation finance. Whatever the figure, climate adaptation and mitigation strategies must include climate insurance, says Koko Warner of the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security and a World Bank advisor.

“If you can figure out a way to meaningfully link insurance approaches with disaster risk reduction, insurance, along with a whole suite of other tools could provide a way to create certainty in a lot of uncertainty," Warner says.

With "climate change, one of the biggest problems in the short-term and medium-term is the variability,” she explains. "Especially for developing countries, the variability is what kills them. And they need a sure planning horizon so that catastrophe and disasters don’t wipe out their development capacity.”

For the insurance industry, an increase in severe weather events like cyclones, hurricanes and earthquakes means that, at best, premiums increase, and, at worst, “it means a rise in the number of people and properties that are just considered uninsurable,” says Bob Ward at LSE’s Grantham Institute.

Climate change inherently changes the nature of assets, Ward explained. It increases the exposure and vulnerability of populations to hazards.

In developing countries, the implications are fundamentally worse. Exposure and vulnerability are “mainly a function of your economic wealth. So wealthier societies are able to have more resilient structures, both social and economic,” he says.

Packed Cities, Slums at High Risk from Climate Change

Today, over half the world’s population is urban. Most of the population of the developing world resides in cities, and the largest cities in the developing world (Mumbai and Shanghai for instance) are located in “high risk areas” for natural disasters, flooding in particular as these cities are constructed on deltas, Ward notes. Deltas are advantageous for economic growth: access to large bodies of water for shipping and transport, but also “young land” susceptible to flooding.

With increasing urbanization in the developing world also comes the scourge of slums, with tens of thousands of people packed into unprotected, tight and often already unsanitary conditions. When an extreme weather event occurs,

“The impacts of flooding in developing countries can be far more devastating ... in terms of the potential impact on people’s lives,” Ward says.

He notes that while Hurricane Katrina was a catastrophe for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, events like Cyclone Nargis and Hurricane Mitch were “one-hundred times worse.”

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