My name is Maria Carmen Lemos. I'm a professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan in the United States. I'm from Brazil and I do research and teach about climate adaptation, especially in lower income countries. In this segment, we're going to talk about Sustainable Development, Goal number 13, Climate Action. As you can see this slide, the goal SDG 13 are very ambitious. They include strengthening resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and integrating climate change measures into natural policies. However, progress has been not as fast as we would have desired. As of 2018, the formal parts of the targets, especially in the adherence of parties to the formal barriers agreement, have been developing. But other parts of the goals is lower to develop, especially the idea that we have to fastly increase adaptive capacity. We know that climate change is a global problem that can bring danger to many of the things that we care about, including livelihoods, ecosystems, and the built environment. In this slide, there are some numbers that tell us about the depth and the breadth of climate change as a problem, and I encourage you to look at some of the consequences that are projected and what climate change is already costing to many low-income communities around the world. How do we know that the climate is changing? By living in these words, we can notice for instance, that we are experiencing more flooding, more drought, that the weather is getting crazier by the minute, and that the effects of those things are becoming more costly, both in terms of lives as well as in terms of money. The effects of climate change are varied and they will affect different systems differently as well. But the most expected changes that are protected for future are in terms of changes in precipitation or the amount that it's raining and changes in temperature. Those changes will likely increase impacts on ecosystems, on people, and on the built environment in the form of drought, of flooding, storms, as well as sea level rise. The way that those impacts are distributed in the word vary considerably. If you guys are interested in the science of climate change and how it actually those projections are made, there is a link for a video that we're going to watch talking about climate modeling and how impacts are being projected from the science of climate change. As we have learned from the video, there is a lot of things that are still to be learned about how those impacts are going to effect the things that we care about. Overall, there are three kinds of responses that you can have to climate change. You can mitigate it, which means that we work very hard to decrease the emissions that are causing global warming and causing the problem of climate change and its impact. Or we can adapt when things have changed already to a level that we cannot do the same things that we do today to respond to those negative impacts. The third thing that we can do is not do anything. An inaction in itself is a response that might exacerbate a lot of the problems that we are having right now. So examples of mitigation are, for example, relying on cleaner energy matrix, using more renewables, such as wind energy or solar energy, driving more economic cars, or using less electricity, or doing anything that we can to decrease the level of emissions of greenhouse gases and especially carbon dioxide. Things that we do to adapt can be making strides in understanding where the risks of climate change are, and for instance, building barriers for water rise or flooding, or we can actually increase the level of irrigation that we use in agriculture, or we can be very proactive on enacting policies and interventions to make people safer from extreme events such as storms or flooding. But there is a series of actions that are good for both. We call those actions co-benefits because they are good both for adaptation and mitigation. Examples of co-benefits are, for instance, education, building green infrastructure, urban forest, conserving water, eating more local food. All of those things are both good for mitigation because they decrease the level of emissions, but they're also good for adaptation because they allow us to build a more sustainable world where those impacts will be slow down or even overcome with new policies and new interventions. So here's some examples of what we are talking about. So we see all the time around us how those things are becoming more and more common, and how they are also becoming more difficult to deal with, to respond, but especially to recover from. So examples of extreme events include, for instance, flooding. We hear about flooding all the time, and how the long-term impacts of flooding are becoming recurrent on some areas, where the number of events has increased significantly, and the time between each event is becoming shorter and harder to recover from, and this is especially the case in delta countries such as Bangladesh, in large coastal cities, in lower income countries such as Lagos in Nigeria. Other kinds of events are also becoming more frequent. Another example is, for instance, drought, where actually kills the most people of all extreme events. But because it happens very slowly and mostly through famine, people pay less attention that they would for what we call rapid onset events like hurricanes or very extreme storms. But drought has been plaguing some regions of the world for generations. In the projections of climate modeling is that they are going to become more severe and maybe last longer. Examples of very long lasting droughts are the 1983 El Nino-related drought in Sub Sahara Africa, which lasted for over 20 years. Some people estimate actually killed more than 20 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. Other events are becoming a newer in the sense that we haven't experienced them before, such as sea level rise. So coastal areas, coastal cities, but especially is small island states, many of them low-income countries are going to be very exposed and very impacted by sea level rise. The pictures here are actually in attempt of the government of the Maldives to call attention to the plight of small island states. So in 2009, the whole cabinet of the Maldives actually met on the water to call the world's attention to how urgent and how severe sea level rise may be for the island. They also commission a study for a potential futuristic incarnation of what islands will become a floating island. But all of those things are complicated by the issue that the resources are not being made available for any of the responses that those small island states need to be preparing for. What can we do? So there are many things that we can do as individuals. There are many things that we can do as communities, but climate change is a global problem. Mitigating climate change will have to be done at the global level. Climate change is an equal opportunity problem because CO_2 and other greenhouse gases, they mix equally in the atmosphere. So everybody is going to be affected by climate change. However, people are going to be affected by it very differently because one of the biggest determinants of how you're going to be affected by climate change, it's what assets, and what resources you have both to respond, to adapt, and to recover from climate change on the ground. So while climate change and mitigation is a global problem, adaptation is a local problem. What can we do? Well, one of the things that distinguish climate change from other environmental problems is that developing countries or lower-income countries are already being disproportionately affected by climate change. So this is a huge justice and fairness problem. An example here is that the share of people affected by climate change driven by disasters is increasing, and is increasing very disproportionately across the level of income of different countries. While low income countries are affected much more severely in terms of loss of life for instance, high-income countries are affected, but many fewer people die on those countries, although they are much more expensive financially because of the loss of infrastructure and how much it costs for you to rebuild what was already there. This suggests that there is an intrinsic unfairness about the distribution of cause and effect of climate change. So if we look at the contribution of different countries to climate change, what we find is that high-income countries have contributed historically much more to climate change. While low-to-middle income income countries and low income countries have contributed much less to climate change, both per capita in many times as well in absolute numbers. In order to rebalance the equation between who's causing climate change and who is going to be affected by climate change, all countries need to work together, act together to a system that will be more fair and actually more effective in terms of recovering and adapting to climate change. So some of the things that countries can do is that they, for instance, developed countries who have already contributed massively to global warming, can adopt technologies and incentivize technology or create demand for low carbon technologies that will free some space in the atmospheric commons. Because lower income countries and middle to low income countries, we'll need that space if they want to increase the consumption of energy by their citizens, by their countries in general. So if it's a zero sum game, somebody will have to clean up so that other people can actually benefit from this newer technology, but also to provide access to energy for large swaths of their population that don't have it right now. If you notice the comparison on these charts about current and future consumption of energy, we notice that while at this point, the per capita consumption of lower and middle income countries is much lower than high income countries. This is likely to change in the future as more and more people have access to energy. So we have to think very carefully about how to make future policies cleaner, but also more fair in terms of access to energy and the possibility of improve your livelihood as a function of this access. Although we have to act together, we have to act differently as we discussed. One way in which we have to act differently is that high-income countries should be invested much more aggressively in energy, research, and development. But what we see in this graph is actually there has been a big drop in overall investment. Although in more recent years, the investment in areas that are very desirable, for instance, such as renewables, have increasing relatively to the past. But in order to be able to afford this transformation, this access to energy and access to electricity transformation to happen, we have to be much more aggressive on the way that we invest in new technologies and create demand for low carbon technologies. We also have to act differently in understanding where the impact of climate change is going to be more severe and what are the means that we have to combat that. Another example where there is a big level of inequality globally is the amount of climate information that we have in different areas of the world. If you look at this map, you see that developed countries high income countries, are much more well-served by data collection across the globe in terms of both weather and climate information. It is necessary that we improve data collection, especially in areas that are going to be particularly affected by climate change impact. Another way that we have to act differently is understanding how future production of food can become more sustainable and better distributed across the globe. Many of the food-producing areas in the world today are going to become more and more reliant on irrigation. If projections of climate impacts are true and temperatures go up, many of those areas will tend to increase the need for irrigation while actually the availability of water may be decreasing. So we need to figure out a better way to produce food sustainably and also to create organizations and institutions that allow for the distribution of this food where it's most needed around the globe. One way that we can do that is to think very hard, which are pathways that would lead us to this war that is more resilient, there is a more fair word in terms of the distribution of impacts and benefits, as well as responses and adaptations to climate change. An idea that has emerged strongly for the past 10 years is this concept of climate-resilient pathways. So climate-resilient pathways, they combine the two actions that we talked about, mitigation and adaptation. But they think of those two actions in the context of sustainable development. So on top of everything that we have to do in order to develop sustainability, we should think of every action that we take, how they are going to be impacted or impact mitigation and adaptation and vice versa. Every time we mitigate, everytime we adopt or we put in place the interventions to mitigate and to adapt. We have to think about how they're going to affect our ability to develop sustainability. So we talked a little bit about that before when we were discussing the energy transformation and how as more people have access to clean energy, how this transformation could bypass many of the bad things that we have done in the past that has led to the problem of global warming. So climate-resilient pathways have to think about those three things in the same breath. They have to think of three things as aspirations. We have to mitigate, we have to adapt, and we have to develop sustainability. This picture suggests that some of the ways that we do that, or if we consider, for instance, the SDGs, how we can take into account in each one of those SDGs what could be potential impacts of climate change and work, either to mitigate or to adapt to them in a sustainability way that we would go a long way to think about a future that can be possible even if we are under the threat of very severe change and a lot of it negative to livelihoods and ecosystems. Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, released a report that makes a very strong argument that a safe space for humanity is to stay within 1.5 degrees Celsius warming. But climate-resilient pathways are a process. In that process, as we talked before, we have to act together, we have to act now, and we have to act differently. So as many things that we have done before and you will have to do in the future. A lot of the ideas that we have on how to build those climate-resilient pathways may seem at this point a little bit aspirational given the little progress that we have done so far to actually mitigate climate change. However, we need also to take these aspirations seriously, especially if we want to keep thinking of a future that is possible and is actually better.
