Act now or pay later

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says adaptation is as important as prevention

There is a peculiarly modern form of the uncanny which Glenn Albrecht, a philosopher, dubs “solastalgia”. It is an uneasy feeling that what you took to be the natural way of things has been changed, without your consent, and that your life does not fit into it as once it did. It is the sort of feeling you might expect if, say, what used to be an unusually wet year was now merely typical. It might be dismissed as the “new normal”. But it does not feel normal, and it never will. Before you get used to it, it will have changed yet again.

The vast new overview of the impacts of global warming published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc) on February 28th paints a picture of a planet where solastalgia is the norm. Half a billion people, it says, most of them in medium or high latitudes, live in places where the average year is now wetter than wet years were in the 20th century. In low latitudes, by contrast, there are 160m people living where the reverse is true.

These “unfamiliar” climates, as the report calls them, do not merely generate unease. Shifts in averages bring with them large changes in the likelihood of extreme events—and those can do great harm, especially to people already vulnerable as a result of poverty, of political or social exclusion, of an already degraded environment that is the material basis of their livelihoods, or of all of the above and more besides. The report is not just a diagnosis of malaise. It is, in the words of Antonio Guterres, the un secretary-general, an atlas of human suffering.

The ipcc notes that there have been increases in extreme high temperatures, both on land and in the seas; in torrential rain; in droughts; and in weather conducive to wildfires. And these have reliably hit the vulnerable more than the rest of the world. In the 2010s mortality caused by floods, droughts and storms was 15 times greater in highly vulnerable regions than in the least vulnerable.

Climate change is contributing to humanitarian crises which see vulnerable people displaced in all parts of the world. Instances of food insecurity and malnutrition that can be blamed on droughts and floods have increased in Africa and Latin America. Contrary to some analysis, though, the report does not see much of a climate influence on violent conflict.

Adept adaptations

Adaptation can cope with some of this, and in places, the report finds, it has already made a difference. One example is Ahmedabad, a city in Gujarat, in western India, which the report praises for pioneering “preparedness for extreme temperatures and heatwaves” by adopting an early warning system (the first in South Asia) and changing building regulations to stop the trapping of heat, among several other measures. Another instance is the use of sand dams in Kenya. These increase storage of groundwater in riverbanks by up to 40%, thus helping people weather droughts. But there is increasing evidence of what the ipcc calls an “adaptation gap”. As the climate has worsened, the distance between adaptations actually being undertaken and