IPCC Report.pdf - Adam Curry

Chapter 1Climate Change: New Dimensions in Disaster Risk, Exposure, Vulnerability, and ResilienceBox 1-1 | One Person’s Experience with Climate Variability in the Context of Other ChangesJoseph is 80 years old. He and his father and his grandfather have witnessed many changes. Their homes have shifted back and forthfrom the steep slopes of the South Pare Mountains at 1,500 m to the plains 20 km away, near the Pangani River at 600 m, in Tanzania.What do ‘changes’ (mabadiliko) mean to someone whose father saw the Germans and British fight during the First World War andwhose grandfather defended against Maasai cattle raids when Victoria was still Queen?Joseph outlived the British time. He saw African Socialism come and go after Independence. A road was constructed parallel to the oldGerman rail line. Successions of commercial crops were dominant during his long life, some grown in the lowlands on plantations (sisal,kapok, and sugar), and some in the mountains (coffee, cardamom, ginger). He has seen staple foods change as maize became morepopular than cassava and bananas. Land cover has also changed. Forest retreated, but new trees were grown on farms. Pasture grasseschanged as the government banned seasonal burning. The Pangani River was dammed, and the electricity company decides how muchwater people can take for irrigation. Hospitals and schools have been built. Insecticide-treated bed nets recently arrived for the childrenand pregnant mothers.Joseph has nine plots of land at different altitudes spanning the distance from mountain to plain, and he keeps in touch with his childrenwho work them by mobile phone. What is ‘climate change’ (mabadiliko ya tabia nchi) to Joseph? He has suffered and benefited frommany changes. He has lived through many droughts with periods of hunger, witnessed floods, and also seen landslides in the mountains.He is skilled at seizing opportunities from changes – small and large: “Mabadiliko bora kuliko mapumziko” (Change is better than resting).The provenance of this story is an original field work interview undertaken by Ben Wisner in November 2009 in Same District, KilimanjaroRegion, Tanzania in the context of the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded research project “Linking Local Knowledge and LocalInstitutions for the Study of Adaptive Capacity to Climate Change: Participatory GIS in Northern Tanzania.”The ethnographic vignette in Box 1-1 suggests the way some individualsmay respond to climate change in the context of previous experience,illustrating both the possibility of drawing successfully on past experiencein adapting to climate variability, or, on the other hand, failing tocomprehend the nature of novel risks.1.1.4.2. Territorial Scale, Disaster Risk, and AdaptationClimate-related disaster risk is most adequately depicted, measured, andmonitored at the local or micro level (families, communities, individualbuildings or production units, etc.) where the actual interaction of hazardand vulnerability are worked out in situ (Hewitt, 1983, 1997; Lavell,2003; Wisner et al., 2004; Cannon, 2006; Maskrey, 2011). At the sametime, it is accepted that disaster risk construction processes are notlimited to specifically local or micro processes but, rather, to diverseenvironmental, economic, social, and ideological influences whosesources are to be found at scales from the international through to thenational, sub-national and local, each potentially in constant flux (Lavell,2002, 2003; Wisner et al., 2004, 2011).Changing commodity prices in international trading markets and theirimpacts on food security and the welfare of agricultural workers, decisionson location and cessation of agricultural production by internationalcorporations, deforestation in the upper reaches of river basins, and landuse changes in urban hinterlands are but a few of these ‘extra-territorial’influences on local risk. Moreover, disasters, once materialized, have rippleeffects that many times go well beyond the directly affected zones (Wisneret al., 2004; Chapter 5) Disaster risk management and adaptation policy,strategies, and institutions will only be successful where understandingand intervention is based on multi-territorial and social-scale principlesand where phenomena and actions at local, sub-national, national, andinternational scales are construed in interacting, concatenated ways(Lavell, 2002; UNISDR, 2009e, 2011; Chapters 5 through 9).1.2. Extreme Events, Extreme Impacts,and Disasters1.2.1. Distinguishing Extreme Events,Extreme Impacts, and DisastersBoth the disaster risk management and climate change adaptationliterature define ‘extreme weather’ and ‘extreme climate’ events anddiscuss their relationship with ‘extreme impacts’ and ‘disasters.’Classification of extreme events, extreme impacts, and disasters isinfluenced by the measured physical attributes of weather or climaticvariables (see Section 3.1.2) or the vulnerability of social systems (seeSection 2.4.1).This section explores the quantitative definitions of different classes ofextreme weather events, what characteristics determine that an impactis extreme, and how climate change affects the understanding ofextreme climate events and impacts.39