october 2006

31-10-2006
UK Report: Global Warming will devastate world economy
Unchecked global warming will devastate the world economy on the scale of the world wars and the Great Depression, a major UK report said yesterday.
 
Introducing the report, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said unabated climate change would cost the world between 5 percent and 20 percent of global gross domestic product each year. He called for 'bold and decisive action' to cut carbon emissions and stem the worst of the temperature rise.

Report author Sir Nicholas Stern, a senior UK government economist, said that acting now to cut greenhouse gas emissions would cost about 1 percent of global GDP each year. "The evidence shows that ignoring climate change will eventually damage economic growth," said Stern's 700-page report, the first major effort to quantify the economic cost of climate change."

"Our actions over the coming decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century."



UK Finance minister Gordon Brown will argue at the launch of the report that harnessing the power of markets is the best way to find new methods to curb the output of polluting gases, Treasury officials said.

Sharing a platform with Blair and Stern, Brown will propose a new EU-wide target for emissions reductions of 30 percent by 2020 and 60 percent by 2050 and expansion of the carbon trading scheme to cover more than 50 percent of emissions.

"Stern's report sees climate change as a global challenge that demands a global solution. The truth is we must tackle climate change internationally or we will not tackle it at all," according to mr. Brown. Read more here.

Even though the report (download the executive summary here) focuses mainly on the mitigation of climate change by an increased CO2 emission reduction, also key messages are given regarding climate adaptation, as copied from the report below:

Key Messages on climate adaptation
  • Adaptation is crucial to deal with the unavoidable impacts of climate change to which the world is already committed. It will be especially important in developing countries that will be hit hardest and soonest by climate change.
  • Adaptation can mute the impacts, but cannot by itself solve the problem of climate change. Adaptation will be important to limit the negative impacts of climate change. However, even with adaptation there will be residual costs. For example, if farmers switch to more climate resistant but lower yielding crops.
  • There are limits to what adaptation can achieve. As the magnitude and speed of unabated climate change increase, the relative effectiveness of adaptation will diminish. In natural systems, there are clear limits to the speed with which species and ecosystems can migrate or adjust. For human societies, there are also limits – for example, if sea level rise leaves some nation states uninhabitable.
  • Without strong and early mitigation, the physical limits to – and costs of – adaptation will grow rapidly. This will be especially so in developing countries, and underlines the need to press ahead with mitigation.
  • Adaptation will in most cases provide local benefits, realised without long lag times, in contrast to mitigation. Therefore some adaptation will occur autonomously, as individuals respond to market or environmental changes. Much will take place at the local level. Autonomous adaptation may also prove very costly for the poorest in society.
  • But adaptation is complex and many constraints have to be overcome. Governments have a role to play in making adaptation happen, starting now, providing both policy guidelines and economic and institutional support to the private sector and civil society. Other aspects of adaptation, such as major infrastructure decisions, will require greater foresight and planning, while some, such as knowledge and technology, will be of global benefit.
  • Studies in climate-sensitive sectors point to many adaptation options that will provide benefits in excess of cost. But quantitative information on the costs and benefits of economy-wide adaptation is currently limited.


30-10-2006
Flood Risks and Safety in the Netherlands (FLORIS)

The Dutch government considers it important that the public has a better understanding of the probability of their area being hit by a flood. The government also wants to have a clear view of the relatively weaker areas in flood protection. Other experts have, moreover, indicated that the protection against flooding may no longer be properly in proportion to the consequences of flooding.

The Flood Risks and Safety in the (Floris) Project was therefore initiated in 2001 at the request of the State Secretary of Transport, Public Works and Water Management. The purpose of the Floris project is to gain an understanding of the consequences and the probability of flooding in the . The project was conducted by the Road and Hydraulic Engineering Institute of the Netherlands Public Works Department (Rijkswaterstaat), in close cooperation with the Water Boards and Provinces. The results were released in the summer of 2005.

The full report of Flood Risks and Safety in the (Floris) project gives the results of the study into the risk of flooding in 16 dike ring areas in the . This report presents both the method and the results. Download here!

The "Flood Risks and Safety in the : Interim Report of the Floris study" has also recently been published. This interim report describes the main findings of the Floris study so far. Download here!



26-10-2006
USA: New York flood risk in 2050 increases due to climate change

The prospect of sea level rise is not an issue for the North Sea region alone. To illustrate that the issues related to this are worldwide, this headline takes a short step outside of Europe

NASA researchers are investigating the potential impact of climate change on New York City using computer models to simulate future climates and sea level rise. Their studies, to date, forecast a 38 to 48 cm-increase in sea levels by the 2050s that could put the city at higher risk of flooding during storm surges.

"With sea level at these higher levels, flooding by major storms would inundate many low-lying neighborhoods and shut down the entire metropolitan transportation system with much greater frequency," said Vivien Gornitz, a climate scientist who is part of a team at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and Columbia University.

Gornitz, along with Cynthia Rosenzweig, another researcher on the team, say that higher sea levels put New York city at greater risk of hurricane storm surge. They estimate that in the case of a 1.5-foot-rise in sea level, "surge for a category 3 hurricane on a worst-case track would cause extensive flooding in many parts of the city.
Source: www.mongabay.com
Read more here




This image shows the storm surge, in blue, over portions of New York City from a Category 3 hurricane, worst-case scenario, if the storm tracks slightly west of New York, USA

18-10-2006
Dutch Advisory Committee Water advice: update flood safety policy
Today, the Dutch Advisory Committee Water, chaired by HRH Prince Willem-Alexander, Prince of the Netherlands, has sent an advisory report to the Minister of Transport, Public works and Water management with respect to safety from flooding.

The Committee supports recent developments to update the Dutch flood safety policy and advises to initiate a cohesive anticipating vision on flood safety and to give it more national priority. The financing structure of flood safety measures, the Committee says, needs structural improvement. The next government (elections in November) is adviced to soon make financial reservations to improve the primary flood defences in order to meet the legal safety standards as prescribed in the Flood Defence Act of 1996.

Also, the Committee makes the case for a better prepared crisis management organisation, in the case the Dutch flood defences fail. Additionally, spatial planning policy with respect to limiting the potential damage of a flood needs improvement. The aspect of better risk communication is underlined by the Advisory Committee.

Download the (Dutch) report of the Advisory Committee Water here.