COP26 Universities Climate Risk Briefing

COP26 Universities Climate Risk Briefing

By Charlotte Lyddon, Bangor University and Luke Kemp, University of Cambridge. With contributions by the COP26 Universities Network Climate Risk Fellows: Neven Fuckar, Ana Raquel Nunes, Katherine Maxwell, Martine Barons, Jo Lindsay Walton, Polina Levontin and Mark Workman

We brought together researchers from around the world for a three-day conference to inform discussion on climate risk.

Here’s what you need to know on climate risk ahead of COP26:  

The Climate Risk Summit (29 Sep - 1 Oct 2021) covered areas ranging from risk attribution to risk communication to share the latest evidence on climate risk in advance of COP26. The recommendations from the summit are intended to encourage COP26 delegates to collaborate and act to build resilience to risks.

Top line takeaways:

  • Risk attribution: Risk attribution examines whether and to what extent human factors contributed to the risk of an extreme event. The field is evolving and has important implications for loss and damages in international climate negotiations and how organisations assess and disclose risks.
  • Tipping Points: Tipping points are critical thresholds beyond which a system reorganizes, often abruptly and/or irreversibly. Earth system elements that may pass a tipping point include the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon Rainforest and ecosystems such as coral reefs. Reducing tipping points means rapid and deep decarbonisation to limit global warming.
  • Risk Cascades: Risk cascades from climate impacts are severe, already occurring and must be incorporated into risk assessments. While predicting such chain reactions is difficult, building resilience against them fortuitously means reducing inequalities.
  • Building Resilience to Climate Hazards: Climate hazards are increasing in severity and frequency. Dealing with these will require a systematic and comprehensive risk framework across different sectors as well as the sharing of extreme event monitoring data from global data centres. Resilience is a collaborative effort.
  • Risk Communication: Link climate risk to pre-existing concerns such as jobs, economic growth or national security. Individuals engage with a risk most effectively when it speaks to their ‘inner elephant’: the part of the brain responsible for our intuitive, automatic thinking.

Extended Summary

Risk Attribution

Extreme event attribution is an emerging field in climate science that aims to answer whether, and to what extent, anthropogenic factors modify the physical hazard and the risk of an extreme event. It is a progressing field and attribution is more easily established for some events than others. Extreme event attribution shows that we are already experiencing the impacts of climate change. This is not a concern just for future generations.

Event attribution results are useful in multiple ways. For-profit and non-profit organisations have to identify, assess, mitigate, and disclose physical risks from damages and disruptions arising from extreme events in a changing climate, and transition risks during decarbonisation. For international policy, the ability to establish links between specific extreme events causing loss and damage with anthropogenic emissions is crucial.

Tipping Points

Tipping points are critical thresholds beyond which a system reorganizes, often abruptly and/or irreversibly (IPCC, 2021). “Tipping elements” are large scale components of the Earth system that may pass a tipping point. These include Arctic summer sea ice extent, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the Amazon rainforest. There are also risks of ecological tipping elements. For instance, at 1.5ºC of global warming, between 70-90% of coral reefs could be lost, rising to 99% of reefs at 2ºC warming. Reducing the risk of tipping points means immediate deep and rapid emissions cuts. While we are already committed to a certain amount of sea level rise for example, we can still reduce the rate through mitigation.

Risk Cascades

Risk Cascades have no definition under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Most simply refer to these as one climatic impact or trend triggering and/or amplifying other risks, including through maladaptive societal responses. One example includes the Summer 2010 heatwave in Russia. Drops in cereal yields led to a cereal export ban in Russia, a spike in global prices which in turn drove food bank usage in the UK and political unrest and riots in Egypt.

Putting precise numbers on the severity or probability of different risk cascades would be inherently difficult, if not impossible. However, understanding both the pathways as well as thresholds for societal tipping points is feasible and important. Reducing inequalities and capacity-building in vulnerable countries are robust interventions to build resilience to risk cascades.

Building Resilience to Climate Hazards

Global issues are felt at a local scale. The increasing frequency and magnitude of extreme events is impacting the whole spectrum of society people from coasts to cities. There is great uncertainty about future drivers and impacts of climate hazards, but that’s no reason to ignore them. The exact impacts of hazards will depend on the local context and environmental conditions.  

Investment in improved monitoring of climate hazards at higher spatial and temporal resolution is key. Improved observation data is needed to support modelling work to develop timely and accurate early warning systems and to understand how past events might look under future climate conditions. Data collection should also focus on how climate hazards impact people, not just how they impact economics. An improved commitment worldwide to publish/share monitoring data to global data centres: global data on climate hazards (floods, wildfires, droughts) is needed to improve knowledge. Investing in the development of systematic and comprehensive risk frameworks across all sectors will help to build resilience. There is a need to i) understand and identify the tolerance of infrastructure, communities, and natural environments to risk and uncertainty; and ii) assess appropriate adaptation measures to individual communities and hazards.

Risk Communication

Use more than words when communicating climate risk and uncertainty to stakeholders. Visual and interactive components can support written words. Case studies, narratives, visuals, augmented reality and personal experience are more emotive. These can be used to link the hazard to concerns stakeholders already understand, like jobs, economic growth or national security. Investment must be directed towards holistic, participatory approaches and citizen science to engage communities in the realities of climate hazards.

Funding for research which promotes and encourages joined up thinking between physical and social scientists, humanities, and arts for cross-sectoral collaboration should be prioritised. This can encourage sharing of best practices to identify appropriate terminology and graphics to communicate risks; these are specific to the context they will be used, or the stakeholder’s tolerance to risk and uncertainty (links back to point 2).

Finally, elected leaders must engage in two-way conversation with scientists. Are policy makers receiving the right information from scientists? How can scientists fill knowledge gaps for policy makers to more effectively act on research outputs?

Download the Goody Bag on Climate Risk Communication, and complete this form to help us co-create a risk communication toolkit ahead of COP26 in November.

 

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