Climate change missing from government risk agendas

Dec 18, 2014 | Systems Analysis

By Leena Ilmola-Sheppard, IIASA Advanced Systems Analysis Program

When government officials speak about risks, they are usually referring to natural disasters. And it seems in these discussions that the increasing frequency of flooding, droughts, snow storms, and hurricanes have no link to climate change nor mitigation of it.

Last week,  I had an opportunity to sit and listen to discussions at the fourth annual Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) High Level Risk Forum.  The objective of the forum is to initiate joint development of the national level risk management tools and procedures.  National risk directors form their Prime Minister’s Offices and OECD ambassadors spent three rainy days from December 10-12 discussing risk.

The most of the time, the discussion centered around disaster risks.  Whatever the theme of the  session, the discussion ended up on disaster management, disaster costs, or best practices. This is a theme that was recognized to be of importance in every government.  The other risks that were presented were terrorism, the Ebola epidemic, and illicit trade. The missing themes–that I had expected to be on the agenda–were technology related, financial risks and political risks.

Photo Credit: Ched Cheddles via Flickr

Governments usually take risk to mean natural disasters – but missing from most discussions are climate change, technology, financial, and political risks. Here: storm clouds over England in September 2014. Photo Credit: Ched Cheddles via Flickr

Margaret Wahlstrom, Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Disaster Risk Reduction, gave the best presentation. Her key message war that climate change related issues were not integrated well enough with risk management.  Kate White from the US Army Corps of Engineers supported Wahlstrom by stating that the climate change will radically change disaster management goals, procedures, and volume of investment.  There should be a strong motivation for that, she said, as disasters are coming more expensive.  According to her data, the total cost of hurricane Sandy was 65 billion US$.

The Australian government calculations presented in the meeting are very revealing as well; from Australian government is spending around 400 million AU$ for disaster prevention and response, and 2.6 billion AU$  for recovery.  As the Australian example shows, governments have a long way to go from words to action. Governments have not yet realized the role of mitigation, at least not in the budgeting level.

The main theme of this year’s forum was “risk and resilience.”  So the word was used a lot in all of the presentations.  However, the concept of resilience seems to have many meanings and concrete substance behind the word is ambiguous.  Margaret Wahlstrom pointed out that there is a need for a cross-discipline understanding of resilience, as well as for a generic resilience measurement system.   Concrete quantitative indicators would help policymakers to assess the development actions needed, improvement achieved, and provide justification for development actions.

The most vivid discussion concerned the relationship of the national risk management and public involvement. Countries such as the United Kingdom promote full transparency and active risk communications, while some of the governments such as Singapore focus on communicating the vision and improvement ideas instead of risks.  My interpretation of the discussion is that many of the represented government experts perceive risks to be too complicated to communicate to a general audience.  The Nordic countries even go beyond communication, to encourage and support self-organized actions. For example the government supported people when they started to offer shelter and places to sleep for those that got stuck on the road during the October storms of this year, the worst to hit the region in decades.

Read the forum’s summary document draft (PDF)

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

How to save lives—and money – by addressing India’s air pollution

Dec 19, 2013 | Air Pollution, Demography, Environment

By Erich Striessnig, Research Assistant, IIASA World Population Program
We have all heard about the terrible air pollution in India’s cities. Average concentrations of particulate pollution exceed World Health Organization guidelines through most of India, most of the time. So why hasn’t anything been done? Is it really too expensive?

In a recent publication with fellow IIASA Population Program researcher Warren Sanderson and IIASA Mitigation of Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gases Program researchers Wolfgang Schöpp and Markus Amann, we set to find out. In the study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, we showed that in fact, policy reforms in India targeted at reducing emissions of dangerous fine particulate matter could save thousands of lives, and at the same time save money.

Mark Danielson

Air pollution in India exceeds World Health Organization limits much of the time, which contributes to health problems and premature deaths. Photo Credit: Mark Danielson via Flickr (Creative Commons License)

Due to their very small size, small particles released by cars, factories, and other combustion can travel very deep down into people’s lungs and cause or worsen all sorts of health issues. In Indian cities, where concentrations of these pollutants are already quite high, the expected increase in economic output over the next two decades will be accompanied by an enormous increase in air pollution, leading to a higher number of sick days or even deaths.

Both of these effects could be prevented or at least reduced if stricter regulations on emission limits – already in place in other countries – were imposed. The new study shows that if India enacted pollution controls as stringent as according to European legislation, by the year 2030, the end of the study period, up to 2.5 million premature deaths would be prevented.

So how do pollution controls save money? Healthier people are more productive because they are sick less often. People who can expect to live longer in a cleaner environment are more likely to make investments which would again create jobs and boost the economy. Our study shows that by 2030 such investments would in fact more than pay for themselves, when the economic benefits of a healthier population are considered.

So why haven’t politicians started doing something already much earlier? One answer might be that such reforms initially only produce costs, whereas the benefits typically don’t crystallize before the next elections. Hopefully, this latest scientific evidence from a collaboration of IIASA population and air pollution researchers can offer these politicians an impetus to act. Read more on the IIASA Web site.

Reference Warren Sanderson, Erich Striessnig, Wolfgang Schoepp, and Markus Amann. 2013. Effects on Well-Being of Investing in Cleaner Air in India. Environmental Science and Technology. 47 (23), pp 13222–13229 DOI: 10.1021/es402867r

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.