“I’ve seen many scientific reports in my life, but I’ve never seen anything like it.” That is what António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, said Monday at the presentation of the latest United Nations report. “An atlas of human suffering,” Guterres called the report, “a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.”
Now the UN chief often uses big words when it comes to climate change. But this time, those words aren’t an exaggeration. It is not easy to read anything positive in this more than 3,600 page report, devoted to the consequences of climate change. The conclusions are firm and clear: the effects of climate change are already visible and felt everywhere, and they will get worse, irreversible damage is caused to people and nature in all kinds of places on the planet. Some ecosystems have reached or are already past the limit of adaptation. All this will lead to more inequality and increasing conflict.
More than before, the IPCC exposes the connection between these consequences in this report. This happens on an abstract level when the report describes that the degradation of ecosystems and biodiversity leads irrevocably to damage to human society. But the examples are also concrete. Rising temperatures are causing drought and causing problems for agriculture. Irrigation can be a solution for the time being, but it is less efficient when it gets drier due to the heat. More water is then needed, but at the same time less is available. And with the water that is available, power plants also have to be cooled. As the temperature rises, that only becomes more important. Extracting even more water from nature is not possible without endangering ecosystems.
This report reads like a sample card of vulnerabilities. And therein lies the pain. Because even though vulnerability is increasing everywhere, the word is mainly used in relation to small island states in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the least developed countries in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. All countries that have made a limited contribution to global warming, but are hit harder than the rest. According to the report, nearly half of humanity now lives in the danger zone.
Because the world is far from being able to control greenhouse gas emissions – and does not seem to be getting it under control for the time being – there is little that can be done about this injustice. Except by paying. Rich countries, including the Netherlands, will have to help vulnerable countries to adapt. This is not only a moral imperative, but – and this is one of the few bright spots in the report – it also helps to increase the resilience of countries. It is therefore also the right thing to do for economic reasons. Climate-proof infrastructure is admittedly a few percent more expensive, but economically it generates a multiple of those extra costs.
Where adaptation is no longer possible, rich countries will have to compensate for damage and loss. This is still a sensitive topic in international climate consultations. Nice words were spoken about this at the climate summit in Glasgow in November, but no action has been taken so far. The discussion about liability continues and must be settled in the coming years. The Netherlands can play a pioneering role in this, as a rich country that has been arguing for some time – and with success – for more attention to adaptation to climate change.
This report also forces the Netherlands to look at itself. After the flood disaster of 1953, the Netherlands showed what it is capable of with a costly and ambitious plan that looked decades ahead. Such a grand plan is needed again now. Only, it’s not 1953 anymore. Gone are the days when a ten centimeter rise in sea level could be combated with a ten centimeter higher dike. The IPCC shows that the climate threat comes from all sides and requires hard choices. How long can the groundwater be kept so low to please farmers, at the expense of nature? Why isn’t the growth of aviation being stopped much more explicitly? When will there be an end to building houses in a polder almost seven meters below sea level?
The longer the answers are not forthcoming, the greater the damage will be in the long run. More than its predecessors, the government seems willing to take climate change seriously. With the recognition that not everything is possible everywhere, as Johan Remkes in his nitrogen report concluded in 2020, the cabinet can show real climate leadership.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 5 March 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of March 5, 2022