Addressing, as a priority, socio-economic vulnerabilities in the countries and regions most likely to be impacted by climate risks between now and 2030 will be critical to averting or minimizing near-term global systemic climate risk cascades.
The impacts of climate change are now tangibly affecting societies around the world. The expert elicitation process described in this research paper highlights that even within the next decade, climate hazards are expected to have increasingly significant disruptive impacts. These impacts will not just play out locally in the path of the climate hazard, but form part of complex, interacting, cascading and compounding hazard-impact pathways which will create global impacts.
Given the concerns highlighted in this research, and the climate-related events of the first nine months of 2021, it is realistic to expect that climate impacts become more severe over the near term. Looking back over the last decade, we can see examples of many of the kinds of events that experts expect to see more of in the approach to the 2030s. Globally, each year in 2008–20, an average of 21.8 million people were internally displaced by weather-related disasters in the form of extreme heat, drought, floods, storms and wildfires. In 2010–11, exceptional summer heat in Eastern Europe diminished wheat yields by a third, leading to severe global food price inflation, which was a factor in the unrest that sparked the Arab Spring uprisings which reverberated across the Middle East and North Africa. At the same time, unprecedented rainfall and resulting flooding in Pakistan affected the lives and livelihoods of some 20 million people.
The research process described in this paper indicates that experts think climate risks will continue to be realized, and at accelerating pace and impact. Recent extreme weather adds urgency to the academic debate about the ability of climate impact models to comprehensively predict climate impacts., This is particularly important given recent research highlighting the crucial way that resonance in planetary waves affects the jet stream and creates hemisphere-wide extremes., There is an urgent need, recognizing the gap in understanding of how extremes may change, to quantify, track and manage climate risks. The fact that climate risks are not currently well characterized does not mean that we can afford to ignore them. The research reported in this paper is a first attempt, using expert elicitation, at least qualitatively, to assess the risks of greatest concern in the near term.
As the third UK climate change risk assessment points out: ‘Adaptation action has failed to keep pace with the worsening reality of climate risk’. Within the 2030 time horizon, socio-economic vulnerabilities are very likely to amplify the impacts caused by climate hazards. Such vulnerabilities within at-risk regions are not only likely to amplify the climate impacts in that region, but may act as cascade initiators, pushing impacts that then cascade across sectors and regions. Averting, or minimizing near-term global systemic climate risk cascades therefore depends on addressing socio-economic vulnerabilities in the places most likely to be impacted by climate risks within the next decade.
Global actors would be well advised, on the basis of this exercise, to consider what action can be taken to address vulnerabilities and avoid scenarios in which the most vulnerable regions become nexuses of cascading climate impacts over the next few years. The 10 hazard-impact pathways of greatest concern identified in this research all relate to Africa (eight pathways) or Asia (two pathways). The impacts of greatest concern are food security, migration and displacement of people, and conflict in Africa. These arise from multiple climate hazards: drought and changing rainfall patterns, coupled with heatwaves. East Africa and the Sahel, spanning West and East Africa, are identified as being of particular concern.
Food security concerns are not, however, confined to the African continent. Similar climate hazards, inclusive of flooding, were seen by the participating experts to be likely to impact South and Southeast Asia, and Australasia. There were concerns that storm damage to crops would exacerbate food security at the global level. Experts expressed concern over multiple breadbasket failure at the global level, with the probability of such a failure in the decade of the 2040s standing at just less than 50 per cent.,
Migration and displacement of people, stemming from similar climate hazards, were also of great concern to the participating experts. Impacts would be most felt in East Africa, South, Southeast and East Asia, the Caribbean and Central America. It was in East Africa and the Sahel where migration and displacement of people were of most concern, with drought and crop failure likely to drive ‘climate refugees’ into Southern Europe.
Further to the suffering and security concerns likely to stem from food shortage and migration impacts, drought was highlighted as a hazard likely to directly create the conditions for conflict across Africa, again concentrated in East Africa. Combined with changing rainfall patterns, drought is also likely to impact livelihoods and income across the African continent. At the same time, cyclones and typhoons in Southeast and South Asia were identified as likely to cause significant infrastructure loss and damage within the 2030 time horizon. Impacts within these regions could have global cascading impacts on international supply chains.
Building societal resilience to the shocks that are likely to occur is a form of adaptation. The 2015 Paris Agreement and 2018 Katowice climate package both call for all parties to undertake and document adaptation progress. Although there has been a rapid increase in the reporting of adaptation since 2006, availability and access to comprehensive socio-economic and adaptation data remains a pivotal challenge, with data often unavailable. Moreover, any meaningful datasets that do exist rarely contain comprehensive global coverage, and are often subject to reporting biases. Crucially, in those countries reporting adaptation measures, there is limited explicit recognition of the transboundary adaptations that are required to reduce risk cascades across geographies, or of adaptations that address vulnerabilities across sectors. New sources of data are required. These could include: publicly available reports, expert knowledge, legislation and regulations, digitally sourced big data, and crowdsourcing. Equally important will be converging on common, systematic, longitudinal and comprehensive techniques to track such data. This research exercise constitutes proof of concept that using a Delphi method can generate expert consensus on risks that are not currently well attended to.
4.1 Recommendations
To reduce the likelihood of climate hazards materializing into impacts within vulnerable countries over the next decade, as well as minimize the chances of cascading impacts stemming from these countries, the international community, the governments of wealthy countries, investors, business leaders and academics need to work with vulnerable countries. Drawing on the insights gathered during the research that has informed this paper, the following recommendations are made to promote solid progress on common goals.
- This paper focuses on the need for effective adaptation measures. Despite this focus, our first and most important recommendation is for strong, unilateral mitigation action against climate change at and beyond COP26. The reason for this is that even if rapid action is taken to adapt to changing climate-related risks, the experts who contributed to the research process have emphasized the significant likelihood that we may soon be locked into impacts so severe they go beyond the limits of what nations can adapt to. The mitigation of climate change is thus of fundamental importance, requiring immediate, drastic and sustained reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and the preservation and restoration of natural carbon sinks.
- Adaptation measures are urgently needed, and must be prioritized, targeted and tailored. The focus must be on addressing socio-economic vulnerabilities in the regions most likely to suffer near-term climate impacts, and where conditions are already precarious.
- Action on adaptation in these regions should not be the concern only of these regions, but should be supported and enabled by richer nations. This support is in the near- and long-term interests of wealthy nations as it will not only avert worse impacts for the most vulnerable regions, but also help prevent the cascading impacts of food insecurity, migration and conflict that are likely to initiate subsequent impacts across borders and continents.
- Adaptation measures should, at a minimum, not increase the risk of conflict, and should where possible enhance peacebuilding. It should be recognized that efforts to combine adaptation and peacebuilding require improved governance, security and economic growth, and – crucially – the buy-in of affected communities.
- A comprehensive and up-to-date climate risk register is needed, incorporating not only near-term climate impacts, but also socio-economic vulnerabilities and associated adaptations that reduce the overall risk, as well as disaster risk preparedness. International organizations, governments, civil society, academics and the private sector are all stakeholders in climate risk; and a clear understanding and ongoing monitoring of climate risk are needed to provide impetus and justification for action by governments, businesses and investors. Ongoing monitoring is also essential to adaptation planning and resilience. Only by improving the monitoring of risk and vulnerabilities can resilience and adaptation be robustly targeted and improved, and thus lessen climate impacts. Many experts, in this study and more widely, are suggesting that a UN body, such as the UN Security Council, should hold the proposed risk register.
- There is a clear need for an annual assessment of how hazards, exposure and vulnerabilities are changing. Repeating this exercise, with modifications and improvements, would be valuable especially until more comprehensive systems for tracking emerging and near-term climate risks are established. Expert elicitation is a useful tool to facilitate responsive quantification and tracking of near-term climate risk; and the Delphi method enables climate scientists and sector risk experts to express concerns in respect of risk pathways that are currently difficult to forecast within climate impact models.
