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March 14, 2022
On February 28, 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a new report focusing on the impacts of climate change and our capacity to adapt to them. This 3,000+ page document can help inform policymakers about the latest climate science and possible solutions. But what are the biggest takeaways from the report and where do we go from here? Dan and EESI Policy Manager Anna McGinn talk with Dr. Anand Patwardhan, previous coordinating lead author for the IPCC and co-chair of the Adaptation Research Alliance, about the main conclusions and how research can drive climate adaptation work forward.
Show notes:
IPCC Sixth Assessment Working Group II Report
EESI resources on COP26
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Episode Transcript:
Dan Bresette: Hello, and welcome to The Climate Conversation. I'm Dan Bresette, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Today, I am not joined by my regular co-host, Emma Johnson, I am instead joined by special guest co-host, Anna McGinn. Anna is our policy manager at EESI. And you may remember her from all of the articles she's edited, and the fact sheets she’s had input on in, briefings she’s co moderated, especially around COP26, which of course took place last fall. Anna, thank you so much for joining us today for this great episode about climate adaptation research and action. And I can see you on the Zoom, but it's also going to be great to hear you in a minute.
Anna McGinn: Hi Dan, thanks so much for having me really looking forward to the conversation. As you said, we're going to be talking about climate adaptation research and action in the context of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that just came out a couple of weeks ago. That report is focused on climate impacts adaptation and vulnerability. Before we jump in with our guest today, just a little background on the IPCC, which is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC is a part of the United Nations. It’s role is to assess the current science on climate change by looking across all the scientific research out there and pulling it into one place. There are thousands of authors and researchers and reviewers involved in the process from around the world. And the idea behind bringing together all this information is to help inform decision makers at all levels of government as they develop climate policy. It's also heavily used as a part of the international climate negotiations, Dan, just like you mentioned, COP26. And we also are going to discuss that in just a bit. Today, the IPCC has completed five assessment reports, and we are in the middle of the Sixth Assessment report cycle right now. The second part of the report was just released at the end of February. And in addition to these assessment reports, the IPCC also conducts special reports. There have been three of those so far, one on assessing the impacts of global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, one on climate change and land, and the most recent one on ocean and the cryosphere, cryosphere, meaning ice. So with that background, Dan, over to you to introduce our guest for today.
Dan: Thanks, Anna. And to help us break down how the IPCC report applies to policymakers and to dive into opportunities to advance adaptation research, we're joined by our guest today, Dr. Anand Patwardhan. Anand is a professor at the University of Maryland, teaching classes on global environmental policy. He was a coordinating lead author for both the Fourth and Fifth Assessment report for the IPCC. And he is a co-chair of the Adaptation Research Alliance. The Adaptation Research Alliance is a global collaborative effort to increase investment and opportunities for action research to develop and inform effective adaptation solutions. The initiative was officially launched at the UN Climate Change Conference last November, COP26. Anand, welcome to the show today.
Anand Patwardhan: Thanks, Anna and Dan, it’s a pleasure to be here with you.
Anna: So Anand, and we're going to just jump right in. And as we mentioned, at the end of February, the IPCC released the second of three major sections of the Sixth Assessment report. The report is global in scope and covers climate impacts, as well as our capacity to adapt to those impacts. Much has been covered in the news about that first aspect, the impacts, so we're going to focus today on the opportunities and challenges around adaptation. So our first question for you is, what are a few of your high level takeaways on the adaptation section of the report, specifically for our policymaker audience?
Anand: Thanks, Anna, that's a great question. And perhaps, before getting to the question itself, might want to spend just a minute on a bit of context. You did introduce the IPCC and the fact that the IPCC does its work through three working groups that focus on different aspects of the issue. Working Group I, whose report came out just a few months ago before COP26 in Glasgow, addresses the underlying science of climate change, and what the resulting changes in the climate might look like. Working Group II, which we're discussing today, looks at the literature around the consequences of climate change, you know, what the impacts are at different levels of warming. And then, of course, what the responses to those impacts might be, which is what we refer to as adaptation. And then the Working Group III report, which will come out just a few months later this year, focuses on mitigation, which is about ways to reduce emissions and avoid the problem in the first place. And so that’s a little bit of context on the working groups and the structure of the three reports. What are some of the key messages? I think there are really four aspects I might want to highlight. Of course, you know, the report is many thousands of pages of text, even though what you might actually look at is a much shorter Summary for Policymakers, the SPM, which tries to distill all of that voluminous material into, you know, maybe 30-odd pages of key messages and findings. But at the higher level, I think one of the ideas that comes through very, very clearly from the report is the notion of urgency. That climate change is not really a problem of some remote distant future. It's in the here and now. It's seen in the intensification of heat waves, in the intensification of tropical cyclones. Hurricane Harvey is a great example of that intensification. And there's a lot of robust science now that is able to attribute some of these extreme events we are seeing today to anthropogenic climate change. So really the sense of urgency. There's also I think, a very clear sense of that every degree of warming matters. So every half a degree of warming matters. So when the global community came together in Paris to set the target of holding warming to well below two degrees, well, that two degrees is really in that sense, an upper bound, and so 1.5, it reinforces, really, I think, the message in the special report on 1.5 degrees, that impacts scale and become much, much worse very quickly, as temperatures increase. I think that's a, that's a very consistent message coming out. I think the other really important contribution of the report is to shine a spotlight on who is most vulnerable, that these impacts are not uniformly distributed around the world, in fact they're not even uniformly distributed within countries. And it's often precisely the communities that are already marginalized and are already suffering from various levels of environmental distress, economic deprivation, that are often the most at risk. So it's really a spotlight on the fact that vulnerability is very unequally distributed. And then the final point, really, I think, coming to the question of adaptation is that there are solutions. There are communities are adapting already that are on the frontlines. But that's not happening at the scale and the urgency needed. And so really, the question of how do we make adaptation become truly everyone's business and avoid falling into the trap of it being no one's business is, I think, kind of the underlying key idea here.
Anna: Thank you so much for outlining those four key messages. And you mentioned the Summary for Policymakers. So want to go back to that for a moment, because we probably have a lot of policymakers or people that support policymakers in our audience. So even that summary can be quite dense and maybe a little daunting to look into. So I'm curious if you have any advice for someone who's looking to review the summary or review other aspects of the report, tips or tricks for doing that effectively?
Anand: Thanks, Anna. And absolutely, I mean, the report, as I said, is many thousands of pages. And even the summary is very dense, 30 odd pages of texts and figures. One thing to perhaps keep in mind is that the Summary for Policymakers is a negotiated document, it is actually negotiated line by line, sometimes word for word, in a plenary that goes over many sleepless nights and days, and you have literally hundreds of delegates from different countries and the author team themselves that are crafting that language in the Summary for Policymakers. So the SPM does have a lot of significance, because it really, in a sense, reflects also the consensus, not only in the scientific community, but also consensus among the policymakers around what they are seeing as those messages. So if you kind of look at the content itself of the SPM, sort of at the high level, that content is organized really around four sections. The first section gives a bit of introduction and background. The second section, which is really the key section, lays out the impacts and risks, what are those risks? How do they increase at different levels of warming? How do they affect key regions and sectors, whether it's, you know, the marine sector, its coasts, its cities, its forests, agriculture, so it lays out really what those impacts and risks are. Third section describes some of the options to respond and manage those risks, actions that are already being done, that could be taken. And then the fourth section in this particular report cycle, really is an interesting attempt to synthesize some of this into a perspective around climate resilient development. What might development look like in a world that is threatened by climate change? How do we ensure that we are able to continue to prosper even in a changing climate? And so that sort of focus of climate resilient development is one of the more interesting aspects, particularly in this working group to report.
Dan: Thanks, Anand, that is all super interesting. You're someone who comes at this, you've been part of these efforts to develop these reports for some time. And it's fascinating listening to, and sort of monitoring how they've come and developed over the years. But I'd like to ask now about maybe some forward looking thoughts and I’m curious, what do you see as the major needs and opportunities going forward for climate adaptation work?
Anand: Thanks, Dan. And I think that's a really important question, because, you know, one of the themes for Glasgow that you might remember was sort of the this was the decade for action, that this decade was sort of the make or break decade where the actions we take or don't take today will set us on the course for what happens in the future. And that's, I think, as true of mitigation, as it is in the context of adaptation. So just as in the case of mitigation, we are concerned about ensuring that the investments we make today don't lock us into a high carbon future, but rather enable us to move to a low carbon future. In exactly the same way, I think we are making long term investments, for example, in infrastructure, in building cities, particularly in the developing world, where a lot of the new infrastructures still to be built and being built, is that we do it in a way that now in addition to being low carbon, also promotes resilience, that doesn't lead us to increase risk. So this, this notion that we need, that we have this window of opportunity is a key one. And that I think is one of the also themes that was picked up in the report of the Global Commission on Adaptation, which I had the pleasure of working with a couple of years ago, which really called for three revolutions: a revolution in understanding, in planning, and of course, in finance. And the starting point of that was, of course, knowledge. Right? So better information that informs all of our planning decisions. And that's I think going to be a key focus of research in the coming year is to make sure that we get the right information that decision makers need. And whether these are utility planners at the local level, whether these are counties that are thinking about land use and zoning, whether this is the federal government thinking about long term investments, you know, we have investments going in infrastructure, for example. So really decisions at all levels are planning decisions, of course, and then which are enabled and supported by finance. So I would say, really, in a sentence, the major need being to shift gears, from what I would call a focus of research on risks, or on the problem space, as it were, to a focus of research on the solution space, what do we do about those risks, and I think that's going to be a really big shift that we need to see happen over this this coming decade, in order to support action.
Anna: We mentioned at the top that you're the co-chair of the Adaptation Research Alliance, which in many ways is trying to do or facilitate that shift that you just mentioned. So I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit more about the Alliance's work. And specifically, its focus on action research, and maybe give us a little bit of a sense of what's the difference between action research and traditional research? And why is a reframing around action research really necessary, in your opinion, and in the work of the Adaptation Research Alliance?
Anand: Thanks, Anna. So as I said, a lot of action starts first, of course, with the right understanding and the right knowledge. In this case, the way we look at action research is research that produces this actionable knowledge. Knowledge that can directly feed into decisions that can support an inform decisions. And again, as I said, there's a whole range of decisions that need to be informed by climate information, right? Whether this is at the individual at the household level, this is a farmer trying to figure out, you know, what crops to plant for the next cycle, given uncertainties in the weather, to a Water Resource Manager trying to figure out how to handle changes in precipitation that are leading to water stress, or it's a utility planter trying to project what is the peak demand in the summer because warmer climate means more demand for air conditioning and cooling. There are decisions that are being taken at all levels that need to be informed by the right kind of climate information, at the right scale, at the right time. That's one dimension right. So the information that feeds into decision. The other dimension is really around solutions, whether these are solutions in terms of developing new heat tolerant crops or solutions in terms of integrating better disease surveillance so that we can figure out how climate change is affecting the shifts in vector borne diseases, whether it's diseases that are well known, like malaria, or even new diseases like dengue, which are, which are now being seen in parts of the world where they'd never been seen before. So it's really focused on solutions now of how to respond to these new and changing risks. So that's how we see action research, both on the solution space, and in the right climate information on the problem space. But then you might ask, as you said, you know, why do we need an alliance? What's the role of the ARA? It's silly that we don't have enough of it. Going back, as we were starting to talk about the IPCC report, it's worth reminding ourselves that what the IPCC assesses, it assesses scientific knowledge, for the most part, as you see in peer-reviewed journal articles. Well, it turns out that a lot of the knowledge of solutions actually rests with practitioners, its people out there in the field, who are doing things, who are adapting already. So it's really I think, one of the goals of the ARA is to shift from perhaps a paradigm of research that focuses on the production of sort of formal scientific knowledge through the peer review process, to really research that connects with action, that sort of gets out of the lab and into the field, and brings the field into the lab, as it were. And this is really a, this is really a big change. It's a change often in, in our institutions, in our incentive structures. I'm an academic, so I well understand how academia, what some of the pressures in academia are. It requires a change amongst our research funding agencies that fund the research to make it more solutions oriented, and decision oriented. But also equally, I think, requires a shift in how we support action. So very often, when we talk to action funders, they want to just get on with the work, they don't see the importance of knowledge. But in the case of adaptation, especially given the fact that climate change climate is uncertain, that we will need to be flexible, we will need to learn as we go along, we need to really bring research much more front and center into the process of implementation and action.
Dan: Most of our conversations so far has been about the IPCC and sort of global reports that have a global focus. But the United States also puts together high-level climate research reports and we call them National Climate Assessments. What are the opportunities for adaptation action research that would help inform the next National Climate Assessment? And are there other ways that the federal government might be able to support or engage in action research to advance climate adaptation?
Anand: Thanks, Dan. That's a great question. That's a really important, it's really important one, you talked about the National Climate Assessment. Well, there's also the US Global Change Research Program, USGCRP, which by law is required to act as a coordinating mechanism amongst the various agencies. And the USGCRP obviously, has also a key role to play in ensuring that the right kind of investments go into research that will then inform assessments like the National Climate Assessment, because they ultimately, the NCA, or indeed the IPCC, which is sort of the global, this process playing out in the global level, does depend on production of knowledge that can then be assessed. And so I think we have looked at both in terms of the National Climate Assessment itself, the process of the assessment, and ensure that that process actually responds to stakeholder needs, at varying levels, at regionally specific, that may be sector specific, that may be often driven at the local and state level. So one dimension of this is sort of at the assessment process that really lays great emphasis on responses, on solutions, on what is happening and practice, on what is working and what is not working, on questions of effectiveness costs and benefits. And then the other side of the question is during that through the USGCRP, the investments that are going into the underlying research, whether it's funding through science funding agencies, like the NSF or NOAA or NASA, or even some of the other agencies like DOE, that support scientific research is actually strengthening and pushing the scientific community to produce the kind of knowledge that can then get picked up through processes like this in NCA.
Anna: Zooming back out now to the international level, the Adaptation Research Alliance has done an evidence review of research and action. So I'm wondering if you could share with us a couple examples from that review to really bring the ideas that we've been talking about here today, to life.
Anand: Thanks, Anna. And perhaps, before sort of diving into the examples, this gives me a chance a little bit to plug some of the principles that we have been trying to develop and really advocate for through the ARA. Those principles, we crafted through a process really with the intention of how do we drive this paradigm shift that we just talked about a few minutes ago? How do we really ensure that we get research that's fit for purpose? And so as we were doing this evidence review, as we were looking for good examples of actual research and practice, there were a few key themes that these examples all illustrate. Right? So they, for example, first principle is that research should be user centered and demand driven, that the research questions that are posed, are framed by what stakeholders want to know, that they're not framed, purely bought by what scientists want to know, but really by what stakeholders and users want in terms of knowledge and information. But then, that the process of research actually is not a process of working in silos and communicating but really working in a co-producing manner. What does co-production mean? It means that the users are engaged in that design and research process itself. They're not sort of brought in as an afterthought, but they're really at the, at the center of that research activity. And that research activity itself empowers the users in the community. So for example, one of the projects that our evidence review looks at is the Xenon la Forest Monitoring Project in Oaxaca, Mexico. And that project looks at forest restoration and community led activities and protection of land, where the research effort involved the communities themselves in monitoring, and then obviously led to a greater empowerment of the community in terms of figuring out what was happening and how they could respond to it. Another key dimension, another key principle, of course, is that how we value research should lay emphasis on impact that it leads to, which kind of follows an important principle, I think, which one of the projects, many projects actually in our evidence will bring it out. But for example, the work of the Watershed Organization Trust, WOTR in India, they've had many decades of experience working with communities on watershed management. And one of the things that this points out is the importance of addressing some of the underlying structural factors that often makes us vulnerable in the first place. So factors like inequities, not having communities that are empowered to participate in governance processes. And so the efforts by WOTR focus on decentralization, and focus on strengthening institutions that represent decentralized governance, and then leading to long term capacity building because communities now have the capacity to themselves argue and advocate for their needs, instead of having sort of people coming in and sort of doing flying in and flying out. So that whole process of in a sense democratization, both of action, but also of knowledge, is something we have seen in a lot of the examples of action research we have come across as good practices. And that's precisely the kind of actual research that the Alliance is trying to catalyze and promote in the Global South but everywhere.
Dan: Well, Anand, this was a really enlightening conversation. And I'd like to thank you on behalf of everyone at EESI, and all of our audience for joining us today. This is Professor Anand Patwardhan, University of Maryland. Thanks so much for talking with us today about adaptation action research.
Anand: Thanks so much, Anna and Dan. Pleasure to be here.
Dan: Well, that was a great conversation, Anna, thanks so much for helping to make that possible. I really am learning a lot about our work on climate adaptation. I'm glad that we spend so much time thinking about it. I think it's going to be something that unfortunately, more and more people across the United States and across the world have to get familiar with. We have some actually, we have some briefings coming up in March around landscape conservation, national climate adaptation data. We also have some briefings coming up in a few months: we're doing a series called living with climate change. And we're going to be looking at some climate impacts that are already affecting us. And we'll be sort of matching those briefings with sort of very solutions-oriented technology briefings looking at what do we need to accomplish to get us emissions reductions on the timescale that will help us avoid the worst outcomes of climate change. And I think one thing that stuck out to me was Anand’s point that every half degree matters. It may not feel like a lot, it may not seem like a lot, what's the difference between 1.5 and 2. But when you look at the IPCC reports, when you look at the National Climate Assessment, there's a big difference between 1.5 degrees Celsius and two degrees Celsius. And I think probably a good reminder that we need to be very thoughtful about how we communicate that so that people don't say, Oh, well, it's just half a degree, what's the difference between, you know, 75.5 degrees and 76 degrees on a day. Doesn't work that way, it's not the same exact thing, we need to be careful about that.
Anna: I really enjoyed the conversation as well, I think the paradigm shift and how we think about research is going to be really critical in the coming years. And that flows everywhere from those that provide the funding to the researchers and thinking about how they do research to the people that are experiencing climate impacts that are, you know, maybe generously going to be involved in this research so we can better understand what's happening and what sort of solutions work and what sorts of efforts actually don't work really well. And that way we can figure out best practices and move forward to have as many people as possible be able to be more resilient to the impacts that we're facing in the future. So think of research is one just small piece of the picture. But actually, when we think about it in the way that Anand described it, it kind of ripples out and impacts so many areas of the work when we think about adaptation and resilience, so that that was something that'll really stick with me.
Dan: Great. That's really interesting. Before we go, just one last thing, wanted to also just put it out there that we will be revisiting all of our work in the lead up to COP27. We put a lot of emphasis on climate adaptation in the lead up to COP26. And my guess is that we'll be doing something similar for COP27 Because as an Anand said, this is the decade of action. And it's really important that we keep on pressure, but also keep on providing science-based, nonpartisan policymaker education resources, so that Congress is prepared to act before this decade gets away from us. If you would like to learn more about EESI’s work on climate adaptation, head to our at http://www.eesi.org and also please follow us on social media @eesionline for all of our recent updates. The Climate Conversation is published as a supplement to our bi weekly newsletter climate change solutions. If you'd like to subscribe, you can go to www.eesi.org/signup to subscribe to our newsletter. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.
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