AFP

Vultures roam the sand in the Brazilian resort town of Atafona amid the ruins of the latest houses destroyed by the sea, whose relentless rise has turned the local coastline into an apocalyptic landscape.

The Atlantic Ocean advances an average of six meters (nearly 20 feet) a year in this small town north of Rio de Janeiro, which has long been prone to extreme erosion — now exacerbated by climate change.

The sea has already submerged more than 500 houses, turning the once idyllic coastline into an underwater graveyard of wrecked structures.

One of the next to lose his home will be Joao Waked Peixoto.

Walking through the jumbled rubble of what was once his neighbors’ house, he looks at what is left: a fragment of a blue-painted room strewn with tattered magazines, a bicycle and other remnants of life.

“When will we have to leave? That’s an unknown,” he says.

“The sea advanced three or four meters in 15 days. Our wall might not last until next week.”

Waked Peixoto’s grandfather built the house as a vacation home, a beachfront getaway with large rooms and a garden.

During the coronavirus pandemic, Waked Peixoto and his family moved in full-time.

But it now looks inevitable the house will be swallowed by the sea.

“It will be a shame to lose this house, because it holds so many memories of my whole family,” he says.

– Extreme erosion –

Atafona, a town of some 6,000 people, has long suffered from extreme erosion. It is part of the four percent of coastlines worldwide that lose five meters or more every year.

The problem is being exacerbated by global warming, which is causing sea levels to rise and making currents and weather patterns more extreme, says geologist Eduardo Bulhoes of Fluminense Federal University.

But Atafona has had a “chronic problem” for decades, he says.

The Paraiba do Sul river, whose mouth is in Atafona, has shrunk because of mining, agriculture and other activities that drain it upstream.

“In the last 40 years, that has drastically reduced the river’s volume, meaning it transports less sand to Atafona,” says Bulhoes.

With less sand, the town’s beaches have stopped regenerating naturally, ceding ground to the sea.

Construction on the coast has only made the problem worse, by stripping away sand dunes and vegetation, the beaches’ natural defenses.

The result has been disastrous for the tourism and fishing industries.

“Large boats can’t come through the river delta anymore… and the money disappeared along with them,” says Elialdo Bastos Meirelles, head of a local fishermen’s community of some 600 people.

“The river is dead.”

– ‘Abandoned’ –

Local authorities have studied several plans to curb the erosion, including building dikes to reduce the force of the ocean’s waves and hauling sand from the river delta to the beach.

Bulhoes, the geologist, proposed the latter, which is modeled on similar initiatives in the Netherlands, Spain and the United States.

But the projects exist only on paper so far.

The county under-secretary for the environment, Alex Ramos, told AFP no one had yet come up with a definitive solution, and that any plan would have to gain environmental regulators’ approval first.

In the meantime, the county has launched a social assistance program that pays 1,200 reais ($230) a month to more than 40 families who lost their homes to erosion.

But critics accuse the local government of a lack of political will.

“We keep hearing promises,” says Veronica Vieira, head of neighborhood association SOS Atafona.

“But this town has been abandoned. It’s an apocalypse. It makes you want to cry.”

An International Atomic Energy Agency taskforce began a mission Monday in Japan to review the controversial planned release of treated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean.

More than a million tonnes of processed water has accumulated in tanks at the crippled plant since it went into meltdown following a tsunami in 2011 and storage space is running out.

An extensive pumping and filtration system removes most radioactive elements, and Japan says the plan to dilute and release the water over several decades is safe.

The IAEA has endorsed the release, which it says is similar to the disposal of wastewater at nuclear plants elsewhere.

But the plan adopted by the government last April, which is expected to begin as soon as March 2023, sparked ire from neighbouring countries over environmental and safety concerns.

It also generated fierce opposition from local fishing communities, who fear it will undermine years of work to restore confidence in their seafood.

Plant operator TEPCO and the Japanese government are hopeful that IAEA monitoring of the process will boost confidence.

“This week we will conduct a mission to review the action, plans, data, and relevant documents, to assess their compliance against the provisions included in international safety standards,” said Gustavo Caruso, director and coordinator of the IAEA’s nuclear safety and security department.

He said the taskforce would be scrutinising elements including the “radiological characterisation of the water to be discharged” and as well the impact on people and the environment.

TEPCO’s chief officer for the treated water management, Junichi Matsumoto, said the firm was already studying infrastructure design and operations for the discharge plan “with the priority on safety and also to contain the impact on the region’s reputation.”

“We hope to further improve the objectivity and transparency of this process through this review,” he added, at a meeting with IAEA and Japanese government officials.

Debate over how to handle the water has dragged on for years, as space to store it at the site runs out, though some critics have suggested there could be ways to store more water until a new plan is devised.

The liquid includes water used to cool damaged reactors, as well as rain and groundwater that seeps into the area.

The filtration process removes most radioactive elements from the water, but some remain, including tritium.

Experts say the element is only harmful to humans in large doses and with dilution the treated water poses no scientifically detectable risk.

The IAEA team will be in Japan February 14-18 and will visit the plant site and give a press conference at the end of their trip.

Nearly 200 nations kick off a virtual UN meeting Monday to finalise what is sure to be a harrowing catalogue of climate change impacts — past, present and future.

Species extinction, ecosystem collapse, mosquito-borne disease, deadly heat, water shortages, and reduced crop yields are already measurably worse due to global heating.

Just in the last year, the world has seen a cascade of unprecedented floods, heatwaves and wildfires across four continents.

All these impacts will accelerate in the coming decades even if the carbon pollution driving climate change is rapidly brought to heel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is likely to warn.

A crucial, 40-page Summary for Policymakers — distilling underlying chapters totalling thousands of pages, and reviewed line-by-line — is to be made public on February 28.

“This is a real moment of reckoning,” said Rachel Cleetus, Climate and energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“This not just more scientific projections about the future,” she told AFP. “This is about extreme events and slow-onset disasters that people are experiencing right now.”

The report will also underscore the urgent need for “adaptation” — climate-speak which means preparing for devastating consequences that can no longer be avoided, according to an early draft seen by AFP in 2021.

In some cases this means that adapting to intolerably hot days, flash flooding and storm surges has become a matter of life and death.

– Billions in damages –

“Even if we find solutions for reducing carbon emissions, we will still need solutions to help us adapt,” said Alexandre Magnan, a researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris and a co-author of the report, without commenting on its findings. 

IPCC assessments — this will be the sixth since 1990 — are divided into three sections, each with its own volunteer “working group” of hundreds of scientists.

In August 2021, the first instalment on physical science found that global heating is virtually certain to pass 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), probably within a decade.

Earth’s surface has warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius since the 19th century.

The 2015 Paris deal calls for capping global warming at “well below” 2C, and ideally 1.5C.

This report is sure to reinforce this more ambitious goal. 

It will likewise underscore that vulnerability to extreme weather events — even when they are made worse by global warming — can be reduced by better planning and preparation, according to the draft seen by AFP.

This is not only true in the developing world, noted Imperial College professor Friederike Otto, pointing to massive flooding in Germany last year that killed scores and caused billions in damage. 

– Finite set of choices –

“Even without global warming there would have been a huge rainfall event in a densely populated geography where the rivers flood very easily,” said Otto, a pioneer in the science of quantifying the extent to which climate change makes extreme weather events more likely or intense.

The report will zero in on how climate change is widening already yawning gaps in inequality, both between regions and within nations. 

The simple fact is that the people least responsible for climate change are the ones suffering the most from its impacts.

Not only is this unjust, experts and advocates say, it is a barrier to tackling the problem.

“I do not think there are pathways to sustainable development that do not substantively address equity issues,” said Clark University professor Edward Carr, a lead author of one of the report’s chapters.

The report is also likely to highlight dangerous “tipping points”, invisible temperature trip wires in the climate system for irreversible and potentially catastrophic change.

Some of them — such as the melting of permafrost housing twice as much carbon as in the atmosphere — could fuel global warming all on their own.

“There is a finite set of choices we can make that would move us productively into the future,” said Carr. “Every day we wait and delay, some of those choices get harder or go away.”

The third and final instalment of the IPCC assessment currently unfolding, due out in early April, examines options for curbing carbon emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Hundreds of cars, campervans and trucks taking part in a Canada-style protest convoy against Covid regulations were preparing to enter Brussels Monday where Belgian officials have already banned a demonstration following a weekend attempt in Paris.

Around 1,300 vehicles from across France had arrived near the French border town of Lille by late Sunday, according to police.

The protest is one of several worldwide inspired by the truckers’ standoff with authorities in Canada.

Camped at a parking lot near Lille, protesters brandished French flags and chanted “We won’t give up” and “Freedom, freedom.”

“We’ll go to Brussels to try to block it, to fight against this policy of permanent control,” said Jean-Pierre Schmit, an unemployed 58-year-old who came from Toulouse.

For Sandrine, 45, who came from Lyon, the government’s response to the Covid crisis had revealed that “we’re losing our freedoms bit by bit, in an insidious way.”

The latest self-proclaimed “freedom convoy” comes after 97 people were arrested at the weekend in Paris where thousands of demonstrators defied a ban on attempting to blockade the French capital.

In France, the demonstrators took aim at the “vaccine pass” required to enter restaurants, cafes and many other public venues implemented as part of President Emmanuel Macron’s inoculation drive.

– Border checks –

Belgian authorities have banned all demonstrations in the capital with “motorised vehicles” and said they had taken measures to prevent the blocking of the Brussels region.

Brussels police have posted on social media warning that vehicle protests are banned and advising against travelling to the capital by car, channelling convoys to a parking lot on the outskirts of the city as the only place where a static protest will be tolerated.

Some participants in a similar demonstration organised in The Hague have also announced their intention to go to Belgium.

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo had however advised the demonstrators to abandon their plans to come to Brussels.

“I say to those who come from abroad: look at the rules in Belgium. We never had rules that were too hard and we don’t have so many anymore. So complain at home,” he said Friday.

Checks are planned at the border and vehicles coming to the capital despite the ban will be diverted, Belgian authorities warned.

Brussels airport also advised travellers to take precautions on Monday and come by train for fear of blocking access routes.

The self-proclaimed “freedom convoy” is one of several worldwide inspired by a truckers’ standoff with authorities in Canada over vaccine mandates.

While French police counted 3,000 vehicles outside Paris on Friday evening, only around a hundred made it to the Champs-Elysees avenue in the heart of the capital on Saturday before being forced out after officers deployed tear gas to disperse the protesters.

In Canada, police on Sunday cleared demonstrators who had occupied a key US border bridge for a week but thousands of protesters remained in the capital Ottawa, where they have paralysed the city centre.

The French protest movement brings together those opposed to the Covid vaccine pass required to access many public venues but also some angry at rising energy and food prices, issues which ignited the “yellow vest” protests that shook France in late 2018 and early 2019.

The French government has said it plans to relax face mask mandates by February 28, and is hoping to end the vaccine pass requirement by late March or early April.

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Efforts to clear New Zealand anti-vaccine protesters by blasting Barry Manilow songs on a loop have drawn criticism from police officers caught in the crossfire.

Hundreds of demonstrators — inspired by the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers in Canada — have been camped on the lawns of parliament for a week, ignoring appeals from Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Monday to “go home, and take your children”.

Attempts to move the protesters over the weekend included dousing them with sprinklers and pummelling them with sickly sweet pop tracks such as “Baby Shark”, “Macarena” and Manilow’s “Mandy”.

Wellington police chief Superintendent Corrie Parnell was unamused at the tongue-in-cheek tactics deployed by parliament officials, which appear to have steeled demonstrators’ determination not to move.

“It certainly wouldn’t be tactics or methodologies that we would endorse, and it’s something we would have preferred did not occur,” Parnell told Radio New Zealand.

“But it did occur, so we have to deal with what we’ve got in front of us.”

Parnell urged protesters who arrived as part of a convoy last week to move vehicles that were still blocking streets.

He also defended the hands-off approach adopted by police since Thursday, when officers tried to forcibly clear the lawns, resulting in violent clashes and more than 120 arrests.

“This is not a matter of… arresting your way out of it,” he said, calling on protest organisers to negotiate in good faith.

While the original convoy was promoted as a demonstration against vaccine mandates, Ardern said it was clearly now being dominated by anti-vaccination activists.

“What we’ve seen out there seems to be much more anti-vaccination than anything else,” she told TV3.

“It’s included yelling abuse at people who are walking around with masks on… there are signs calling for the execution of politicians… we’ve seen some horrific behaviour down there.”

Ardern declined to comment on the musical anti-protest stunt, but opposition figures criticised parliamentary speaker Trevor Mallard for approving the action.

“Mallard’s actions are unedifying, embarrassing and ineffective,” National party lawmaker Chris Bishop tweeted.

Opposition ACT Party leader David Seymour accused Mallard of “acting like a kid” and fuelling a siege mentality among the protesters.

“Not only are Mallard’s antics immature, not only are they ineffective, they have made a serious situation much worse,” he said. 

“His petty behaviour has only encouraged the protesters further.”

In central Portugal, a sustained drought has revealed the ruins of a village that was totally submerged underwater when a large reservoir was created nearly 70 years ago.

“I have never seen that!” says Carlos Perdigao, 76, as he gazes at the ruined stone houses of Vilar which were swallowed up by the Zezere river when a dam was opened in 1954.

Vilar stands on the banks of the river, surrounded by cracked yellow earth, another sign of the ongoing dry spell during what is normally a rainy winter season, with the drought also hitting neighbouring Spain.

Weather services in both countries say it was the second driest January on record since the year 2000.

The current drought is extraordinary because of “its intensity, scale and length”, says climate scientist Ricardo Deus of Portugal’s meteorology agency IPMA.

Of Portugal’s 55 dams, 24 are only holding half of their water capacity, and five are below 20 per cent, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Earth observation service.

The  Algarve, Portugal’s southernmost province, and one of Europe’s top tourism destinations, is one of those most affected by the drought.

Meanwhile Spain only got a quarter of the precipitation it normally gets in January, said the AEMET weather service. 

The dry spell, which began at the end of 2021, is ruining crops, leaving farmers struggling to feed livestock and hampering hydroelectricity production.

– ‘It’s a disaster’ –

Earlier this month, Portugal ordered five of its hydropower dams to suspend water use for electricity production in order to prioritise human consumption.

Nearly 30 percent of Portugal’s electricity comes from hydropower dams.

And in Spain, Agriculture Minister Luis Planas on Tuesday said the government was “concerned” about the drought and would adopt the “necessary measures” depending on how the situation evolves.

Spain’s water reserves are currently at less than 45 percent of their capacity, officials say, with the southern Andalusia region and Catalonia in the northeast worst hit. 

Farmers in both countries are worried.

“Look! The grass isn’t growing to feed the animals,” says Antonio Estevao, a cheese producer who owns a herd of around 30 goats in Portela de Fojo Machio, a village in central Portugal near the town of Pampilhosa da Serra.

“If it doesn’t rain in the coming days, it’s going to be very complicated,” he sighs, gazing at his drought-stressed pastures.

The lack of rain is also jeopardising the town’s efforts to draw tourists inland with a floating pool structure set up for bathers in the Zezere river.

But the pool’s plastic lining lies slumped on the ground, with the drought forcing the river to recede.

“For us, it’s a disaster,” says the town’s mayor, Henrique Fernandes Marques.

The same area was badly hit by a wave of wildfires that raged through parched farmlands and forests in 2017, claiming over 100 lives.

– No end in sight –

More frequent and intense droughts are expected to put enormous strain on climate-vulnerable regions as temperatures rise, and will likely heighten the risk of related natural disasters such as wildfires, scientists say.

While the alternation between dry and wet years is normal in southern Europe, “we have observed a decline in the percentage of rainy years lately,” said Filipe Duarte Santos, an environment specialist at Lisbon University.

These droughts are “one of the most serious consequences of climate change,” he added.

“Until greenhouse gas emissions are drastically reduced, the problem will continue.”

The situation is not likely to improve in the coming weeks as forecasters expect rainfall in both countries to be below the seasonal average.

Faced with this reality, the Portuguese government on Thursday said it would boost its cooperation with Spain to fight the drought.

Star light, star bright, the James Webb Space Telescope has seen its first star (though it wasn’t quite tonight) — and even taken a selfie, NASA announced Friday.

The steps are part of the months-long process of aligning the observatory’s enormous golden mirror that astronomers hope will begin unraveling the mysteries of the early Universe by this summer.

The first picture sent back of the cosmos is far from stunning: 18 blurry white dots on a black background, all showing the same object: HD 84406 a bright, isolated star in the constellation Ursa Major.

But in fact it represents a major milestone. The 18 dots were captured by the primary mirror’s 18 individual segments — and the image is now the basis for aligning and focusing those hexagonal pieces.

The light bounced off the segments to Webb’s secondary mirror, a round object located at the end of long booms, and then to the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument — Webb’s main imaging device.

“The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of taking images and aligning the telescope are proceeding,” said Marcia Rieke, principal investigator for the NIRCam instrument and regents professor of astronomy, University of Arizona, in a statement.

“We were so happy to see that light make its way into NIRCam.”

The image capturing process began on February 2, with Webb pointing at different positions around the predicted location of the star.

Though Webb’s initial search covered an area of the sky about equal to the size of the full Moon, the dots were all located near the center portion, meaning the observatory is already relatively well positioned for final alignment.

To aid the process, the team also captured a “selfie” taken not through an externally mounted camera but through a special lens on board NIRCam. 

NASA had previously said a selfie wasn’t possible, so the news comes as a welcome bonus for space fans.

“I think pretty much the reaction was holy cow,” Lee Feinberg, Webb optical telescope element manager, told reporters in a call, explaining that the team wasn’t sure it was possible to obtain such an image using starlight alone.

The $10 billion observatory launched from French Guiana on December 25 and is now in an orbit that is aligned with the Earth’s around the Sun, one million miles (1.5 million kilometers away) from our planet, in a region of space called the second Lagrange point.

Webb will begin its science mission by summer, which includes using its high resolution instruments to peer back in time 13.5 billion years to the first generation of galaxies that formed after the Big Bang.

Visible and ultraviolet light emitted by the very first luminous objects has been stretched by the Universe’s expansion, and arrives today in the form of infrared, which Webb is equipped to detect with unprecedented clarity.

Its mission also includes the study of distant planets, known as exoplanets, to determine their origin, evolution and habitability.

Coca-Cola, under pressure from environmentalists over its packaging policies, has pledged to use reusable containers for at least 25 percent of its beverages by 2030.

The soda giant announced the pledge Thursday, saying it would be implemented globally through the glass and plastic bottles it sells to consumers and through the containers used at soda fountains and dispensers.

Refillable containers accounted for about 16 percent of total volumes in 2020, Coca-Cola said.

“Reusable packaging is among the most effective ways to reduce waste, use fewer resources and lower our carbon footprint in support of a circular economy,” said Ben Jordan, senior director of packaging and climate at Coca-Cola.

But the coalition #Breakfreefromplastics, which has rated the company the world’s top plastic polluter because of its historic use of single-use plastic containers, offered only measured praise.

“Coke’s announcement that they are expanding their reusable packaging target globally is definitely a step in the right direction,” said Emma Priestland, global corporate campaigns coordinator for the group. 

“The company’s string of broken promises in the past, however, compels us to welcome this announcement with some skepticism.”

The advocacy group As You Sow, which has drafted a shareholder proposal urging greater use of refillable bottles, praised the announcement.

Conrad MacKerron, the group’s senior vice president, said he was “pleased” by Coca-Cola’s commitment, adding that, “this action has the potential to substantially reduce the amount of single-use plastic bottles used, many of which end up as ocean plastic pollution.”

As You Sow said it will undertake additional analysis of the pledge to determine whether to withdraw its shareholder proposal.

A US court has struck down a Trump-era decision to remove federal protections for gray wolves across much of the country, in a move hailed by conservationists who said the listing was vital for the species’ recovery.

A 26-page ruling issued Thursday by Judge Jeffrey White in a case brought by wildlife groups found the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had erred in its October 2020 decision to remove the apex predators from the Endangered Species Act (ESA), where they were first listed in the 1970s.

Though the decision to delist gray wolves across most of the lower-48 states was taken by the administration of former president Donald Trump, Joe Biden’s government had continued to defend the move in court.

“It really is a win for wolves across the country,” Collette Adkins of the Center for Biological Diversity, told AFP.

“And I hope it finally convinces the Fish and Wildlife Service to really focus on recovering wolves instead of prematurely removing their protections.”

A quarter million gray wolves — long a symbol of the free spirit of the American wilderness — once roamed from coast to coast before the arrival of European settlers and eradication campaigns that endured into the 20th Century.

At the time of the decision to de-list them, the wolves had recovered from a low of 1,000 to around 6,000 — but hundreds were subsequently legally killed, either through hunting or conflicts with livestock operators.

In one egregious example, hunters in Wisconsin killed over 218 wolves in less than three days in February 2021, using packs of dogs, snares and leg-hold traps — well beyond the state’s own limit of killing 119 wolves.

The 2020 decision to remove the species’ protections had been opposed by 1.8 million Americans in public comments, as well as hundreds of scientists, veterinary professionals, and the iconic conservationist Jane Goodall.

Even the researchers commissioned by the FWS to carry out a review of the science found it did not support de-listing.

“Both under Democratic and Republican administrations, there has been this year-to-year desire to just be done recovering wolves,” said Adkins. 

“It’s been frustrating because the Endangered Species Act envisions a recovery of these animals so that they can fulfill their ecosystem role,” she added.

Research has confirmed the wolf’s importance in thinning over-browsing herds of elk, which in turn prevents destruction of habitat, for example. And a recent study from Wisconsin found that wolves kept deer away from roads, reducing collisions between deer and cars.

Adkins said she was hopeful of a change in policy after interior secretary Deb Haaland this week penned an op-ed in USA Today criticizing some western States in the northern Rocky mountain range, which have stepped up hunting campaigns in recent months.

The gray wolves of the northern Rockies haven’t been covered by the Endangered Species Act since a 2011 Congressional act, but Halaand wrote she could reinstate federal protections specifically for them if necessary.

As a pioneer in so-called attribution science — establishing a link between extreme weather and climate change — Friederike Otto is adamant that the rising toll of heatwaves and hurricanes cannot be explained by global warming alone.

AFP spoke to Otto, a physicist at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, ahead of the release of a major UN climate report on climate change impacts and how humanity can adapt to them.

Q. Is ‘natural disaster’ a contradiction in terms?

To talk about natural disasters the way that we usually do is not very helpful because it turns the attention away from the agency that we have as humans. 

You have to search very hard to find climate disasters that are purely natural. Even without climate change, if humans are involved, such disasters occur for the most part when vulnerability and exposure meet extreme weather events. Global warming just makes it worse.

Q. Can you give an example?

Last year there were major floods in western Germany which led to lots of lost lives, damaged property. 

Yes, climate change made the rainfall more intense. But even without global warming there would have been a huge, heavy rainfall event. And it would have landed in a densely populated geography where the rivers flood very easily and the water has nowhere to go. 

Q. Has attribution science led to blaming disasters just on climate change?

When we started to do attribution, everyone -– we, the media –- were excited to finally have an answer to the question: what is the role of climate change in these disasters? It was a breakthrough to be able to say an individual event was made, say, 10 times more likely.  

But if we ignore vulnerability, then we also ignore to a large degree what we can actually do to cope with and protect ourselves from climate change.

Q. How do we assess responsibility for a natural disaster?

The goal… is not so much to pinpoint fault or blame, but to understand the causes. The next step is to ask: what do we need to change? Who has the agency to do that? Then you can ask about responsibility. 

We know now that building mansions on the beach or cliffs of Malibu is probably a stupid idea. It is deliberately exposing oneself to risk. 

A 1,000-year-old city built on what has now become a flood plain is different. But we still have to adapt: educate people not to build there anymore, build in a way -– on stilts, for example — that can withstand floods. We also need better flood forecasting.  

Q. Is it also an equity issue?

It’s the vulnerable in society who suffer the greatest loss and damages. They live in houses that can’t withstand natural hazards; they live in floodplains; they can’t afford insurance. And it’s not just Global North vs Global South. Who’s still suffering today from the consequences of Hurricane Katrina, that devastated New Orleans in 2005? It’s not the rich and white. It’s the poor, and people of colour.

Q. What is ‘maladaptation’, and where does that fit in?

Just blaming climate for disasters can lead to maladaptation. If you think of climate disasters purely as a physical problem, you’re likely to favour a technical solution, like building a dam. That may result in less flooding in a small part of a city but have bad consequences along the rest of the river.  

If the measure you put in place to adapt makes things worse in the long run or for the majority of people, that’s maladaptation. Adaptation also means education, governance, and so on. But investing in those things is harder, and it can take decades to see results.

Q. Have disasters been incorrectly blamed on climate change?

The drought and famine in Madagascar. Climate change is really not playing a role there. The population is extremely dependent on rain-fed agriculture, but the rains are just naturally not terribly reliable. 

And there’s a very high rate of poverty. Outside disaster assistance has been very short-term. Lots of things that have gone really wrong on the vulnerability side. But climate change is not really a driver.

Q. The UN identified Madagascar at the world’s first climate-driven famine

Even without doing an attribution study, just from everything that we knew before from IPCC reports, it should have been clear that climate change is not the only, and not even a major driver of the drought in southern Madagascar.  

I can see why they do that -– to raise funds and so on. But it’s just not helpful to say, “everything is tickety-boo and then the big, bad climate change monster comes and eats us all”. That’s not how it works.