Scenarios as the basis for assessment of mitigation and adaptation

The possibilities and need for adaptation and mitigation depends on uncertain future developments with respect to socio-economic factors and the climate system. Scenarios are used to explore the impacts of different strategies under uncertainty. In this chapter, some scenarios are presented that are used in the ADAM project for this purpose. One scenario explores developments with no mitigation, and thus with high temperature increase and high reliance on adaptation (leading to 4oC increase by 2100 compared to pre-industrial levels). A second scenario explores an ambitious mitigation strategy (leading to 2oC increase by 2100 compared to pre-industrial levels). In the latter scenario, stringent mitigation strategies effectively reduces the risks of climate change, but based on uncertainties in the climate system a temperature increase of 3oC or more cannot be excluded. The analysis shows that, in many cases, adaptation and mitigation are not trade-offs but supplements. For example, the number of people exposed to increased water resource stress due to climate change can be substantially reduced in the mitigation scenario, but even then adaptation will be required for the remaining large numbers of people exposed to increased stress. Another example is sea level rise, for which adaptation is more cost-effective than mitigation, but mitigation can help reduce damages and the cost of adaptation. For agriculture, finally, only the scenario based on a combination of adaptation and mitigation is able to avoid serious climate change impacts

Adaptation to Climate Change: Why is it Needed and How Can it be Implemented?

This is the 3rd study to be published in the CEPS Policy Brief series from ongoing research being carried out for the EU-funded ADAM project (ADaptation And Mitigation strategies: supporting European climate policy). Following an introduction to the aims and objectives of the ADAM project, section 2 sets out the rationales for public policy related to adaptation to the impacts of climatic change in the EU. Section 3 provides evidence from a number of stakeholders and sketches the perception of various actors towards the role of European adaptation policies and climate proofing of sectoral policies. Section 4 on the economics of adaptation argues that the economic impacts of climate change will mainly be reduced by private and autonomous response, while principal challenges are with adaptation needs that require collective action and public engagement, including public finance. Section 5 assesses monetary and socioeconomic risks from extreme weather events in Europe and points to the evidence of rising losses due to weather extremes whilst important knowledge gaps remain to project future risks. And the final section (6) deals with different concepts of uncertainties surrounding climate change and climate variability, and argues for adaptive measures to be sufficiently flexible to allow recalibration as uncertainties are reduced with time

Adaptation to Climate Change in the Transport Sector

In this study, we review the literature on climate change adaptation measures in the transport sector. Many of the measures proposed are rather conceptual and far from concrete, probably due to the fact that climate change effects on transport are either unknown or highly uncertain. Given the limited information on the potential magnitude of climate damages and the various uncertainties involved, postponement of adaptation investments may well be the most sensible strategy at the moment, especially when investments are substantial and irreversible. Furthermore, monitoring of relevant climatic changes and ongoing research into climate change effects are important elements of a pro-active adaptation strategy. Irreversible decisions, such as the ones on spatial organization, likely require a more active strategy, e.g. in the form of making spatial reservations. We further discuss the interdependency between optimal mitigation and adaptation, an issue that is often overlooked in the literature. Finally, most operators and governmental bodies are not used to dealing with risk and uncertainty, and generally base their decisions on single risk values only, likely leading to under- or overinvestment. We discuss several relevant topics in this area and highlight methods that can be used to better deal with these issues. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Differences in the dynamics of community disaster resilience across the globe

The consideration of disaster resilience as a multidimensional concept provides a viable and promising way forward for reducing risk and minimizing impacts today and in the future. What is missing is the understanding of the actual dynamics of resilience over time based on empirical evidence. This empirical understanding requires a consistent measure of resilience. To that end, a Technical Resilience Grading Standard for community flood resilience, was applied in a longitudinal study from 2016 to 2018 in 68 communities across the globe. We analyse the dynamics of disaster resilience using an advanced boosted regression tree modelling framework. The main outcome of our analysis is twofold: first, we found empirical evidence that the dynamics of resilience build on a typology of communities and that different community clusters experience different dynamics; and second, the dynamics of resilience follows transitional behaviour rather than a linear or continuous process. These are empirical insights that can provide ways forward, theoretically as well as practically, in the understanding of resilience as well as in regard to effective policy guidance to enhance disaster resilience

Lessons Learned from Measuring Flood Resilience

The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (ZFRA) has identified the measurement of resilience as a valuable ingredient in building community flood resilience. Measuring resilience is particularly challenging because it is an invisible or latent characteristic of a community until a flood occurs. The Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) framework measures “sources of resilience” before a flood happens and looks at the post-flood impacts afterwards. The FRMC is built around the notion of five types of capital (the 5Cs: human, social, physical, natural, and financial capital) and the 4Rs of a resilient system (robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity). The sources of resilience are graded based on Zurich’s Risk Engineering Technical Grading Standard. Results are displayed according to the 5Cs and 4Rs, the disaster risk management (DRM) cycle, themes and context level, to give the approach further flexibility and accessibility. In the first application phase (2013-2018), we measured flood resilience in 118 communities across nine countries, building on responses at household and community levels. Continuing this endeavor in Phase II (2018 – 2023) will allow us to enrich the understanding of community flood resilience and to extend this unique data set. We find that at the community level, the FRMC enables users to track community progress on resilience over time in a standardized way. It thus provides vital information for the decision-making process in terms of prioritizing the resilience-building measures most needed by the community. At community and higher decision-making levels, measuring resilience also provides a basis for improving the design of innovative investment programs to strengthen disaster resilience. By exploring data across multiple communities (facing different flood types and with very different socioeconomic and political contexts), we can generate evidence with respect to which characteristics contribute most to community disaster resilience before an event strikes. This contributes to meeting the challenge of demonstrating that the work we do has the desired impact – that it actually builds resilience. No general measurement framework for disaster resilience has been empirically verified yet , but the FRMC framework has been developed to eventually generate the data needed to demonstrate empirically which ex-ante measures are most effective for communities. Our findings suggest that stronger interactions between community functions induce co-benefits among the five capitals, thus providing evidence for a virtuous cycle type effect where higher resilient capacity in one capital fosters the community’s capacity for resilience in other capitals

Supporting Climate Risk Management at Scale. Insights from the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance Partnership Model Applied in Peru & Nepal

There has been increasing interest in the potential of effective science-society partnership models for identifying and implementing options that manage critical disaster risks “on the ground.” This particularly holds true for debate around Loss and Damage. Few documented precedents and little documented experience exists, however, for such models of engagement. How to organise such partnerships? What are learnings from existing activities and how can these be upscaled? We report on one such partnership, the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, a multi-actor partnership launched in 2013 to enhance communities’ resilience to flooding at local to global scales. The program brings together the skills and expertise of NGOs, the private sector and research institutions in order to induce transformational change for managing flood risks. Working in a number of countries facing different challenges and opportunities the program uses a participatory and iterative approach to develop sustainable portfolios of interventions that tackle both flood risk and development objectives in synergy. We focus our examination on two cases of Alliance engagement, where livelihoods are particularly being eroded by flood risk, including actual and potential contributions by climate change: (i) in the Karnali river basin in West Nepal, communities are facing rapid on-set flash floods during the monsoon season; (ii) in the Rimac basin in Central Peru communities are exposed to riverine flooding amplified by El Niño episodes. We show how different tools and methods can be co-generated and used at different learning stages and across temporal and agency scales by researchers and practitioners. Seamless integration is neither possible, nor desirable, and in many instances, an adaptive management approach through, what we call, a Shared Resilience Learning Dialogue, can provide the boundary process that connects the different analytical elements developed and particularly links those up with community-led processes. Our critical examination of the experience from the Alliance leads into suggestions for identifying novel funding and support models involving NGOs, researchers and the private sector working side by side with public sector institutions to deliver community level support for managing risks that may go “beyond adaptation.

Multidimensional Atomic Force Microscopy: A Versatile Novel Technology for Nanopharmacology Research

Nanotechnology is giving us a glimpse into a nascent field of nanopharmacology that deals with pharmacological phenomena at molecular scale. This review presents our perspective on the use of scanning probe microscopy techniques with special emphasis to multidimensional atomic force microscopy (m-AFM) to explore this new field with a particular emphasis to define targets, design therapeutics, and track outcomes of molecular-scale pharmacological interactions. The approach will be to first discuss operating principles of m-AFM and provide representative examples of studies to understand human health and disease at the molecular level and then to address different strategies in defining target macromolecules, screening potential drug candidates, developing and characterizing of drug delivery systems, and monitoring target–drug interactions. Finally, we will discuss some future directions including AFM tip-based parallel sensors integrated with other high-throughput technologies which could be a powerful platform for drug discovery