What is the value of attributing extreme events to climate change?
- Loss and Damages (L&D) have earned its place in climate talks under the U.N Framework Convention on Climate Change in the last decade.
Key highlights
- Economically developing countries, in particular those that are ‘particularly vulnerable’, have demanded the L&D fund to compensate for the havoc of climate change within their borders.
- The criteria by which ‘particularly vulnerable’ countries are to be identified are crucial.
- The developed world is opposed to the idea of being held legally accountable in court for any extreme events since that could open a floodgate of lawsuits.
- Against this background, our understanding of whether attribution reports can actually hold up in court as evidence of culpability is very important.
Attribution of Asian heatwaves
- A team of climate scientists called World Weather Attribution (WWA) reported that heat waves across Asia, from the west to the southeast, had been rendered nearly 45-times more likely by climate change
- The climate scientists contrasted the conditions in which the heatwaves occurred against a counterfactual world in which climate change did not happen.
- The researchers run models for the planet’s climate without increasing greenhouse gas emissions and other anthropogenic forces.
- Thus, climate scientists tried to address these challenges in the process of assigning probability changes to events in the past.
- When evaluating the Asian heatwaves, the WWA scientists used regional scales and different definitions for different regions.
- Another significant challenge in attribution exercises, is how scientists choose the extreme events for which they will perform attribution exercises.
- Governments need to be able to respond to such decisions, and attribution science should in turn, be sufficiently reliable.
Extreme events and human action
- The actual impacts of extreme events depend not only on the hazard or the extreme event but also on the vulnerability and the exposure of the population affected.
- Similarly, the financial consequences are also affected by multiple factors.
- Considering all these challenges, we must take stock of the international financial aspects of adaptation, mitigation, and L&D.
- In particular, governments should consider an agreement on historical responsibilities to fund developing countries, close adaptation gaps, build adaptation capacity, and finance mitigation for the global good.
- In the real world, we need a cost-benefit analysis based on a clear role for attribution in the overall climate action landscape.