John Tarrant: How climate change will affect the Commonwealth
Few people now underestimate the significance of climate change. Its impact will be serious for all, and totally catastrophic for some countries in the Commonwealth. The timescales are getting shorter and the predicted changes more severe.
A very small and diminishing minority continues to question the role of human influence, particularly the use of fossil fuels. Some still claim that other natural mechanisms are forcing climate change as they have done at many times in the earth's history.
The work of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the single largest source of scientific analysis. Commonwealth universities have played a very significant part in the work of the panel and its working groups. Of the 3,185 contributors and reviewers to this huge volume of work, 917 have university addresses and 404 of these come from Commonwealth universities. Commonwealth universities - many of them members of the Association of Commonwealth Universities - are therefore heavily engaged with the process. And these figures underestimate the university contribution - many of the scientists are listed with research institute addresses and many of these are either within or strongly associated with universities.
The great majority of scientists are agreed both that mankind is the major cause of recent changes and that these changes are of a greater magnitude and happening faster than they have in the past. But, whatever the arguments about causes, almost no one denies that the climate is changing.
Research on climate change divides into three: the mechanisms, the impacts, and preventing or slowing the changes. Relatively little has been done on strategies for coping with the changes that almost everyone now accepts are inevitable.
Similarly, most of the policy efforts, at national and international levels, concentrate on prevention through limiting carbon emissions.
As climate change will affect every aspect of our lives, the great diversity of university research means that they are particularly significant in the sub-group study of impacts with 41% of the contributors. The third and latest IPCC report makes gloomy reading. The rapid economic growth of the Chinese and Indian economies means that significant global warming is now more or less inevitable. Urgent action is needed but it can probably do no more than slow the rate of warming.
Many of the measures advocated in the developed economies to reduce carbon emissions seem to be designed more to reassure people that they are doing something to help rather than to make a significant contribution on a world scale.
In addition, many of the strategies to reduce carbon emissions have their own negative impacts and opponents. Nuclear power is expensive, requires very large investment and we still have no long-term solution to disposal of the waste.
The increased use of biofuels as substitutes for fossil fuels is one of the contributors to rapidly rising food prices, as biofuel crops displace the growing of grain and other food crops. Even carbon offsetting has been criticised for being little more than a way to salve the conscience of international air travellers.
Further research on the mechanisms and impacts of climate change continues to be essential, as are policies to reduce global warming. But it is now time to both increase our university research effort and direct our national and international policies at coping with the warming that almost all scientists suggest is inevitable.
One consequence of global warming that will direct impact on a number of Commonwealth member states is sea-level rise. Just how are low-lying countries of the Commonwealth able to cope with this? What will we be able to do to help the inhabitants of the Maldives and Bangladesh as their countries are inundated?
Seasonal flooding produced by monsoon rains and occasional events like the 2004 tsunami and Cyclone Nargis can be dealt with, locally catastrophic though they may be. We are now talking about a whole new scale of problem.
Most modelling of climate change predicts increased drought conditions for the majority of Africa. Many countries are hardly coping with the present conditions. Any worsening threatens major disaster. We do not seem to have answers.
Yet, the great majority of national and international efforts are directed at reducing carbon emissions, but very little is said about either the inevitability of the warming or how the world might find ways of living with it. Governments need to be more honest about the inevitability of a warmer world and start to consider how we might cope.
Over the last 30 years, the study of the mechanisms of climate change, the scale of the likely changes and the impacts of those changes have been led by our universities. Universities of the Commonwealth will need to lead again as we try to understand how we might deal with the consequences of global warming.
· Prof John Tarrant is secretary general of the Association of Commonwealth Universities
· This article was amended on Thursday June 12 2008. Due to an editing error, a crucial word was missing from this article. We said: 'Urgent action is needed but it can probably do more than slow the rate of warming'. We meant to say 'can probably do no more than slow the rate of warming'. This has been corrected. Also, homophone corner: climate change will affect, not effect, our lives. This has been corrected.