2014•10•07     Bonn     New Scientist

We still cannot predict exactly how climate change will affect each part of the world, but the people on the front lines are showing others how to adapt

IT IS hard to prepare for a disaster, but harder still to prepare for a disaster that you can’t identify. Yet that is the quandary facing many nations, which still don’t know how climate change will affect them – even though it is already happening. That means many communities must prepare for the unknown.

We are running out of time to gather scientific evidence, says Koko Warner of the United Nations University (UNU) in Bonn, Germany. It is clear that climate change is happening, driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases, and its impacts will be felt around the world. But it has proved difficult to predict how events like floods and droughts will change in specific areas over the coming decades.

The second instalment of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report came out on Monday (see “World must adapt to unknown climate future, says IPCC”). In earlier IPCC reports, part two made regional predictions, to tell communities what will happen around them. But this year’s report instead focuses on how people are, and should be, adapting to climate change.

“We cannot wait for climatologists to establish exactly what role climate change played in different events,” says Kees van der Geest, also at UNU. “We want to build societies that are more protected against possible deterioration. We want to know why some things work, what doesn’t work well, how we can improve, how we can make our society better prepared.”

Read the interview online here