A FOLLOW-UP TO THE UNBREAKABLE REPORT
New publication by @GFDRR "Building back better: achieving resilience through stronger, faster, and more inclusive post-disaster reconstruction" a lot of interesting data and insights to many countries and the private sector Read More
The Great Change: Breathing Highways and Sponge Cities
During the 20th Century, the rate of global warming was twice as fast in Taiwan (1.7°C) as for the world as a whole (0.74°C). Partly as a result, the number of days with rainfall decreased dramatically and typhoons gained strength. In 2009, Typhoon Morakot dropped over 1,000 mm (39.4 inches) in a single day and caused the loss of 699 lives. A massive mudslide wiped out Xiaolin Village and 474 people were buried alive. In 2015, Typhoon Soudelor left similar damage. It took months to repair the roads.
Then Taiwan and East China were struck by Dujuan, known in the Philippines as Typhoon Jenny, a killer storm and the thirteenth typhoon of the 2015 Pacific typhoon season. Eight months later, Nepartak became the third most intense tropical cyclone on record with 114 deaths and more than $1.5 billion damage in Taiwan and East China. September brought Meranti, a super typhoon and the strongest ever to make landfall in China in more than 1000 years of records. Meranti’s peak sustained winds tied the record set by Haiyan in 2013, 195 mph (315 km/h), comparable to a tornado, or a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. In Taiwan, nearly 1 million households lost power and 720,000 lost water supplies. Flooding in Zhejiang took 902 homes and affected 1.5 million people.
Between those punctuations, the erratic weather brought long droughts. New Taipei City had to enforce water restrictions when the Shihmen reservoir went dry in April. All cities along coasts or rivers have engineered means to remove excess water and to prevent flooding. Few have the means to sustain themselves in severe droughts. Read More
Samuel walks through through the ruins of his family home with his father Phillip, on March 16, 2015 in Port Vila, Vanuatu.
The president of the Seychelles on Monday called on the international community to "wake up" to climate change after a massive tropical cyclone devastated the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu.
"The cyclone, which has just struck Vanuatu — a sister Small Island State — with such catastrophic effects and the tragic loss of lives is a clear manifestation of climate change, which some persist to deny," Seychelles President James Michel said in a statement.
"Today it is the South Pacific, tomorrow it could be us," he added.
His comments echoed those of Vanuatu President Baldwin Lonsdale. "Climate change is contributing to the disaster in Vanuatu," he said Monday, as relief agencies surveyed the scale of damage caused by Super Cyclone Pam.
Reports from the outer islands of Vanuatu on Monday painted a picture of utter destruction after the monster storm tore through the South Pacific island nation, flattening buildings and killing at least 24 people.
Disaster management officials and relief workers were struggling to establish contact with the islands that bore the brunt of Cyclone Pam’s winds of more than 185 mph, which destroyed homes, smashed boats and washed away roads and bridges as it struck late on Friday and into Saturday.
The official toll of 24 killed looked certain to rise as reports began to trickle from the hardest hit parts of the scattered archipelago.
"Many of the buildings and houses have been completely destroyed," Lonsdale told Reuters. "More than 90 percent of the buildings have been destroyed."
President James Michel blames devastating Cyclone Pam on global warming, issues warning to world
Military flights from New Zealand and Australia were bringing in water, sanitation kits, medicines and temporary shelters for the estimated 10,000 made homeless on the main island, with supplies being unloaded late into the evening at the airport. France and the United States were also sending aid.
Commercial flights resumed on Monday, bringing in more aid and taking out tourists.
Formerly known as the New Hebrides, Vanuatu is a sprawling cluster of more than 80 islands home to 260,000 people, about 1,250 miles northeast of the Australian city of Brisbane.
Perched on the geologically active Ring of Fire, Vanuatu of the world’s poorest nations suffers from frequent earthquakes and tsunamis and has several active volcanoes, in addition to threats from storms and rising sea levels.
Low-lying island nations, some of which are little more than three feet above sea level, are regarded as some of the most vulnerable to rising seas blamed on climate change.
"When will the international community wake up to reality and put our efforts and resources to get a binding agreement to reduce global warming and sustain the survival of our planet?" Michel said.
In November last year, Michel urged the planet’s small island nations to unite for an unprecedented campaign against climate change or else be treated as global "bystanders" and be allowed to drown. The Alliance of Small Island States, a group of 44 coastal and low-lying countries, repeated that goal and presented measures to keep the global temperature from rising even further at the climate change summit in Lima, Peru in December. More
As Typhoon Hagupit hits the Philippines, one of the biggest peacetime evacuations in history has been launched to prevent a repeat of the massive loss of life which devastated communities when Super Typhoon Haiyan hit the same area just over a year ago.
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| Typhoon Hagupit |
“One of the biggest evacuations in peacetime” strikes a sickening chord. Is this peacetime or are we at war with nature?
I was about to head to Lima, when I got a call to come to the Philippines to support our office and its work around Typhoon Hagupit (which means lash). In Lima another round of the UN climate talks are underway to negotiate a global treaty to prevent catastrophic climate change. A truce of sorts with nature.
But these negotiations have been going on far too long, with insufficient urgency and too much behind the scenes, and not so much behind the scenes, interference from the fossil fuel lobby.
This year, like last year and the year before these negotiations take place against a devastating backdrop of a so-called ‘extreme weather event’, something that climate scientists have been warning us about if we don’t take urgent action.
Tragically, we are not taking urgent action. Nature does not negotiate, it responds to our intransigence. For the people of the Philippines, and in many other parts of the world, climate change is already a catastrophe.
Only one year ago, Super Typhoon Haiyan killed thousands, destroyed communities and caused billions of dollars in damage. Many survivors who are still displaced have this week had to evacuate the tents they have been living in as Typhoon Hagupit carves a path across the country as I write.
It’s too early to assess the impact so far—we are all hoping early indications will spare the Philippines of the same pain that was experienced after Haiyan.
Here in Manila, we prepare to travel to the impacted areas in the wake of Typhoon Hagupit, or Ruby, as it has been named. We will offer what minor assistance we can.
We will stand in solidarity with the Filipino people and we will call out those who are responsible for climate change, those who are responsible for the devastation and who should be helping pay for the clean up and for adaptation to a world in which our weather is an increasing source of mass destruction.
With heavy hearts we prepare to bear witness. We challenge those in Lima to turn their attention from the lethargy and process of the negotiations and pay attention to what is happening in the real world.
We call on them to understand that climate change is not a future threat to be negotiated but a clear and present danger that requires urgent action now!
Each year, the people of the Philippines learn the hard way what inaction on emissions mean. They might be slightly better prepared and more resilient, but they are also rightly more aghast that each year—at the same time—the climate meetings seem to continue in a vacuum, not prepared to take meaningful action, not able to respond to the urgency of our time and not holding accountable the Big Polluters that are causing the climate to change with ferocious pace.
Before leaving for Manila I also received a message from Yeb Saño, climate commissioner for the Philippines: “I hope you can join us as we bear witness to the impact of this new super typhoon. Your help would be very valuable in delivering a message to Lima loud and clear.”
Yeb was the Filipino chief negotiator for three years at the UN climate talks and recently visited the Arctic on a Greenpeace ship to witness the Arctic sea ice minimum. Two years ago in Doha, as Typhoon Pablo took the lives of many he broke through the normally reserved language of dispassionate diplomacy that dominates UN climate treaty talks:
“Please … let 2012 be remembered as the year the world found the courage to … take responsibility for the future we want. I ask of all of us here, if not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?”
I am joining Greenpeace Philippines and Yeb to visit the worst hit areas, document the devastation and send a clear message from climate change ground zero to Lima and the rest of the world that the ones that are responsible for the majority of emissions will be held accountable by the communities that are suffering the impacts of extreme weather events linked to climate change.
We will call on the heads of the fossil fuel companies who are culpable for the unfolding tragedy to examine their consciences and accept their historic responsibility. They say the truth is the first casualty of war, in this war against nature, the truth of climate science is unquestionable.
Please join us. Please add your voice by signing our petition calling on Big Polluters to be held legally and morally accountable for climate damages. After signing the petition you will be redirected to a site where you can make a donation to the relief efforts of partner organizations. More
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Environmentalist David Suzuki has attacked the Coalition’s climate change policies, calling for a legal penalty to be imposed for “wilful blindness” in leaders who commit the “crime” of ignoring climate change.
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| David Suziki |
Suzuki, a Canadian academic visiting Australia, told the ABC’s Q&A on Monday night that the government’s decision to disband The Climate Commission – which has since been resurrected as a privately funded body – was “very dangerous”.
“Human beings have become so powerful that we are altering the physical, chemical and biological properties of the Earth on a global scale,” he said. “In a time when we have become so powerful, how are we best making decisions for the future? I would think the best source of advice would be science.
“If we don’t listen to science, what are we going to turn to – the Bible? the Qur’an? An advertising agency? Australians are at a very critical time. You had a mechanism where science could be provided, with no commitment one way or the other, so that you could make up your own mind. By shutting that down, what does that tell you?
“I think it’s a crazy, dangerous situation if we’re going to marginalise science in favour of political priorities. I think that’s very, very dangerous.”
Suzuki said he didn’t regret comments made to the University of NSW on Saturday which accused the prime minister, Tony Abbott, of “criminal negligence” over his policies, which include the dismantling of the carbon price and scrapping various climate change agencies associated with it.
“I don’t think I went too far – what we are seeing is a crime against future generations,” he said. “There ought to be a legal position on intergenerational crime. If you stand out for a role of leadership and ignore the science on climate change, I think that’s wilful blindness.”
In Suzuki’s UNSW speech he also attacked “outrageously rich” people, such as mining magnate Gina Rinehart, for helping create a “campaign of confusion” over climate change.
“Environmentalism is a way of seeing our place within the biosphere,” he said. “That’s what the battles were fought over. The barbarians – that is, many of the politicians and corporate executives that environmentalists have been fighting all these years – are driven by a totally different set of values – by the drive for profit, for growth and for power.”
He added that Australians should be “at the ramparts” over climate change because of the impact it is already having in terms of drought and damage to the Great Barrier Reef.
“Mother Earth is giving you the signals in Australia, loud and clear,” he said. More
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