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Germán Poveda, who has participated in the reports of the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Climate Change, recently published a document in the company of other scientists in which he collects the evidence that hurricanes and storms will be increasingly intense in America Latin. The only way out, which they had already noticed years ago, is to make good adaptation plans, but few countries have them.
Colombian professor Germán Poveda needs no introduction. His name often appears in the extensive reports published since 1990 by the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Climate Change, known by its popular acronym IPCC. He is a civil engineer and PhD in Hydraulic Resources, and frequently appears in different settings trying to spread the long list of consequences of global warming. After the tragedy of Providencia, of La Dabeiba (Antioquia) and that of various points of Magdalena and Chocó, his reflection on what happened sums it up in one sentence: “This is tragic. I feel like a broken record. We are narrating chronicles of an announced disaster ”. (Read In Providencia, Hurricane Iota forced some inhabitants to take refuge in water cisterns)
What Poveda is referring to is that for several years science has sent clear signals to the rulers to prevent these events from having such tragic outcomes. “It seems that we are not learning anything from past experiences,” he says. What happened with the 2010-2011 La Niña phenomenon in Colombia is a good example.
“After those years,” he says, “measures were taken, but adaptation plans focused on reactive actions; not preventive. And while they looked great on paper, implementation has been very precarious. They have been solutions that are not cost effective, based on ‘hard adaptation’, that is, building more concrete infrastructure such as walls and levees. We forget the ‘soft adaptation’ and green, which are strategies designed with respect for nature. They have been very small solutions for a deep structural problem ”.
For Poveda that has created difficulties that were in evidence in a weekend in which luck was not on the Colombian side. The ingredients of a “perfect storm” were mixed: the usual rainy season; the La Niña phenomenon, which exacerbates rainfall; and the passage of Hurricane Iota through Colombia in a year that now holds the record for the most tropical cyclones in the Atlantic: 30.
Poveda, precisely, had published a document last June in which he warned of the consequences that hurricanes could generate. The text is part of the report Adaptation to the risks of climate change in Ibero-American countries, a book of more than 750 pages in which a large group of scientists summarized the available evidence and evaluated some countries’ adaptation plans to climate change from Latin America, in addition to Spain, Portugal and Andorra. Poveda was in charge of the “Storms and Hurricanes” section, together with Jorge Amador (Costa Rica), Tercio Ambrizzi (Brazil), Juan Bazo (Peru), Eduardo Robelo-González (Mexico), José Rubiera (Cuba), and Sergio M. Vicente-Serrano (Spain).
The consequences of not having adaptation plans
While it is true that it is still difficult to predict well in advance the trajectory of hurricanes and the precise moment when they will be most intense, there is one point that scientists have been making year after year: climate change will intensify the highest category (3, 4 and 5) and will generate increasingly extreme storms. But there is a way to avoid catastrophes like those in Providencia: invest in adaptation plans.
It is difficult to summarize everything that one of these strategies covers, but the following graphic summarizes the main points you should have:
When evaluating the situation of these plans in the countries of Latin America, Poveda and his colleagues found very dissimilar things. “The adaptation plans, policies and actions in the countries of the Ibero-American Network of Climate Change Offices show great disparity in terms of their content and effective implementation,” they wrote. “It seems necessary to establish precise action schedules with binding commitments for all countries in the region.”
The document also pointed out the lag in the region. “Little progress has been made in terms of adaptation programs explicitly based on the three adaptation approaches: 1, community-based adaptation; 2, ecosystem-based adaptation, which integrates the use of biodiversity and ecosystem services; 3, adaptation based on infrastructure ”.
“A strong weakness is noted in most countries related to the lack of investment in scientific research and technological capabilities for monitoring and forecasting intense storms and hurricanes,” the authors wrote.
That represents a huge problem in the region for a simple reason. As pointed out in the document, this part of the continent has been identified as “very vulnerable” to the impacts of global warming. Central America, especially, will be in serious trouble. “It is the second region of the planet most vulnerable to climatic risks.”
A compendium of figures support their arguments: between 1970 and 2010, 70 natural disasters of climatological origin occurred in the region. 31 were presented in Central America and Mexico; 16 in South America and 23 in the Caribbean. Of these, 40 were caused by storms and hurricanes (another 14 by the El Niño phenomenon, and three by La Niña).
The consequences have been devastating. Disasters generated by hurricanes and storms caused 50.2% of deaths, 41.29% of damages and 38.4% of total losses. They were also responsible for 37.3% of the population affected by weather disasters.
The price, if you want to analyze it in monetary terms, has many zeros: “The costs of the damage and losses caused by these disasters of climatic origin were estimated at US $ 106,427 million, of which US $ 21,012 million correspond to hurricanes and storms in the Caribbean”.
The best example of the changes that climate change has brought when talking about hurricanes was Hurricane Maria in 2017. It produced more intense rains than 129 other hurricanes in the Caribbean. Iota also seems to be a good example. “It has been a historic hurricane due to its speed of development and the impact it has had. We were at the edge of the eye of the hurricane. That is why it was so devastating, because of the speed of evolution ”, Yolanda González, director of Ideam, said yesterday.
By not taking forceful measures, Latin American countries are exposing themselves to a very serious problem. The list of threats from hurricanes in the region is long: very intense and prolonged storms, storm surges and extreme winds, loss of human life, more climate refugees, destruction of infrastructure, paralysis in the provision of essential public services, contamination of bodies of water, destruction of crops and animal lives, and intensification of various types of diseases transmitted by vectors and rodents and destruction of cultural heritage. There may also be loss of coral reefs and mangroves, and destruction of marine biodiversity.
It should also be added that there are special conditions of vulnerability in Latin America that intensify the risks of hurricanes. The disorderly settlement of coastal areas; accelerated urbanization and uncontrolled occupation of riverbeds; inequality and marginality; the deforestation of 96 million hectares of forests in the last 15 years; poor governance and a low culture of insurance against risks are some of the factors mentioned.
The cost, in economic terms, of not establishing adaptation plans, then, will be very high. Poveda and his group summarize it with a figure: “the impacts of climate change in the face of an increase of 2.5 ° C in Latin America and the Caribbean could cost between 1.5% and 4.3% of GDP, while the costs of adaptation would not exceed 0.5% of regional GDP ”.
Have Colombia and the coastal territories implemented any of these measures so that a tragedy like that of Providencia does not happen again? Poveda prefers to be prudent, but believes that very few have been implemented. “We should learn from Cuba, which is by far the country that has the best early warning and adaptation system,” he says. “We have a lot to do in terms of prevention. We have to stop being a two-headed country: make very nice plans on paper, but do the opposite in speech ”.
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