FROM Britain to the Balkans to Indonesia, the world is currently experiencing exceptional weather conditions. While Southeastern Europe is wilting under unprecedented high temperatures, in the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and in large areas on the UK, the problem is a deluge of rain that has brought catastrophic flooding.
In England some areas have received a month’s summer rainfall in just a few hours. Thousands of homes have been flooded, water and electricity supplies have been cut as treatment works and substations were inundated. The devastating impact of these extraordinary levels of rainfall have been exacerbated by the fact that in the last 30 years, planners have permitted building of houses and commercial plants on flood plains that once absorbed and drained away heavy rain. It has been calculated that fully twenty percent of British housing is now on a flood plain.
Yesterday scientists reported that there might actually be whole towns and villages in the UK that have to be abandoned permanently because of the certainty of regular floods. Tens of thousands of Britons face the prospect of finding their homes uninsurable and worse unsaleable because they have been built in the wrong place.
The woes of these people are as nothing however compared to the devastation facing low-lying island nations, particularly in the Pacific who will see the total disappearance of their countries thanks to rising sea levels.
And yet to be seriously contemplated is the almost certain impact of higher seas on many of the world’s great cities, the majority of which is located on coastal plains at the mouths of rivers. With their deep metro systems and sophisticated but vulnerable infrastructure, such major conurbations as New York, Shanghai, London and Rotterdam are at considerable risk.
Whatever its causes, the reality of climatic change is now here for all to see. The polar ice caps are melting, tropical storms growing in intensity, and rainfall and searing sunshine increasing.
There are two principal responses required to tackle what is happening. The first and most obvious is for a coordinated effort to do what can be done to diminish the human impact on climate change. This means conservation coupled with the application of technology to limit the production of carbon pollution. Flue cleaning equipment may be expensive in the short-term but its long-term benefits cannot be in doubt. Not only must the carbon-clean up technology be shared among countries but so too must the cost of its installation.
The second response is to prepare for the effects of inevitable climate change. Each country will understandably want to look to its own protection first, say in flood defense schemes. But this would be wrong. Weather is no respecter of national borders. The strongest defenses can be mounted region by region - reforestation in Nepal will for instance benefit Bangladesh as well as the Nepalis. Stopping flooding half way down the Rhine will merely move the disaster further down.
The big message is that we are all in this crisis together and only by working together can we hope to mitigate its impact.
