Just before the containers closed off the capital city for the Azadi March that challenged the PML(N) government, a very important conference took place in Islamabad to highlight the findings of the latest scientific report on climate change released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s voice on climate science.

LEAD-Pakistan, who had organised the event, invited a few of the lead authors of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), released in 2013/14 and an author of an earlier IPCC report, Dr Adil Najam, who is also the Chairman of LEAD-Pakistan’s Board of Governors. Dr Najam gave the keynote address, pointing out that how to deal with climate change is no longer a scientific question but a political question. “The IPCC has delivered, the science has delivered, but policy makers have not delivered”.

Discussing the latest three-part report by the IPCC, Dr Najam explained, it made clear that “climate change is real, it’s here, it’s bad and it’s getting worse”. He further said that climate change is “unfair, it’s ours, it’s happening today and it changes everything”. We as a planet have failed to mitigate and those who need to adapt the most are today the least capable (often the poorest). Countries like Pakistan ought to make adaptation a development issue, not a fringe issue to be dealt with by a ‘climate change division’. According to Dr Najam, “It is necessary, it is doable, it’s affordable and it’s not getting done”.

He was pessimistic about the outcome of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which has still not come up with a global agreement to curb carbon emissions and hence control global warming. “The UNFCCC has become a joke”, he pointed out.

Climate change is a reality, but dealing with it is just not a priority

In the meantime the science on climate change has become clearer. “The debate is in fact over … the first paper on climate change came out in 1932 and since then there have been over 14,000 scientific papers supporting climate change and only 24 papers against it.” Because the world is not doing anything about climate change, the impact is getting worse. “It has now become a development management problem.”

In response to Dr Najam’s keynote address, Dr Joyashree Roy from India, a lead author who has contributed to Working Group III’s report on mitigation on “Emission Trends and Opportunities for Low Carbon Development”, pointed out that: “there is too much importance on policy makers. If they won’t do anything, then the world will take action. Let’s take a more positive view.” In her view, the world is already acting under pressure from scientists. “Our responsibility is to find ways to make people act … I am optimistic that we can turn things around. Look at the manufacturing sector; there is recycling and material exchange which can all reduce emissions. Then there are low energy building codes; we can retrofit buildings for 50 to 90pc energy reduction. Then there are lifestyle changes, and low carbon infrastructure.” In her view, the hope does not necessarily lie in the UNFCCC treaty being signed, but “Let’s see how we can do things better”. Since every country has its own development pathway it can decide whether to invest in the energy and supply sector or agriculture or forestry to pursue a low carbon future.

Dr Muhammad Mohsin Iqbal from the Global Change Impact Study Centre in Islamabad is the only author from Pakistan to contribute to AR5 in the “Food Security and Food Production Systems” chapter of the Working Group II report. He summarised that the “AR5 projects that climate change will continue under a range of scenario over the 21st century. If emissions continue to rise at the present levels, the global average temperature will be 2.6-4.8 degrees Celsius higher than at present.

“Climate change will cause decline in crop yields in some parts of the world. In Southeast Asia, as well as in Pakistan, decreases in yields will be in the range of 18-32pc by 2080s. Increased hunger and malnutrition combined with population growth and increase per capita food demand pose challenges to meet this demand at a time when emissions are increasing.” He pointed out that: “Adaptation is highly place and context specific and no single approach is appropriate across all regions, sectors and settings. Integrated crop/livestock systems will be a good option.”

Ali Tauqeer Sheikh, the head of LEAD-Pakistan then launched a summary of AR5 for policy makers in South Asia by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN). The ‘Executive Summary’ report is called “What’s in it for South Asia” and it distils the most important material on South Asian experiences in adaptation and mitigation from the thousands of pages of AR5.

The CDKN report finds that climate change will have widespread impacts on South Asian society. There are clear signs that the impacts of climate change are already being felt. The Asia region as a whole experienced the most weather and climate-related disasters in the world between 2000 and 2008. The risk of deaths due to flooding is highly concentrated in Asia. The incidence of many diseases increases at higher temperatures: the pathogens and parasites that cause disease multiply faster. Dengue and Japanese encephalitis outbreaks in South Asia have been associated with temperature and rainfall.

Crop production is likely to shift northwards across Asia as heat stress threatens current cropland and cooler regions are likely to benefit from warmer temperatures leading to an increase in the arable area. Rural poverty in South Asia is expected to continue to be more widespread than urban poverty for decades to come. Rice, a key staple in the region, is most vulnerable in the northern part of South Asia, but changes in climate may boost wheat production in parts of Pakistan where warmer temperatures would make it possible to grow at least two crops per year of wheat and maize in mountainous areas. An increase in extreme rainfall events related to monsoons will be very likely in the region. More frequent and heavy rainfall days are projected over parts of South Asia (low confidence). According to the IPCC, adaptation is the only effective option to manage the inevitable impacts of climate change. Unfortunately very few people from the government were able to make it to the conference because of all the tight security in the capital — our policy makers, who needed to listen to the experts assembled from far and wide, can at least benefit from reading a copy of this report.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 7th, 2014