Global | Like a wave

Summary

Climate change is an unstoppable wave on the horizon where consumption or investment decisions and public policies are made. Climate change mitigation must be bolstered by measures to adapt to its effects. In so doing, its impacts will be felt in waves rather than a tsunami.

Key points

• Key points:
• Mitigation, slowing temperature rise, requires a substantial drop in net emissions close to zero. Only some countries have promised to reach this target by the decade of 2050, although it is not yet legally binding.
• This requires measures to adapt to more extreme and higher average temperatures, altered rainfall patterns, higher sea levels, as well as greater frequency and severity of hurricanes, floods and fires.
• The EU has just announced a new climate change adaptation strategy that emphasizes scientific knowledge as a lever for defining and implementing policy. Such a strategy is vital to tackle an issue synonymous with uncertainty due to the complexity of the climate system and its interactions with human activity.
• Climate must become a crucial factor in designing, evaluating and reviewing prospective scenarios of governments and companies and uncertainty must be reduced by devising alternative policies for reducing emissions and strategies to adapt both to climate events and to the risks and opportunities of the transition to a low-emission economy.

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