Opinion: The Age of Climate Disaster Is Here--Foreign Affairs

The planet has broiled this summer, with July winning the unwelcome title of the hottest month since records began, in the nineteenth century. Indeed, climate scientists think that it was possibly the hottest month in the past 120,000 years. Given the rapid pace of climate change, however, July offered merely a taste of the heat to come. In 2015, world leaders established a goal to keep average global surface temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures in order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. In July, global temperatures breached that critical ceiling, if only briefly. Nearly 5,000 local heat and rainfall records were broken in the United States alone; globally, the number exceeded 10,000. And scientists anticipate that 2023 will clock in as the hottest year on record.

Although climate scientists have long predicted an increase in such extreme weather events, some have recently expressed alarm at the sheer speed at which the climate is changing. The sudden explosion of record temperatures carries a warning for humans: adapt or die. The scale of the climate catastrophes suffered throughout this year reaffirms that it is no longer sufficient for governments and policymakers to focus on mitigation—in other words, developing strategies to reduce harmful pollutants emitted into the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. The world must also pay more attention to adaptation, upgrading infrastructure and policies to withstand extreme weather. If governments and societies do not make adequate preparations, the damaging impacts of climate change will crush lives, livelihoods, and communities across the globe. The 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) under the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change, scheduled for late November through early December in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), provides a crucial moment for nations to finally give adaptation equal billing with mitigation on the international climate agenda. This year’s COP could herald an inflection point for climate efforts; with weather catastrophes still raging around the planet, governments should be galvanized to take more radical action than they have at previous summits.

ADAPT OR PERISH

Heat statistics alone, as shocking as they are, do not tell the whole story of climate impacts. Higher temperatures mean bigger floods, hotter and longer heat waves, more destructive wildfires, deeper droughts, and more intense storms. And the severity and longevity of this summer’s high temperatures are startling. For 31 days in a row, Phoenix, Arizona, recorded temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, heating pavement to the point that people’s—and pets’—skin burned on contact. Temperatures reached 122 degrees Fahrenheit in southwest Iran, forcing the government to declare public holidays because it was simply too hot to work. In August, the much-anticipated Boy Scout Jamboree in South Korea was cut short, with hundreds of teens falling ill from heat. With warmer, wetter conditions allowing mosquitos to flourish, the worst recorded outbreak of Dengue fever has swept Bangladesh, leaving hundreds dead and medical providers overwhelmed. Smoke from Canadian wildfires, which razed territory the size of Greece, forced millions of Americans and Canadians indoors to avoid respiratory illness. Fueled by gale-force winds, wildfires devastated the Hawaiian island of Maui, killing at least 114 people, laying waste to the historic town of Lahaina, and driving locals into the ocean to escape the flames.

Extreme precipitation has also left a trail of destruction this summer. New Delhi had half a foot of rainfall on a single day in July; deadly mudslides and flash floods followed. In normally dry Beijing, another July storm dumped the heaviest rainfall in 140 years, four times the city’s average rainfall for the entire month of August. And amid a severe heat wave across Europe in late July, Italians witnessed hail that approached the size of cantaloupes, with one stone measuring almost eight inches, the largest ever recorded in the continent.

These events come at a high human and economic cost. Homes destroyed, schooling disrupted, and supply chains broken. And it is humans who have inflicted such suffering on ourselves; the heat that devastated Europe and the southwestern United States this summer would have been “virtually impossible” in the absence of the burning of fossil fuels by humans, according to an analysis by World Weather Attribution, a nonprofit that analyzes data to determine how climate change influences extreme weather events. This causal link holds true across the globe; the record-breaking heat in China was 50 times more likely because of human-caused climate change, also according to the World Weather Attribution.

Until now, political leaders, corporations, and scientists have largely focused the climate-change discussion on cutting harmful pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. The other side of the challenge—adaptation, or preparing for catastrophic weather events like those witnessed this summer—has remained “under-resourced, underfunded and often ignored,” according to the chair of the United Kingdom’s Climate Change Adaptation Committee. Adaptation efforts—for example, elevating buildings to avoid flooding, restoring natural infrastructure such as mangrove forests to buffer sea-level rise, and investing in electric grids that will perform under extreme conditions, be they heat, cold, or drought—have remained modest even as climate-related disasters have worsened. In 2022, the UN concluded that without increased attention, the scale of climate-related disasters could outstrip existing adaptation efforts.

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