The dangers of climate change

David Sheppard, Director, SPREP

October 2009 Issue

Climate change as you all know is a major challenge for our countries, our communities and our people. The adverse impacts of climate change will affect all the vital economic, social and environmental sectors of our countries. Our economies face insurmountable challenges and many of our lower lying islands and coastal areas could be annihilated by climate change.
At the same time, the solutions to climate change lie largely outside our control. Industrial processes and un-sustainable developments in countries far from our shores are the main causes of climate change.
We are all aware of the dangers of climate change, but our citizens need to hear what steps can be taken and what steps are being taken so that we can adapt to these changes.
While we are taking action on mitigation in the region through renewable energy and energy efficiency measures, since we cannot influence the global increase in emissions in any significant manner by our own actions, our focus will then by necessity turn to adaptation.
The region is clearly taking action but within very limited means. There have been some very successful projects in the region and we are currently in the process of starting up a multi-million dollar GEF project in 13 countries called the Pacific Adaptation to Climate Change Project.
This will focus on interventions in the food security, water resources and coastal infrastructure areas. It will feature a community-based approach that takes into account the views and aspirations from the community (bottom-up) and links these with national level policies and planning (top-down).
It is well understood that for adaptation to climate change to function and be sustainable, it must be acceptable to the communities. After all, they are the ones who will have to live with the changed situation, whether the adaptation fails or succeeds.
At the same time any action must be linked to the governments’ broader development and planning processes. We have therefore conducted extensive consultations and have developed proposals for each participating country in accordance with their priorities and needs.
Mainstreaming of issues: A common thread in much of the climate change work of SPREP is therefore capacity building. We seek to build training and awareness in each of our projects and to also assist our member states with the mainstreaming of environmental issues into their national planning processes.
In September, SPREP conducted several capacity building activities. Together with the Finnish Meteorological Institute, we have started training to upgrade skills in national meteorological services to meet new international standards. These new skills will benefit airline security but will also assist with the meteorological observations in the region.
In September, we also conducted a media-training workshop on climate change and environmental reporting. The media has a vital role to play in bringing information on climate change to the different audiences in the region, but also in publicising climate change realities facing our communities. SPREP is seeking to assist in this regard through this capacity building exercise funded by the government of Canada.
In the context of our regional renewable energy project PIGGAREP, SPREP is also conducting capacity building workshops. Recent workshops in Niue and Vanuatu afforded opportunities to study practical renewable energy options, while at the same time raised awareness among utility personnel of the adaptation needs and options for their power supply and distribution networks. This is an emerging area of work where SPREP will seek to link adaptation to climate change to these mitigation projects through capacity building. These efforts are part of a greater emphasis in the region on preparing to adapt to a changing climate.
While negotiations are still ongoing, it will be very important for the sake of the region to have strong, ambitious targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions agreed to at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December this year. Concomitantly, there needs to be adequate financial and technical support to vulnerable countries such as ours to help them to further prepare for climate change impacts.
Through strong international partnership and political commitment to reduce emissions, we hope to be able to avoid the unmanageable and with capacity building, technical and financial support to be able to manage the unavoidable.