Building Resilience to Climate Change

We all should now acknowledge the fact that climate change is with us now as we are already witnessing its impacts all around us. Birds are nesting earlier, animals are moving territories, the duration and range of season is changing, the glacial lakes area expanding in size and increasing in numbers making them themselves a big threat to downstream communities. The scientific community has already envisaged that the concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) including CO2 have reached levels well above any observed in the last millions years and now we should acknowledge the fact that even if we immediately stop our GHG emitting activities tomorrow the earth's surface temperature would continue to increase for another 50 or more years (actually can't predict) because of the time lag between emissions and the earth's responses to the emissions. Every day, the reporting on climate change highlights the risks and alerts people to take measures for both to mitigate and to adapt. Keeping these facts in mind, adaptation (more on the resilience) represents a major challenge to sustainability for individuals, households, firms and organisations, and is related to their changes in perceptions of climate risk change. Here I would like to point out some pertinent issues to be discussed and come to some realistic conclusions regarding the resilience to climate change so that everyone of us could start doing something at least from own side to make some difference.

For the vast majority of people the impact of climate change means an increased risk of losing their homes and livelihoods, more disease, less security and sometimes death.

Natural disasters like GLOF, landslides, forest fires disrupt and endanger lives and threaten the livelihoods of the people. These natural disasters take tremendous toll on development often negating development efforts and threatening prospects of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The upward shifting (vertical) of low land species has added increasing pressure to upland species and invasion is becoming more common.

Kids in the world's poorest communities are those among the most vulnerable. They are already experiencing the impacts of climate change through malnutrition and various diseases, poverty, inequality and increasing risk of conflict – and ultimately an increase in child mortality rates.

Here everybody should look for the question "What determines a nation's capacity to adapt and HOW?" There is, in fact, no fixed set of characteristics that dictate adaptive capacity. A number of broad indicators have been developed suggesting a greater or lesser capacity to adapt, although a variety of more proximal measures may be used in the actual quantification of adaptive capacity. Clearly, improving adaptive capacity involves much more than simply executing a particular adaptation project, such as flood risk reduction, designed to reduce climate risk. Instead, it is fundamentally a process of building working institutions that have knowledge and ability to manage the process of climate adaptation as well as generating the resources (human, technical, and financial) to implement adaptation actions/tools.

Improving the adaptive capacity of Asia-Pacific nations require continued economic development that leads to the establishment of robust institutions, infrastructure, and the growth of human and financial capital.

Rather than adaptation to climate change being a separate venture pursued in isolation, ideally it should one that is 'mainstreamed' into existing development activities and decision-making, ‘well integrated’. Other issues include ecosystem and biodiversity, heat-related mortality, water resources, agriculture and commercial forestry as some of many.

Furthermore, despite many scientific advances, there is still much uncertainty about how our ecosystems will be affected by climate change. We therefore need to be adaptable and flexible in redefining our approach, even if we face inevitable extinction of some of the important species, as we increase our understanding as a last resort. Adaptation to climate change is vital for increasing the adaptive capacity and resilience of poor people regarding the impacts of climate change. Adaptation strategies need to be integrated into poverty reduction as a cross cutting issue and focus on the needs of people most affected by climate change impacts and aim to reduce the most important vulnerabilities they face. Therefore action on adaptation must be focused on community based adaptation strategy through mobilization of local resources.