Time to give up on the false hope and prepare for the worst from climate change
K (Guru) Gurunathan is a former Mayor of Kapiti and a regular opinion contributor. OPINION: Best I declare my card straight away. My wife and I are doting grandparents to our first grandchild, and a second is on the way. So, I am deeply concerned for the planets ability to provide them and their generation with a sustainable and safe future. In 2019, when Local Government NZ launched its Climate Change Declaration , then-president the late David Cull made a plea for the government to not only focus on the reduction of carbon emissions (mitigation) but to equally focus on adaptation. He made a controversial argument: While we have a clear duty to reduce our carbon emissions, New Zealand accounts for less than 0.2 per cent of global emissions, which means whatever our efforts in the mitigation space, we will not move the dial in any meaningful way. He defined this a stark truth. That same year, in May, I moved a motion to declare a climate change emergency for the Kapiti Coast , the first in the Wellington region. My stated underpinning rationale was competely based on the huge iceberg of adaptation costs facing Kapiti a district with 1800 coastal properties and 6000 others in flood zones. Given David Culls stark truth made sense, I excluded any mention of mitigation. While I take his point about a moral duty to reduce emissions, the question is whether it's realistic to expect countries will collectively reduce emissions to achieve the Paris Agreement and keep further global temperature increases below 1.5C. An agreement based on scientific advice that breaching this threshold could cause potential climate tipping points with catastrophic consequences. At the COP26 Climate Change Summit 2021, the global alliance of think tanks called Climate Change Trackers tracked the pledges of 140 governments and concluded the world was actually headed towards a 2.4C warming. Ill add even these pledges are unreliable, given the growing economic nationalism and hydrocarbon-based militarisation. How many of us know the worlds militaries are exempted, for security reasons, from international agreements on disclosing their emissions data? Last week, the conservative Colorado Springs paper The Gazette noted the worlds militaries fuelled 5.5 percent of global green house emissions in 2022. The first 12 months of the Ukraine war accounted for 120 million tonnes which was more than the combined total of Singapore, Switzerland and Syria. With the rapid global drift to a fragmented, multi-polar world, paralleled with blocs beefing up their military investment, this can only get worse. Given the unprecedented heatwaves, wildfires and flood events across the world, an alarmed World Meteorological Agency is saying land and ocean temperatures are off the charts and the UN secretary general has said climate change is out of control. Some scientists, desperately noting the lack of urgent action despite 30 years of rationale scientific advice, are advocating civil disobedience. The stark truth is, as activist Greta Thunberg so eloquently summed up the COP26 summit , it is all more blah blah blah. We should stop peddling false hope and concede the 1.5C threshold is going to be breached and breached sooner. The Meteorological Agency is saying it likely to happen within five years, triggering potential climate change tipping points and unleashing a cascade of catastrophic impacts. The moral imperative cannot be monopolised by those who, in faith, believe the world can agree to drastic measures to arrest further global heating to below the 1.5C threshold. The moral imperative, one can argue, is for leaders and our communities to bite the bullet and urgently invest in adaptation measures. The stark lesson of Cyclone Gabrielle to politicians is that the cost-of-living mantra is not just about food prices in our supermarkets. The real engine room of the cost of living crisis is the impact of our consumer capitalist lifestyles and its destruction of our environment. Our moral imperative around adaptation should include our responsibility to our poor in New Zealand, and our vulnerable South Pacific nations. At the global level, 200 leading economists from 67 countries have called on the UN and World Bank to tackle the increasing gap between the rich and poor thats entrenching poverty and increasing risk of climate breakdown. With the world burning and flooding at the same time, with our oceans heating up and our biodiversity collapsing, our grandchildren deserve practical political leadership focused on practical solutions. What they dont deserve is the pothole politics of chucking kids into prison, racial dog whistling and the perpetration of a system where the wealthy minority pay less tax than the poor.