Europe is not a ‘safe haven’ from climate breakdown, expert warns

Europe is not “a safe haven” when it comes to climate change as the latest scientific evidence and recent extreme weather events indicate the Continent will be as badly affected as other places on the planet, leading climatologist Hans-Otto Pörtner has said.

The big risks arising from this – including heating exposure, water shortages, challenges to agriculture and food production and increased flooding – need to be addressed by administrators and citizens, he told the European Climate Change Adaptation conference in Dublin Castle on Tuesday.

Attended by more than 600 scientists, politicians and climate NGOs, the conference is examining how best to adapt to the consequences of global warming caused mainly by human-induced carbon emissions.

With record temperatures in Europe, exposure to heat was a particular threat to the health of agriculture workers, said Prof Pörtner who chaired the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s working group on climate impacts. With excess heat responsible for thousands of deaths, adaptation measures were required to protect vulnerable workers.

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“Water is not a given any more,” he said. It needed to be managed better and kept clean due to its importance to European economies and transportation of goods.

[ Analysis: Climate crisis was predicted, but global warming is now entering uncharted territory ]

Crop failure was a part of Europe’s history and would be so again in the near future, Prof Pörtner predicted. As a consequence “agriculture needs to be more climate resilient” by moving away from intensive production while enhancing nature. This required changing dietary habits, notably eating less meat, freeing up land for biodiversity and enhancing its ability to store water, he said.

Sea-level risk poses huge challenges for Europe that probably means “having to give land back to the ocean”. In addition, freshwater flooding exacerbated by climate extremes would have devastating consequences for people and infrastructure.

In such circumstances, “how can we be fast enough?” he asked. It was flawed thinking, he said, to believe that countries can fail to meet emission reduction targets and then “adapt” later.

This was because of planetary limits which, if exceeded, would reduce the capacity to adapt, he said.

Delays in mitigation had to be addressed while preparing for inevitable emergencies in the form of heatwaves, floods and wildfires. It also necessitated climate-resilient development and “bringing bureaucratic silos together”. A system of “governance for emergencies” was needed to overcome inertia, he said.

There was huge diversity across Europe with climate disruption, for instance, a particular challenge for the Mediterranean and Ireland “may be a little less affected”. At this point, however, there was a need for unified strategies and “a stop to endless debates about how to implement [actions]”, Prof Pörtner said.

Dr John Bell, director of Healthy Planet, DG Research & Innovation with the European Commission, told the conference some climate impacts such as sea-level rise were happening sooner than anticipated. “We may be running out of time but we are not running out of ideas,” he said.

Society needed to be able to deal with the knowledge and scientific indications of what was happening, he said. Scientists could not be private actors any more and had to co-operate more effectively with policymakers in building resilient communities and societies “in places where people can live, work and move”.

[ ‘Unprecedented’ ocean temperatures around Irish coasts driving extreme weather events ]

Equally, there was no economic or political option other than to accelerate “deep mitigation” in cutting emissions, he said. Echoing the EU’s missionary origins, he said: “The mission between now and 2050 is to make peace with nature.”

This required mobilisation to ensure resilience in infrastructure, housing and nature-based solutions, he said. The European Commission planned to have more than 150 climate-resilient regions throughout Europe within the next decade – and not just have a strategy in place.

“Science has a duty to give courage to politics; to give hope to citizens, to give space to innovation and to give – above all at this point – respite to nature,” Dr Bell said.

Oceanographer Nadia Pinardi, director of the UN Decade Collaborative Centre on Coastal Resilience, said heat and carbon dioxide was accumulating in oceans and sea level rising at such a rate that there was increased risk of “cascading effects” on the planet. Critically, this required addressing the question of how best to prepare for one-in-100 year events that are likely to happen once in 10 years.

Blaz Kurnick, head of the European Environment Agency’s adaptation unit, said recent summers in Europe had taken a huge toll in the form of heatwaves, flooding and wildfires. Flooding during 2021 in Germany and Belgium had caused €60 billion of damage, giving rise to speculation that a €100 billion extreme weather event would occur within the next few years.

He highlighted the particular risk for hospitals and schools located in “urban heat islands”, with 46 per cent of Europe’s hospitals and 43 per cent of its schools in such locations. This was raising issues about “how do we rebuild critical infrastructure”, and whether school holidays should be changed because of a lack of cooling options.