Europe, it seems, may be more vulnerable to climate change than some people think.
According to a report issued Monday by the European Environment Agency, the World Health Organization and the European Commission, Europe has warmed more than the global average. The report also includes new projections that suggest European seas are set to rise more than previous estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
(The executive summary of the report is available as a PDF here.)
But perhaps more significant than the climate science is the prescription for action in the report.
European Union policy makers for the past decade have emphasized the need to implement a regulatory regime to put a global cap on emissions and to enable wealthy countries to finance ways of cutting carbon in the developing world. The report says working toward a new global climate deal remains important. But interestingly, it also says the priority should be advancing technological solutions, creating incentives for populations across the globe to preserve their forests, and making the most vulnerable populations more resilient to heat waves and flooding.
In particular, the report highlights the need to review how to manage irrigation and whether rivers will be able to help keep nuclear power plants cool in the future. It also urges Europe to do more to protect people from insect-borne diseases and flooding rivers.
“What is now needed is a massive scale-up in renewable energy technology development and transfer, investment in energy and resource efficiency, adaptation actions and efforts to reduce deforestation, increase the resilience of ecosystems and reduce effects on human health,” the report says.
Increasingly, there is a strong conviction among many energy experts that cap-and-trade systems will be insufficient to meet the task of delivering cleaner energy to a human population and to economies that are set to swell in coming decades. They say a big, direct push on technology using huge government subsidies may be necessary.
This question of how to foster new energy technologies quickly and efficiently also was highlighted in our Energy Challenge series.
Of course, it is possible that nations will agree to expand the global cap-and-trade systems foreseen under the Kyoto climate treaty. Negotiations are set to begin in earnest this December on a new accord, which United Officials want in place by 2012.
Then again, there’s no guarantee that cap-and-trade systems will work, or that the most polluting nations — China and the United States, at the moment — will adopt such systems.
Even if polluting countries do adopt them, many things stand in the way of their being effective. One hazard is that the price of carbon could suddenly plummet — as it did in the European system in 2006 because of a glut of credits on the markets — prompting a swift return to burning more fossil fuels.