Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Four insurance initiatives have called on governments to harness risk management techniques and industry expertise to help the developing world adapt to climate change. "With climatic disasters inflicting more and more damage, the increasing reliance of governments on foreign aid alone is unsustainable," commented Andrew Torrance, chairman of ClimateWise and head of Allianz Insurance. "As the global climate continues to warm, we have to find new ways to protect people and economies from the impacts of extreme weather, particularly those who are most vulnerable. Insurers have much to offer, but this potential can only be leveraged through a partnership approach with governments," he continued.

Governments are being asked to implement risk reduction measures already agreed at the 2005 World Conference on Disaster Reduction, to provide a suitable enabling environment for risk management and insurance to function at all levels of society, to invest in reliable risk exposure data and making it freely available to the public and to act on lessons learned about the benefits of regional public-private partnerships and micro-insurance schemes that reduce climate-related losses. Patrick M Liedtke from The Geneva Association noted that the core principle of risk management and loss prevention is that in most cases prevention is better than cure. "If governments, especially in the developing world, can implement robust risk management and loss reduction measures then a significant amount of both human suffering and economic loss could be prevented," he said.

Experts meeting at World Water Week in Stockholm have warned that erratic weather is threatening food security. "We are getting to a point where we are getting more water, more rainy days, but it's more variable, so it leads to droughts and it leads to floods," observed Sunita Narain from the Centre for Science and Environment in India. She believes that climate change is making rainfall even more variable. Colin Chartres of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Sri Lanka warned that "millions of farmers in communities dependent on rain-fed agriculture are at risk from decreasing and erratic availability of water."

A new report from IWMI concludes that unpredictable weather requires large investment in a wide range of water storage options to counter the uncertainty. It warns against over-reliance on single solutions like large dams, proposing instead an integrated approach combining storage on all scales, including the use of water from natural wetlands, water stored in the soil, groundwater beneath the earth’s surface and water collected in ponds, tanks and reservoirs. "Just as modern consumers diversify their financial holdings to reduce risk, smallholder farmers need a wide array of 'water accounts' to provide a buffer against climate change impacts," commented the report's lead author, Matthew McCartney from IWMI. "Even small amounts of stored water, by enabling crops and livestock to survive dry periods, can produce large gains in agricultural productivity and in the well-being of rural people," he added.

An international team of scientists has concluded that the estimated rate of ice loss from the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets should be halved. The correction results from a new assessment of the effect of glacial isostatic adjustment, the rebounding of the Earth's crust after the last ice age. "A good analogy is that it's like a mattress after someone has been sleeping on it all night," said team leader Bert Vermeersen of Delft Technical University in the Netherlands.

The researchers made use of observations of changes in the Earth's gravitational field related to the distribution of mass on Earth, including ice, from the two GRACE satellites. Global Positioning System (GPS) and sea-floor pressure measurements were also used. They are calling for a more extensive network of GPS readings, which, combined with other data, "will possibly be able to provide conclusive evidence on this matter in the years to come." The corrected figures means that expansion of the warming oceans must account for around 70 per cent of recent sea-level rise, rather than the 50 per cent that was previously assumed.