Circe, an EC-funded 4year research project, aims at developing for the first time a comprehensive assessment of climate change impacts in the Mediterranean area. CIRCE's rational does not take climate impacts as direct consequences of climate changes: the causal relationship is much more complex since a given climate change leads to very con- trasted impacts according to existing policies as well as to socio-economic and political re- sponses.
This paper freely draws on some findings from ciRce’s first stakeholders meeting2, or- ganised by iDDRi in October 2007. a high- level, focused dialogue among a small group of selected participants, this meeting was articu- lated around two key questions:
- Business models, sector-wide transitions and socio-economic irreversibilities: is there room for manoeuvre?
- Succeeding where we failed: can the climate challenge be turned into an opportunity?
These questions were examined with regard to three sectors (agriculture, energy and tour- ism) and two themes (ecosystems protection and urban & regional planning). important cross-cutting issues for the mediterranean such as water management, regional security, international migrations, etc., were dealt with in the discussions along the two days.
The following questions & answers there- fore owe a lot to the meeting participants, although its limits and potential misinter- pretations are the sole responsibility of the author.
Adaptation in the Mediterranean: why is it necessary?
As it appears in iPcc’s 2007 report, the med- iterranean is a climate change vulnerability “hotspot”. it is hence often stated that climate change is the greatest challenge to regional sustainable development in the 21st century. indeed, it is and will increasingly be a major driver of environmental and socio-economic changes in the mediterranean. increased water- scarcity, for example, would critically raise the vulnerability of a number of countries that are already under heavy water stress, and would have widespread impacts on “water poor coun- tries3”.
At the same time, climate change is only one among a wide range of such drivers (including economic, sectoral, cultural, political, etc.). Sev- eral of these may well be far more determin- ing for mediterranean societies than climate change per se – depending on issues, contexts and time frames.
It does not seem necessary to decide whether climate change is the greatest challenge or an additional one: time will tell, and in any case it has to be addressed. What is certain is that the region is on course for an unstable, dirty and expensive future under all reasonable cli- mate scenarios. the present situation, as well as long-term projections, are highly unsustain- able. in most cases, climate change reinforces these trends. even though climate change is likely to have some positive effects, there is no example at hand where climate trends would reverse or even ease such unsustainable situ- ations.
Therefore, all mediterranean societies and businesses will need to adapt, on a continuum between those directly affected by changes in climate to those indirectly affected by climate-driven socio-economic changes. it should spe- cifically be underlined that if our societies turn out to be serious about keeping greenhouse gas emissions at a manageable level4, adapta- tion will also be about adapting to future miti- gation policies.5 these could have major and structural effects on the way mediterranean societies live and do business. in many cases, synergies will exist between mitigation and adaptation options. nevertheless, there will undoubtedly be circumstances under which adaptation and mitigation policies shall be an- tagonistic: thorny decisions will then have to be made.
Adaptation capacity in the Mediterranean: is it high or low?
The mediterranean has had to deal with, and adapt to, serious climate stresses throughout history. chronic water scarcity and heat waves, for example, have been described in some plac- es for well over 2 000 years. Besides, basically all societies and economic sectors around the mediterranean have experienced changes of unprecedented magnitude and speed over the last century. in that sense, they all have demon- strated immense adaptation capacities.
In today’s world, we actually have little knowl- edge about the capacity of current, discussed or planned adaptation efforts to cope success- fully with future climate change. a number of heavy assumptions already circulate in the ad- aptation community: for example, that the rich have higher adaptation capacity than the poor; that adaptation capacity is higher at the local level; or that the private sector can adapt more easily than the public sector.
What can be asserted is that adaptation ca- pacity probably varies substantially between sectors, places and populations. and that there is already some evidence that some of these largely over-estimate their own adaptive capac- ity. in particular, major governance issues, es- pecially in Southern mediterranean countries, will most likely severely hinder timely and ef- ficient adaptation.
Finding out if the above mentioned assump- tions rely on evidence-base science, or if they are rather clichés that need to be challenged, requires additional detailed research linking global and regional issues to local case studies. ciRce shall be an important contribution to this end.
Adaptation strategies and instruments: what can we say about what to do?
In terms of “who should do what”, adaptation raises numerous challenging questions on the relative roles of individual versus cooperative actions, market-driven vs. policy-driven adap- tations, anticipatory vs. ex-post adaptation, lo- cal vs. national or international policy making. What is more, adaptation strategies also range from short to long term endeavours, from col- lective choices to specific, ad hoc initiatives, and from marginal changes in day-to-day prac- tices to major sector-wide transitions and ulti- mately comprehensive re-assessments of the current development models, challenging the very way we think about future.
It is quite clear however that there is no sin- gle, one-size-fits-all solution at hand. Rather, a portfolio of technologies, initiatives and poli- cies is required, that re-emphasizes the need to link economic development with sound environmental and natural resources manage- ment.
To name only a few, capacity building, insur- ance mechanisms and incentive policies, subsidies, market frameworks, food security and so- cial safety nets are of outstanding importance. “mainstreaming” adaptation into up-coming policy reforms, including at the eU-level as with the common agricultural Policy, is essen- tial. indeed, they may strongly constrain the development paths not only within europe but in Southern and eastern mediterranean coun- tries. Urban and regional planning can also take us a long way into adaptation, and lots of measures that should be adopted to fight air pollution in cities are actually good for climate change adaptation as well. the value of services provided by various terrestrial and coastal eco- systems around the mediterranean, and there- fore the importance of keeping them healthy and functioning, should be better understood, assessed and factored in decision making.
Generally speaking, there is a need for more elaborated assessments of climate change im- pacts on all economic sectors as a first step for action. it calls for improved science on im- pacts, which often requires collaboration from all stakeholders including the industry.
If adaptation is about societies more than about nature and climate, it is crucial to better understand human reasoning. We can actually build on 30 years of empirical research on pub- lic perception of risk, a field of its own in the social sciences. We have learnt that different types of risks are perceived in different ways: for instance, people tend to overestimate the risk of dying from a terrorist attack compared to a heart attack. they also weigh more costs than benefits – a crucial information for cli- mate change adaptation. What about the risk of suffering from climate change and the costs and benefits of anticipating it?
Is the need for adaptation really bad news... or can it be turned into an opportunity?
As to whether climate change can be turned into an opportunity through adaptation to ac- complish long-needed transitions, there is no easy answer. the array of opportunities actu- ally varies considerably. it is quite obvious that climate change will severely constrain local development and hence the variety of choices available. it is also clear that adaptation will take time and will require significant invest- ments – even though business as usual would undoubtedly cost more in the long run.
But opportunities do exist. Firstly because climate change will have positive effects: there will not only be losers but also winners. more importantly, because climate change in- vites mediterranean societies to re-examine a number of development models, from the largest scale to sector- or place-specific cases. increasingly, the adaptation debate points out climate change as a lever to reorient what are commonly called “absurd policies” and asso- ciated unsustainable trends.6 changing such policies and reversing those trends is seen as a first, key step to climate change adaptation. to some extent, adapting to future climate change implies to adapt first to current climate vari- ability, and even more simply to current cli- mate. however, there are people/sectors/places that benefit from unsustainable policies, so that using climate change as a lever to sustain- ability will raise oppositions and require politi- cally painful choices.
In any case, sustainable ecosystem manage- ment is clearly brought back to the centre of the debate on climate change by the adaptation agenda. threats on ecosystems are not direct consequences of climate change, but primarily of other heavy trends like water pollution, land use change and resources overexploitation. cli- mate change only reinforces present negative trends. it calls for better policy implementa- tion to succeed where we largely failed so far in the mediterranean: managing biodiversity and natural resources in a sustainable way. in a sense, one could even argue that there is lit- tle news in what climate change brings to the mediterranean ecosystems issue.
Finally, as has historically always been the case when it comes to sustainable development, there is a lot of wishful thinking about adapta- tion. Since the scientific community started discussing the subject, and since it emerged on the political agenda, constraints have in- creased and available options have reduced. Decision makers are still to be convinced and climate change is still to be turned into a busi- ness opportunity for adaptation efforts to re- ally take off. it would be naïve to assume that adaptation will happen just because it should, because it is in most people’s best interest ei- ther individually or collectively.
1 climate change and impact research: the mediterranean envi- ronment (www.circe- project.eu)
2 list of participants, detailed report from the stakeholder meeting, as well as presentations delive- red by speakers, are available at www. circeproject.eu, or at www.iddri.org
3 countries where water availability is less than 1 000 m3 / year / person (namely Jordan, tunisia, alge- ria and egypt).
4 e.g. aiming at a +2°c target.
5 in that regard, the mediterranean is not an isolated region but one that is dee- ply immerged and integrated in global governance and the world economy.
6 Such as the ones captured by the “vir- tual water” concept: Southern mediter- ranean countries are net exporters of water to northern mediter- ranean if agricultural water inputs are taken into account.
