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Nobel laureates offer ideas on battling climate change

Participants of the 4th Nobel Laureates Symposium on Global Sustainability, held in Hong Kong, offer their expertise in battling climate change

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Photos: Corbis; Bruce Yan; AFP; Jonathan Wong

If you put the world's cleverest people in one room and asked them to solve the problem of global warming, would they be able to do it?

From Wednesday to Saturday, Hong Kong will be playing host, street protests permitting, to the 4th Nobel Laureates Symposium on Global Sustainability (www.nobel-cause.de). Co-hosted by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research - the world's leading climate change think tank - and the Asia Society, the event will gather together climate-change scientists, urbanisation experts, politicians, business leaders and about 20 Nobel laureates.

The symposium series is the brainchild of Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute, a long-standing member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and an expert on climatological tipping points.

"The aim of the symposium series is to raise the most authoritative voices of science - that is the eminent experts and the Nobel laureates - about the big issues of global sustainability," says Schellnhuber. The symposium's subtitle is "4C - Changing Climate, Changing Cities".

The "4C" refers to the four degrees Celsius rise in temperature that we will experience by the end of the century if we don't take steps to combat climate change.

At the opening session, Schellnhuber, Jim Yong Kim (president of the World Bank) and Rajendra Pachauri (head of the IPCC) will present aspects of their work that paint a picture - not a pretty one - of a world four degrees warmer. Sea levels will have risen dramatically, low-lying land and island nations will have been subsumed by the waves, extreme weather events will have become the norm, agricultural yields will have fallen with a concomitant increase in food prices, there will be frequent droughts and killer heatwaves, and nasty tropical diseases will have expanded their territory away from the equator.

Cities, with their high energy consumption and emission-intensive infrastructure, are both the biggest part of the problem and the key to a possible solution.

"The future of the climate will be determined in the cities," says Schellnhuber. "They are currently responsible for 70 per cent of greenhouse-gas emissions, and that figure will rise to 80 or 90 per cent."

Currently, just over half the world's population live in urban areas. It is predicted that in the next 30 years another one billion people will up sticks from the countryside to make their homes in cities.

The previous Nobel Cause symposia were held in Potsdam, Germany (2007), London, Britain (2009), and Stockholm, Sweden (2011). The choice of location this time reflects the pivotal role Asia plays because of its uniquely rapid growth rates. In the next 30 years, Asia will become home to 21 of the predicted 37 global megacities.

"Hong Kong seems to be the ideal place to tackle these issues," says Schellnhuber. "It's part of the Pearl River Delta [which is considered an emerging megacity], it's on the coastline, it's a global leader in innovation and it's the access point for mainland China, where East meets West."

China is the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and global emissions are likely to hit a record high this year, largely due to the country's growth. For China, the effects of climate change aren't someone else's problem.

"If you look at the data, China is among the most vulnerable countries in the world when it comes to climate change," says Schellnhuber. "Because so many cities are situated on the coast, because of the tropical storms and the desertification - their ecosystem is in serious danger."

As well as being the No1 polluter, however, China is also the world's largest investor in renewable energy technologies. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, China invested US$54 billion in renewables last year, trumping the United States' investment of US$36.7 billion by a considerable margin.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the notoriously heedless behaviour of land developers, the flouting of environmental regulations by factory managers, the degradation of the environment and the air pollution with which Hongkongers are all too familiar, one of the themes to emerge from the conversations with participants is that many remain optimistic about China, and even think it could become a role model.

"China has the unique chance to avoid most of the dirty development we saw in Europe and North America, and to solve many problems in one stroke," says Schellnhuber. "It needs to switch to less carbon-intensive fossil fuels and go massively into renewables."

Over the course of four days, the symposium will conduct sessions on the socioeconomics of urbanisation, the evolution of the city, urban design, the latest climate change science, policymaking, technical and systemic solutions, and financing issues. The participants will discuss, in depth, how their visions for transformation can be achieved.

But, of course, it's not just down to research, innovation and good intentions, it's also a matter of political will.

"When we talk to advisers to the [Chinese] leadership, they say, 'We don't deny that climate change is real and that it will have a huge impact on us. We want to find the right way to protect the climate,'" says Schellnhuber. "The debate in China is very rational and it's based on science."

But the status quo, cemented in place by socioeconomic and political inertia, has to change for that science to be translated into positive action. Too many people have buried their heads in the sand.

"We have this absurd situation that more and more people flock to cities which are mostly positioned on the coast," says Schellnhuber. "So, instead of going inland, away from the vulnerable areas, they're going directly into the danger zone."

The symposium will be tackling what is probably the biggest question of our time: will we eventually make the planet uninhabitable or will human ingenuity and political energy finally combine to steer us away from disaster?

Some of the laureates have expertise in a relevant field but most do not. That's the beauty of it, according to Schellnhuber. They are independent thinkers of the highest calibre.

"The experts will present their findings and the laureates will assess them. In a way, that's the most solid and serious and objective way of dealing with scientific evidence."

At the end of the symposium, a memorandum summarising the findings will be produced by a committee and signed by all the luminaries. This will be shared with regional and global leaders, and Schellnhuber plans to present it at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris next year, a meeting seen as critical for climate change negotiations.

Will it all have been worthwhile if nothing concrete is achieved?

"You never know what an idea will do, but I do believe intellectual interventions are an important part of human history, and have often changed the course of human history," says Schellnhuber. "I feel very encouraged that all these Nobel laureates are coming to Hong Kong. I experience a lot of hostility from mediocre minds and it more than compensates to have the support of the most brilliant minds in the world."

 

"My personal history crosses oceans. I was born and raised in Hong Kong and I graduated from Chinese University 40 years ago. Then I moved to the United States. I worked at Princeton University, as a climate scientist, for 35 years.

"I returned to Hong Kong, and to Chinese University, last year. I came back because I want to contribute the concluding part of my career to the betterment of climate change and environmental awareness in Hong Kong and China.

"The steering committee for the Nobel Cause symposium asked me to help out with the organisation. So I was involved in designing the programme and selecting speakers. It's very exciting that this symposium, which has an illustrious history, is taking place in Hong Kong.

"The fact that they're holding it in Asia this time is an indication that attention should be paid to the non-European part of the equation. Hong Kong and China face a different set of problems to other countries. Economic growth and urbanisation is happening here more rapidly than anywhere else on Earth; therefore it's an opportune time to raise public awareness of the implications of climate change.

"My plan for the next several years in Hong Kong is to form a cohesive, interdisciplinary team that will address various aspects of climate change: the implications for local weather, public health, air-pollution issues and so on. Having occasions such as the Nobel symposium is a big boost to our morale.

"The highest level of the Hong Kong government is involved. I hope this will bring the attention of the public and the media to the urgent problems of climate change. I think the pace is picking up all over the world.

"I've been involved in three cycles of the IPCC assessment report process. For the fifth round - which has just concluded - I was lead author on the chapter on regional climate change. Most people know about the global effects of climate change but they don't have information on, 'What does that mean to me locally? How will it affect my district in Hong Kong?' So the IPCC is now focusing more heavily on regional aspects.

"In Hong Kong we're facing specific types of weather events, the most obvious of which is the tropical cyclones - the typhoons. The typhoons are closely related to the strength and position of a larger-scale circulation feature called the western Pacific subtropical anticyclone, which determines the preferred tracks of the typhoons. We've been recording a slightly declining number in Hong Kong recently, but our research suggests that the ones that do occur might be more severe.

"Several parts of China also experience heatwaves in the summer. Sustained heatwaves are dangerous and cause many deaths. And climate change may bring more disease. This summer, Guangdong province suffered a severe outbreak of dengue fever, with thousands of cases reported. Dengue fever is very sensitive to temperature. An increase of two degrees Celsius would allow for many of these tropical diseases to advance northward to Hong Kong and the mainland.

"The other important aspect is heavy rainstorms, which cause flooding and landslips. There may be more instances of intense storms like the one we experienced this spring. That one dumped more than 100mm of rainwater in a very short time, damaging some subway stations and a shopping mall.

"The coupling of rainstorms with a rising sea level is a matter of particular concern. Much of Hong Kong's land is reclaimed from the ocean - including the area intended for the airport's third runway. Building a very high platform is prohibitively expensive but if it's too low, it could be at risk. If higher sea levels combine with the storm surge created by typhoons, it would push a lot of water onto land and cause tremendous flooding."

 

"I trained originally as a vet, even though I'm now in medical science, so I've got a very broad interest in the biological consequences of climate change. I'm interested in the biodiversity issue, the food-production issue and the issue of what medical problems are going to arise.

"At the moment, we live in an extractive society. We're only degrading the planet and not in any sense trying to sustain it. The sustainable city is central to this and we're beginning to look to China for innovation in that area.

"With America having this terrible Republican party, which doesn't believe in anything except money, China is beginning to take a real leadership position in developing renewable energy technology and setting ambitious targets for greenhouse-gas reduction.

"The first medical implication of climate change is heat stress. We had terrible bush fires in southern Australia a few years back and several hundred people died as a direct consequence. But the numbers of heat stress-related deaths in the cities, brought about by the intense heatwave, were much higher. And this always happens. In medical statistics they refer to it as 'excess deaths' - the number of deaths that occur above the normal level. Heatwaves always result in large numbers of excess deaths, particularly among the elderly and vulnerable.

"Additional medical implications arise as insect-borne infections move away from the equator. We're more likely to see diseases such as malaria in areas where they don't usually occur.

"The second biological implication is the unpredictability of weather for agricultural production, and resulting food stress. If there's one thing that causes revolutions, it's hunger. The French revolution resulted from hunger and food stress; the recent revolutions in the Middle East, including the Arab spring, were all preceded by a big hike in food prices due to shortages. So there's the effect of insufficient food, which we're already seeing in the Sahel region of Africa, and then there's the effect of increasing food prices.

"Flooding is another important issue. Massive storms trigger freshwater flooding which damages sewage systems, causing outbreaks of waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid. And rising sea levels cause ocean flooding. We're starting to see salt water getting into fresh water aquifers in places like Bangladesh. And, of course, people are going to be displaced from island nations such as Tuvalu.

"From my point of view, the climate scientists have given us the diagnosis and now it's time to decide how we handle it. I think we have to practise preventative medicine for the planet. A key part of that is developing sustainable cities. Each and every one of us should be thinking in terms of duty of care - it's the basis of medicine. We have a duty of care for future generations and for all life forms.

"Wealth has become extremely concentrated. According to Oxfam, the 85 richest people on the planet have accumulated as much wealth between them as the whole bottom half of the world's population. I think the best thing the billionaires can do for themselves, and for their own good feeling and to enjoy their lives, is to start spending that money to improve the long-term prospects of others, including their own descendants.

"What I'd like to say to the ultra-wealthy is, 'Think about your duty of care.' The [Bill & Melinda] Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Warren Buffett are all doing really positive things. Philanthropy is very big in the US. The new billionaires in Asia need to think of their place in history. Will they be regarded with gratitude and respect by future generations for what they did to ensure good lives for other human beings?

"The message I'd most like to get across is this: if you've got a lot of money, be a star, be one of the saints, and use that money to a positive end."

 

"My background is in high-energy physics - quarks, gluons, string theory, dark matter, etc. From there I migrated to biology and started dealing with questions of scale. I started by asking: 'Are elephants simply scaled up versions of mice? Are humans scaled down whales?'

"I moved on to address issues of scale in many aspects of biology, including metabolic rate, growth, ageing and mortality, sleep, cancer and the dynamics of ecosystems.

"This work revealed that there are extraordinary regularities across all living organisms. On average, they scale in a predictable, systematic way. No matter what physiological characteristic is measured - whether metabolic rate or lifespan - it can be explained using mathematics. This great commonality across organisms originates in networks - the networks that sustain life, such as the circulatory and respiratory systems.

"My next question was: 'Does this scaling theory extend to cities? To what extent are cities organisms?' People use biological metaphors when they talk about cities. They'll refer to the metabolism of a city, or its DNA. By analysing large amounts of data, my colleagues and I discovered surprisingly regular scaling laws that govern cities worldwide.

"Like organisms, cities are networked systems. They function through obvious physical networks, such as roads, electrical lines and water pipes. But, more importantly, these are integrated with the dynamics of social networks - how people interact and form groups - and this underlies these extraordinary scaling laws.

"Simply put, the scaling laws state that if a city doubles in size then, on average, per capita socioeconomic quantities that involve the interaction of human beings increase by 15 per cent. This includes wages, the quantity of patents produced, the level of innovation and the number of cases of Aids and influenza. And with this doubling in size, there are similar per capita savings of 15 per cent on all infrastructure. A city twice as large doesn't require twice as many roads, or twice as many gas stations, but only 85 per cent more. This creates fantastic economies of scale.

"No doubt, this is one of the major reasons cities keep expanding - people living in larger cities perceive significant gains and improvement of their lives. However, cities bring us the good, the bad and the ugly. In a city you may get higher wages, more opportunity and greater diversity, but you'll also expose yourself to more disease, crime and pollution.

"Our goal is to develop a quantitative 'science of cities'. I believe such a goal is extremely important in addressing the huge challenges of global urbanisation and sustainability. To mitigate the multitude of problems and avert disaster, we need to understand how the system works and the underlying principles and dynamics at play.

"A major reason I'm coming to the symposium is my firm belief that the fate of the planet lies with the future of our cities. The major problems we're facing today: global warming, scarcity of resources, energy, crime, pollution, disease, etc, primarily originate in cities and are all strongly interconnected. It's particularly important in the developing world, and especially in China, where 200 to 300 new cities are planned in the next 25 years, each with over a million people. In addition to the huge demand on resources and materials, this will be an enormous challenge to the social fabric. And what happens in China will affect us all.

"China needs to think carefully about how people will live in these new cities. Many are soulless places that create alienation. That's easy for me to say but, unfortunately, China has had to move quickly, and doesn't have the time to grow cities organically. Cities are much more than just places where people live. They are where people meet and interact, generating ideas, innovation and wealth. A well-designed city can help people lead meaningful and fulfilling lives.

"To facilitate wise decisions, we urgently need to develop a predictive scientific framework. Although this symposium is primarily about global warming, I see it slightly differently to others. I see urbanisation as the big question, and global warming as one of its many consequences."

 

"This year the IPCC is bringing out its Fifth Assessment Report - the reports of the three working groups have already been published and we're working on the synthesis report, which we will complete [this month].

"These are our major findings: we now have 95 per cent certainty that most of the warming that has taken place since the 1950s is the result of human actions. The climate is changing, the sea level is rising, the oceans and land surfaces are warming. The average temperature increase, since the beginning of the 20th century until 2010, has been 0.85 degrees Celsius. Over the same period the sea level has risen, on average, by 19cm. And changes in precipitation are taking place along with an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.

"We've also come up with projections for the future. We've assessed four different scenarios, one of which is a 'do nothing, just continue with business as usual' scenario. If that were to happen, we could see a rise in temperature of as much as 4.8 degrees by the end of the century along with a sea-level rise of up to 98cm. We also know that the extreme events we're experiencing will become more frequent and more intense; so much so that a heatwave which now comes, say, once in 20 years, would be occurring once in every two years.

"We would see an increase in extreme precipitation events. Larger quantities of rainfall would occur in the form of heavy falls, putting life and property at risk, and affecting the water supply so that water might not be available year-round.

"Climate change will adversely affect human health and agriculture, with implications for food security. Rising temperatures would reduce yields of wheat, rice and maize, and most likely other crops, too.

"There's a whole range of things we need to do if we want to limit the temperature increase to a maximum of two degrees by the end of the century.

"First, we would have to make sure that by 2050 the emissions of greenhouse gases were at least 40 to 70 per cent lower than those in 2010. That would mean moving to renewable and low-emission sources of energy on a large scale by the middle of the century and ensuring that we have zero carbon emissions by the end of the century. Additionally, we would have to use energy much more efficiently. We would have to consider nuclear energy, bioenergy and carbon capture and storage. We would have to stop deforestation across the globe and expand the area under forest.

"So the sum and substance of what we found is that the impacts of climate change are already upon us and we have to adapt to them. Even if we brought emissions down to zero, or drastically low levels, these impacts would continue for several decades, because there's a certain time lag in the system. But adaptation alone is not enough because the impacts will become progressively worse. We have to mitigate the emissions of greenhouse gases. And that's a global challenge because these are gases which mix freely in the atmosphere.

"The world has to move quickly if we want to contain the extent of this problem. But we can do it - it is within our means. There will be costs incurred but these would be very low. We've estimated that if we embark on this pathway of mitigation, it would involve a loss of around 1.7 per cent of global GDP [gross domestic product]. But there would be huge benefits to offset that: a higher level of energy security, a cleaner atmosphere and possibilities of higher employment.

"There are some costs in taking action but they are nothing compared to the costs of inaction. It's essential for us to eliminate the risks of climate change, this will lead us to a better future, not only for our generation but also for generations to come."

 

"At the symposium, I'm taking part in a panel discussion called Climate Challenges for Chinese Cities. I'm going to talk about the public health perspective.

"We have data, recorded by the Hong Kong Observatory, showing that there has been a mean temperature increase of 0.15 degrees Celsius per decade in the period from 1947 to 2013. The warming has become significantly faster since 1984 - it's now at a rate of 0.2 degrees per decade. This increase can be attributed to urbanisation as well as global warming.

"In terms of tackling the health risks and impact of climate change, we follow World Health Organisation guidelines. The WHO has strategies and actions for tackling the health-related hazards of global warming at a local level. They focus on four areas: improving advocacy and increasing awareness; strengthening partnerships internationally as well as locally; enhancing scientific evidence - we need more research so we better understand the health risks and how to deal with them; and assessing how different regions may react on account of their own systems, infrastructures, capacity and so on.

"The WHO also advocates that member states have the appropriate adaptive strategies and action plans to mitigate the risks and impact of climate change. The three areas we work on are surveillance, prevention and control.

"Floods and warmer weather may lead to an increase in mosquito-related diseases such as dengue fever, malaria and Japanese encephalitis. Incidence of those diseases isn't an issue in Hong Kong at the moment; any cases we have seen have been imported by travellers.

"Our Food and Environmental Hygiene Department regularly monitors the population of aedine mosquitoes [which transmit dengue fever] using the Ovitrap Index. They monitor 44 areas in Hong Kong where this mosquito is prevalent. If an area has high numbers of the mosquito then the department will go and spray with insecticide and give more health education to people in that area.

"We also monitor rodent populations, using an index to monitor if there are any changes. If the weather gets warmer, this will affect environmental hygiene, so there will be a risk of more rodents. Again, we don't see any increases at the moment.

"And we monitor food-borne diseases. In warmer weather, microbes grow faster so food may go bad more easily. Our Centre for Food Safety has a surveillance programme which takes 65,000 samples from different foods throughout the year. We sample at the import, supply and retail level. Again, we don't have a major problem but we are always on our guard.

"We have a close relationship with China and maintain a mechanism for communication. There are certain units in China we work with and share intelligence with. I think this communication platform is very important. Hong Kong can't change the health care systems in Chinese cities but we can share our information and experience."

 

 

 

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: A meeting of minds
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