How to face the future

Arun B Shrestha :
Climate change is not just a future scenario for scientific discourse. It is already happening and will continue to happen as more heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHG) and short-lived climate pollutants (SLCP) accumulate in the atmosphere. There is strong evidence that the Earth is already 1°C hotter than at the start of the 20th Century.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development identifies climate change as one of the greatest challenges of our time, and its impacts will undermine the ability of all countries to achieve sustainable development. Sustainable Development Goal 13 is to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impact”.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the primary intergovernmental forum for negotiating the global response to climate change, unanimously recognized the need for bold action at the Conference of Parties (COP) 21 in Paris last year, at which governments agreed to “hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”.
 While these commitments are good news, they are highly ambitious and the plans developed so far cannot avoid a rise of 3°C.
According to the World Meteorological Organization, in terms of global averages, each of the past several decades has been significantly warmer than the previous one.
The period 2011-2015 was the hottest on record, and 2015 – because of a powerful El Niño – was the hottest since modern observations began in the late 1800s. Along with rising temperatures, climate change is disrupting the seasons and increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme events, such as droughts and heavy rainfall. These changes provide a foretaste of a hotter, drier, wetter future.
And when it comes to mountains, the indications are that changes will manifest in much stronger ways. The Mountain Research Initiative warns that warming will be much stronger in high elevation areas, such as the Hindu Kush Himalayas, where the impact will be compounded by biophysical fragility and socioeconomic vulnerability. ICIMOD, along with its with partners, has been conducting scientific research on climate change to support policy and action to reduce impacts and vulnerabilities.
 (To be continued)