Food, water security at heart of existential climate threat
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Nirmal Ghosh US Bureau Chief In Washington, Nirmal Ghosh
Given how far behind efforts are to keep global warming to 1.5 deg C above pre-industrial levels, despite the pledges from US President Joe Biden's climate summit, adaptation to warming's worst effects must be a priority, the summit heard on Thursday.
Water and agriculture are at the heart of the adaptation challenge. The US itself is seeing billions of dollars' worth of damage from floods and wildfires, exacerbated by global warming and likely to only get worse if the current path of 3 deg C of warming continues.
Dutch Minister for Infrastructure and Water Management Cora van Nieuwenhuizen, in a breakout session on resilience and food security, said: "Ninety per cent of all climate disasters involve water."
She urged a scale-up in investment in adaptation, saying she was ensuring that the Netherlands' foreign economic aid is equally focused "50-50 on mitigation and adaptation".
Separately, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin warned that the climate crisis is a "profoundly destabilising force for our world".
"Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis," he said at the summit, which ended yesterday.
"We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does."
Speaking to reporters later at the White House, Mr Biden's special envoy for climate change John Kerry, who alongside the President and Secretary of State Antony Blinken chaired some of the summit's discussions, said: "Today, we've built a huge foundational building block... the world came together."
But he cautioned: "I'm not sanguine. The next six months of diplomacy will be absolutely critical. It's progress, but we still have a heavy lift and no one should doubt the challenges of the road ahead."
The "six months of diplomacy" was a reference to the six months left to the 26th Conference of the Parties in November in Glasgow, commonly called the UN Climate Conference, where commitments made will be legally binding.
Mr Kerry acknowledged there was scepticism about the United States, especially after the previous administration pulled the country out of the Paris Agreement on curbing global warming.
"We had to restore America's credibility. We had to prove that we were serious. And I think today does that in many ways," he said.
