Veerabhadran Ramanathan*, Joachim von Braun** and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco***
*University of California at San Diego, Cornell University & Pontifical Academy of Sciences
** University of Bonn & Pontifical Academy of Sciences
*** University of Massachusetts at Boston and Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences
August 9, 2024
The first twenty years of the 21st century were the hottest in the global instrumental record (1). This instrumental record began around the late nineteenth century. The hottest year in the record is 2023, which may have exceeded even the paleotemperature records going back to 125,000 years ago (1).
The emission of the major heat-trapping pollutants is also breaking records, reaching nearly 40.9 billion tons of CO2 in 2023 (2). CO2 is a long-lived gas, which, once released into the air, stays there for centuries to millennia. The CO2 blanket covering the planet now weighs about 1,200 billion tons.
The ripple effect of climate change is felt in all aspects of human existence (illustration below):
Why are the emission and temperature curves not bending despite three decades of negotiations among leaders of nations? This is for historians to ponder, but here, we will dive into the consequences of inactions to bend the curve.
Even if we take decisive actions to bend the curve now, the warming will continue to get worse for at least the next 25 years, simply because of the inertia in the natural systems (oceans and glaciers) and the social systems (scaling of technologies globally is but one example) (3). The global temperature is expected to cross the much-dreaded threshold of 1.5°C around 2030 (4). A warming planet has no climate norms, since each year will be hotter than the prior years, with more weather extremes than those experienced during prior years.
While the human-made decadal-scale warming of the planet inflicts chronic pain on people and ecosystems, the year-to-year natural variations like El Niño, over the longer-term warming, inflict acute pain through storms, floods, fires, and droughts.
The cost of doing nothing is excessive and cumulatively can reach $178 trillion from 2020 to 2070 (5), forcing a billion people to migrate. By then we will cross several tipping points in the natural and social systems.
MAST: A New Way to navigate through the climate crisis
We need a new way to navigate the climate crisis and protect people and ecosystems. We cannot rely just on mitigation of emissions. We need to complement mitigation with adaptation to cope with the additional heating of the planet in the coming decades to survive. We need to complement mitigation and adaptation with societal transformation to survive as well as thrive, and evolve to a sustainable way of living. An evolution to a sustainable way of living is essential to build and protect a habitable planet for our progenies and future generations.
We must broaden the current approach of a dominant focus on Mitigation to climate resilience. Resilience consists of the following actions: i) Anticipate threats and risks; ii) Prepare for threats and risks; iii) Respond to threats and risks; and iv) Recover and Rebound from threats and risks. Mitigation, Adaptation, and Societal Transformation form the three pillars for climate resilience (6). This new way of navigating through the climate crisis is referred to as the MAST approach, where MAST is the acronym for Mitigation, Adaptation and Societal Transformation (7).
Mitigation to bend the warming curve by 2050 to limit the warming to below 2°C is the first Pillar of MAST. This action will significantly reduce climate risks. We must drastically reduce four short-lived climate pollutants (methane, black carbon soot, tropospheric ozone, and HFCs) to reduce the rate of warming by half in the short term (<25 years) while transitioning away from fossil fuels to decarbonize the economy during the same time. In addition, we must remove at least 300 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere during the next 40 years. The current weight of the CO2 blanket that humans have contributed to is over 1,200 billion tons.
Adaptation: Adaptation to unavoidable climate changes is the second pillar of MAST. Adaptation has three phases: reduction in sensitivity to climate change, reduction in exposure to climate threats, and enhancement of adaptive capacity. However, there are limits to human and ecosystem adaptations, and to stay within these limits, adaptation must be tightly integrated with mitigation that slows the rate of warming in the near term.
Adaptation must receive the same priority as mitigation. Adaptation, while it has been recognized to be necessary, has not received high priority in terms of climate protocols and financial commitments.
Adaptation must start at the local level of a community, a city, a village and scale upwards to an entire nation and the planet. The following actions are examples of adaptation actions we can take: i) Protect the public against heat stress, floods & droughts; ii) Provide physical & mental health services for those affected by fires, droughts, floods, and rising sea levels; iii) Climate proofing of infrastructure and homes; iv) Energy access, water, and food security for the poor; and v) Mass migration policies for those displaced by climate extremes.
Societal Transformation: Societal transformation to a sustainable way of living is essential for thriving after the climate crisis. Sustainability requires society to extract natural resources circularly. Currently, we are dumping about 2 billion tons of solid/liquid waste each year to landfills; about 50 billion tons of heat-trapping pollutant gases into the atmosphere, and polluting the oceans with plastics, raw sewage, and other waste products. Worldwide, we throw away about 30% to 40% of food in landfills. All this wasteful behavior contributes to climate change, biodiversity loss, and growing inequality.
Societal Transformation involves fundamental shifts in behavior and shifts in socio-economic systems and governance. Behavioral changes must include shifting from short-term benefits to individuals to longer-term shared benefits of societal actions. It must better balance technology with nature-based solutions to build climate resilience. It must make better use of indigenous knowledge and approaches to nature. In Pope Francis’ words, “This transformation is akin to an ecological conversion.” The climate crisis presents us with an unparalleled opportunity to build a stronger, healthier, and more just world that reflects that our thriving depends on the well-being of the natural world and other living beings.
The first step towards societal transformation is the climate/environmental literacy of the entire population from childhood to adulthood. We must develop innovative ways to provide climate and environmental literacy to educate and empower climate champions, stewards, and warriors.
Next, researchers must form transdisciplinary partnerships with civil society, including faith-based communities, to unpack climate change from all other divisive issues. We must make it crystal clear that climate change is NOT a political problem but a scientific problem backed with reliable data that threatens human survival.
In all MAST-related climate actions, nature-based solutions that are locally led and developed, targeted to reduce climate risks and to adapt to climate changes, should be given priority over all other solutions. Synergistic solutions that protect the health of nature (including biodiversity) and people’s health should be given priority.
MAST: Practical Ways of Building Resilience
Overview: Adaptation and Resilience must be designed, developed and built at local levels. They must be scaled to the state and national levels to garner the required funding.
Mitigation to reduce climate risks is, in part, a top-down process beginning at the national and international levels and implemented locally. The primary reason is a scientific one: Emissions anywhere mean global heating everywhere. The long lifetimes of heat-trapping pollutants, from months to decades to centuries, imply that emissions in any corner of the planet can travel from thousands of kilometers to the entire planet from the Arctic to the Antarctic and cover it like a blanket. Like a blanket that keeps us warm during a cold winter night by trapping our body heat, the blanket of gases traps the infrared heat emitted by the surface and some atmospheric gases (water vapor mainly) and heats the planet.
Since we have been unable to bend the emissions curve, we must anticipate and prepare for hardships for at least the next few decades, when the warming curve will point upwards. The warming curve will bend in about 25 years, provided we take drastic mitigation actions now and moving forward. Implementing MAST will ensure that we survive and thrive during the next 25 years and beyond.
The issue of survival over the next 25 years will be a massive challenge for the poorest three billion people on the planet who are still relying on elemental technologies to meet basic needs such as cooking and home heating/cooling. The combined emissions of heat-trapping pollutants by these three billion is less than 10%, but they have suffered 75% of the climate-impacts-related losses during the last few decades. The societal transformation part of MAST will ensure that these three billion are treated fairly and with justice. The primary challenge for the rest of society is to ensure the security of energy, water, and food for the poorest three billion.
PAS/PASS Initiative and Leadership
A series of meetings on climate change organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS) since 2011 (8), as well as meetings organized jointly with the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS) since 2014 (9), have paved the way for an influential transdisciplinary alliance between climate science, social science, policy, and religion. This alliance already has a demonstrable impact on climate change dialogue by bringing the human dimension of the climate problem to the fore. For example, in his climate encyclical published in 2015, Pope Francis wrote: The cry of the earth should be heard with the cry of the poor.
The lack of enforceable emissions policies, combined with the planet’s rapid warming during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, persuaded PAS and PASS that we must pursue a new way to protect people and nature. This led to a new PAS and PASS initiative called Resilience of People and Ecosystems under Climate Stress (10) to bring researchers, policy-makers, and faith leaders together to understand the scientific and societal challenges of climate change and develop solutions for enabling resilient people and resilient ecosystems. To take this initiative further, PAS organized a meeting of experts in July 2022 (10). At this meeting, the MAST concept for resilience was proposed (6,11). The MAST as an implementable strategy for resilience was accepted by all the experts attending the meeting in a conference declaration (12).
The 2022 resilience meeting led to the realization that resilience must be built at the local level of a city and a state. This, in turn, led to the decision that the next meeting must bring in Mayors and Governors from around the world. The call for this summit declared (13): We no longer have the luxury of relying just on emissions mitigation. We need to build climate resilience so people can bend the emissions curve and bounce back from the climate crisis safer, healthier, and wealthier to a sustainable world. This summit, proposed by Ramanathan (PAS) and Suárez-Orozco (PASS), was organized jointly by PAS and PASS on May 15-17, 2024.
PAS/PASS has also held several meetings on systems impacted by climate change; the most notable one was on food, titled Science and Innovations for a Sustainable Food System (14). The topics covered (15) included Food Systems Resilience, Climate Change and Food Systems, Water for Food Systems, and Agroecology for Low- and Middle-Income Countries.
Transdisciplinary Partnerships: The two academies brought together a diverse international group of researchers, faith leaders, policymakers, and heads of cities, towns, governorates, and provinces, assembled under the auspices of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Pope Francis presided over the summit.
The Global Summit assembled a group of mayors and governors worldwide to discuss and showcase innovative solutions for climate resilience. Participating Mayors and Governors were selected based on risks faced, population vulnerability, scalability of practices, and engagement in scaling up solutions. The topic of the discussions was in the domains of Water, Air, Food, and Energy, with a focus on governance and human health.
Planetary Call to Action for Climate Change Resilience
The primary outcome of the summit was a Planetary Call to Action for Climate Change Resilience (Ramanathan, V; Suárez-Orozco, M; von Braun, J; Alford, H; Turkson, P; and 15 other authors – see Reference #14 below, 2024) by PAS and PASS (16), signed by all attendees including Pope Francis and all the attending Mayors and Governors. The Planetary Call to Action is fashioned somewhat along the lines of the successful Montreal Protocol, which phased out ozone-depleting chemicals from the atmosphere. The protocol elements were chosen to meet the criteria of the MAST strategy for climate change resilience. It calls for resilience as a human rights issue, addressing inequity issues for the poorest three billion people, the rapid phasing out of fossil fuels, and climate literacy for all ages from children to adulthood, among several others, that pave the way for surviving the crisis while thriving through it. Listed below are two of the protocols that relate to the implementation of the planetary call to action:
· Researchers and policymakers working on solutions should adopt evidence-based trans-disciplinary collaborations that involve Mayors, Governors, and local NGOs to manage the resources available at various levels of government.
· Climate change is global, impacts locally, and requires local action. Therefore, we call upon heads of nations to facilitate more vital voices of mayors and governors in international climate policies.
Next Steps: Sub-Regional Implementation Plans for Resilience Actions
We begin with the status of current climate action efforts dealing with climate resilience. Most of the intellectual, policy, and financial efforts of the last few decades have been directed at mitigating emissions. The topic of adaptation has largely been ignored until recently, at least concerning finance flows for adaptation.
For example, a 2023 report published by the United Nations Environment Program on adaptation, which is titled Adaptation Gap Report 2023: Underfinanced and Underprepared (17), concludes that inadequate investment and planning on climate adaptation leaves the world exposed. Another report published by the Global Center on Adaptation (https://gca.org) mentions that (18):
Global climate finance doubled in the last two years to USD 1.3 trillion annually in 2021-2022 compared to the USD 653 billion tracked on average in 2019-2020. Unfortunately, global adaptation finance is diminishing in importance, from 7% in 2019-2020 to 5% of total climate finance in 2021-2022.
However, the planning and policies on adaptation are in slightly better shape, as reported by IPCC in its most recent report titled Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report (19): Adaptation planning and implementation has progressed across all sectors and regions, with documented benefits and varying effectiveness. Despite progress, adaptation gaps exist and will continue to grow at current rates of implementation. Hard and soft limits to adaptation have been reached in some ecosystems and regions. Maladaptation is happening in some sectors and regions. Current global financial flows for adaptation are insufficient for, and constrain implementation of, adaptation options, especially in developing countries (high confidence). Adaptation, as well as societal transformation, must be given the same priority as mitigation, since people are suffering from ongoing climate changes and the associated weather extremes. Resilience has to address the policies, the implementable actions and the financial flows to ensure the well being of people and ecosystems (illustrated below).
Towards this goal, we propose sub-regional summits in about 6 to 10 jurisdictions (including developed, developing, and least developed nations) worldwide. The Planetary Call to Action document spells out the actions we need to take. The regional summits should directly address implementing the MAST strategy (Mitigation/Adaptation/Societal Transformation). Specifically, the summits should address: (a) What will it take to implement the recommended solutions in the Planetary Call to Action Vatican document in disparate world regions? (b) How do we best foster a dialogue that will lead to local knowledge sharing and, whenever possible, local nature-based solutions to address regional climate challenges? (c) How do we best scale up solutions between and across participating regions?
The primary outcome of the regional summits should be city-by-city or county-by-county blueprints for climate change resilience. These blueprint efforts must be led by local leaders: mayors, governors, researchers, faith-based institutions, indigenous communities, and civic society. It is recommended that the regional Summits be co-sponsored by PAS and PASS during 2025/2026. The expectation is that the blueprints from the 6 to 10 jurisdictions will be published under the sponsorship of PAS and PASS and will serve as examples of how to make the whole world climate resilient.
We are aware that what is being proposed is a Herculean task. But the climate crisis demands it. We will survive and thrive with the MAST strategy and the Call for Action. The proposed plans will advance the Call to Action for a universal protocol of resilience, as Pope Francis called it in his speech on May 16, 2024, to the Resilience Summit attendees: “I commend the two Academies for producing a universal protocol of resilience.”
References:
(1) https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/paleoclimatology/paleo-perspectives/global-warming
(2) https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152519/emissions-from-fossil-fuels-continue-to-rise
(3) Ramanathan, V., Xu, Y. & Versaci, A. Modelling human-natural systems interactions with implications for twenty-first century warming. Nat Sustain 5, 263-271 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00826-z
(4) Xu, Y., Ramanathan, V. and Victor, D.G., 2018. Global warming will happen faster than we think. Nature 564, 30-32 (2018). doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07586-5
(5) The Turning Point – Global Summary, 2022, Deloitte Report.
(6) Ramanathan, V. and Joachim von Braun (Editors), 2022: Resilience of People and Ecosystems under Climate Stress. Published by: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. See Chapters: V Ramanathan: Climate Resilience: Why, When and How, pp. 19-28.
(7) Suárez-Orozco, M. and V. Ramanathan: Op-ed in The Hill, March 21, 2024. https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/4544594-a-forward-thinking-strategy-to-survive-and-thrive-through-climate-change/
(8) https://www.pas.va/en/events/2011/glaciers/final_statement.html
(9) https://www.pas.va/en/publications/extra-series/es41pas.html
(10) https://www.pas.va/en/events/2022/resilience.html
(11) https://www.pas.va/en/publications/scripta-varia/sv152pas/ramanathan.html
(12) https://www.pas.va/en/events/2022/resilience/final-statement-of-the-workshop-on-resilience-of-people-and-ecos.html
(13) https://www.pas.va/en/events/2024/climate_resilience.html
(14) https://www.pas.va/en/events/2021/food_systems/final_statement.html
(15) von Braun, J; Afsana, K; Fresco, L; Hassan, M. 2023. Science and Innovations for Food Systems Transformation. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-15703-5. Book published by Springer.
(16) Ramanathan, V; Suárez-Orozco, M; von Braun, J; Alford, H.; Turkson, P; Gustafsson, O; Hassan, M; Schellnhuber, J; Viana, V; Lee, H.; McCarthy, G; Narain, S; Dreyfus, G; Farrar, J; Kimutai, J; Hoffer, M; Suárez-Orozco, C; Swaminathan, S; Picolotti, R; Yu, K; 2024: Planetary Call To Action for Climate Change Resilience. Published by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
(17) https://www.unep.org/resources/adaptation-gap-report-2023
(18) https://gca.org/reports/state-and-trends-in-climate-adaptation-finance-2024/
(19) https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf