“Climate action failure,” said Emilio Granados Franco, “is an existential threat to humanity that is going to start showing its face over the next five to 10 years.”
Granados, the Head of Global Risks and Geopolitical Agenda at the World Economic Forum, gave this sober warning about the all-too-immediate future in his opening plenary session at Engineers Australia’s Climate Smart Engineering Conference 2021.
“I don’t need to tell you about hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and polar ice melting,” Granados said. “These are, by now — or should be by now — things that we all know by memory.”
The risk of climate action failure, Granados said, has both a high likelihood and a high impact — a particularly dangerous combination. And it is, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Risks Report, one of the top five global risks as rated by likelihood as well as by severity.
And it is not the only environmental risk identified by the report, an annual global risks perception survey that the World Economic Forum has conducted since 2007. Extreme weather and human environmental damage, for instance, are also significant threats to the economy, society and planet.
“Environmental risks … have really taken the top spots both by likelihood and impact,” Granados explained.
“Twenty-twenty was the first year in the report’s history when five of the top five likely risks were all environmental.”
Immediate concerns and spillover effects
This year, infectious diseases — such as COVID-19 — made the list, but apart from that, concerns remained focused on environmental issues.
And although immediate environmental impacts of climate change are severe enough, what Granados called the “spillover effects” are also cause for alarm.
“For example, health issues,” he said. “Poor quality of air and food will only lead to [a] higher incidence of infectious diseases.”
This includes not just mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever, but also new diseases emerging from other species.
“We will also continue to see food and water prices [increase], because food production needs to double by 2050,” Granados said.
“Another spillover effect is in migration. In 2020 alone, 30 million people were far from their homes, but going forward, over the next 30 years, that number could amount to more than 200 million at risk of displacement.”
That could lead to geopolitical disputes, particularly among middle-power nations like Australia. And other political challenges could emerge, such as control over a newly ice-free Arctic Sea, disputes about overfishing, and collapsing ecosystems as a result of reduced biodiversity.
“Also, as we saw in COP26, geopolitical tensions over climate are going to expose fossil-intensive economies that may see fewer incentives or higher challenges to strongly committed climate action,” he said.
Engineers will matter
These risks mean that a transition to net-zero carbon emissions is a necessity, and that effort will require engineers.
“We have to transition to net-zero, but it’s still not clear how,” Granados said. “We know some of the most potential gains will come from technological transformation. My concern is personally that some of these technologies may be unaffordable at an individual level and also at an international level.”
He also pointed to potential trade-offs that could affect the transition, such as dependence on mineral resources.
“While some of these technologies may work, we need to get ahead of them and think about [them] over the next 20 years,” Granados said.
Developing countries, in particular, might need help to balance existing technologies with new ones.
“There are some technologies that countries invested tonnes of their public budgets in 10 years ago because they held the promise of delivering cleaner energy,” Granados said.
“Pressuring those countries to part from those technologies is as challenging as helping them finance the new ones. So we need to take technologies that still have some ways to go, but start introducing new technologies at the same time as we ease [off from] the others.”
But even though Granados focused on the climate threats that were both likely and devastating, he also touched on a couple of risks receiving less attention.
“The first one is a backlash against science,” he said.
“I’m concerned about it because we’re in a planetary crisis because we didn’t listen to the science decades ago. We were surprised by the pandemic because we didn’t listen to the science 10 years ago.”
And a distrust of scientific expertise could intensify all other problems — with climate change an example. The World Economic Forum report identified the easy — and sometimes intentional — spread of misinformation through digital networks as a concern.
“The second one is industry collapse,” Granados continued. “There are some sectors that lose from the transition, and I think also one of the reasons why we haven’t been able to see more decisive or immediate commitment from some governments is precisely because they still hinge or depend on these industries that need to be phased out — to use COP26 language … And we haven’t created the opportunities for the millions of people that are employed by them.”
How sad that the once respected Institute of Engineers has stooped to publishing and supporting the comments of someone who gets published by The Age, ABC, SBS, and SMH!
Time to get off the Climate Alarm religion bandwagon and publish reasoned, factual, scientific opinion
All frantic words and panic, no facts supplied. He states: These risks mean that a transition to net-zero carbon emissions is a necessity, and that effort will require engineers. Net zero is necessary, why? Since 1958 the increase in atmospheric CO2 was 0.5% pa. And this is in a period where anthropogenic CO2 emissions increased relentlessly.
CO2 increased from 280 ppm in 1958 to 414 ppm now, see https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ . Get out your calculator and check the slope of the increase yourself. I can give you the answer why the increase is so minimal, just give me the platform to talk facts.
It’s a disgrace that an engineering body is publishing such emotional nonsense.
This article is unscientific scare-mongering! It uses the same “next ten years” to reach a “tipping point” that has been quoted since I was a presenter at the first “Greenhouse” conference in Melbourne in the early 1980’s.
My message then was that if the assembled greenies were truly concerned about “Greenhouse” they would be pro-nuclear. The message remains the same, the resistance remains the same and one is driven to the conclusion that this is a political campaign disguised as environmental!
The facts are that hurricanes (tropical cyclical storm) are declining in intensity and frequency, both in the Atlantic and south-west Pacific. BOM published data is incontrovertible! Why is it that what purports to be a learned society does not even check when the data is freely available?
The planet has warmed by about 0.3% with a 50% increase in Carbon Dioxide partial pressure, if of course one uses the correct base temperature of 0 degrees Kelvin!
And a distrust of scientific expertise could intensify all other problems — with climate change an example. The World Economic Forum report identified the easy — and sometimes intentional — spread of misinformation through digital networks as a concern.
Such catastrophic assertions are not backed by our geological records.
We deserve a better dialogue than this.
That Engineers Australia is giving air time to this alarmist rhetoric is incredibly disappointing. Please talk to some of your members, particularly the geologists and geotechnical engineers who can reassure you that global temperatures have been both several degrees warmer and several degrees cooler than in current times. And sea levels have been considerably higher and lower, all without humans burning a single hydrocarbon! The most irrational and unscientific thinking is expecting global temperatures to remain constant forever. “Climate Action” is the 21st centuries snake oil and will do nothing to ensure a resilient and sustainable planet.