Recently, I blogged about my sobering week at the excellent Fisheries Climate Awareness Workshop (CLAW), it was designed to enhance knowledge and awareness of SPC member countries and territories on climate issues and projected impacts on the industrial fisheries of the western and central Pacific.
SPC did a wonderful compilation of the event and put it on a website. As said I would blog progressively about the presentations that I found contributed more to my understanding (primarily as a way for me to consolidate what I learned), I would link to CLAW’s depository as I walk down the experience… so here is the 1st presentation we had: Climate change terminology
Espen Ronneberg from the SPC did the presentation (link to download). I had never met him before, and I was profoundly impressed. He spent a lot of time working with RMI, and we had that in common. The man knows his stuff, and he made quite a few presentations.
His presentation clarified essential terminology such as the greenhouse effect, carbon footprint, adaptation, and mitigation.
The presentation also clarified key concepts to establish a common understanding between participants. Overall, he noted that it is important for all sectors to be cognizant of the language used by other sectors and to enhance climate change literacy at all levels.
The terminology for climate change needs to be unpacked in terms that the broader public can understand. For example, the concept of a blanket of greenhouse gases can be quite effective when talking about warming, and the increased emissions contribute to the thickening of that blanket. This, in turn, increases the level of energy of the atmospheric system, leading to more extreme impacts of what is already observed from climate variability.
During the discussion, it was noted that climate justice is not a term that was used in the presentation; rather, the terms loss and damage were referred to. Climate justice is used in fisheries in the Pacific. Climate justice was brought to the climate change discussions by civil society and it is used to highlight the injustice of the problem.
For example, Pacific Island Countries (PICTs) produce the fewest impacts globally but get the brunt of the damage from the impacts of climate change. However, the term climate justice has not been accepted internationally. Oil producers say that stopping oil production is an injustice for them, so they are unwilling to use that term. Some aspects, such as security around climate change, are acknowledged, and this may be more constructive terminology to use when engaging with polluters.
It was also noted that climate change and climate variability are defined on different scales. Climate change is a longer-term impact, and climate variability is more short-term, such as a switch in ENSO state, but both are caused by climate change. Variability has short-term impacts but the system usually can revert back to its original state, whereas climate change is longer-term and cannot be reversed.
The positive impacts of climate change tend to be highly localised from a global perspective. For example, you may increase rice production in a small local area, but globally rice production will decrease. As a result, the small positive local changes are overwhelmed by the global-scale negative changes.