Executive Summary

Disaster signifies extreme impacts suffered when hazardous physical events interact with vulnerable social conditions to severely alter the normal functioning of a community or a society (high confidence). Social vulnerability and exposure are key determinants of disaster risk and help explain why non-extreme physical events and chronic hazards can also lead to extreme impacts and disasters, while some extreme events do not. Extreme impacts on human, ecological, or physical systems derive from individual extreme or non-extreme events, or a compounding of events or their impacts (for example, drought creating the conditions for wildfire, followed by heavy rain leading to landslides and soil erosion). [1.1.2.1, 1.1.2.3, 1.2.3.1, 1.3]

Management strategies based on the reduction of everyday or chronic risk factors and on the reduction of risk associated with non-extreme events, as opposed to strategies based solely on the exceptional or extreme, provide a mechanism that facilitates the reduction of disaster risk and the preparation for and response to extremes and disasters (high confidence). Effective adaptation to climate change requires an understanding of the diverse ways in which social processes and development pathways shape disaster risk. Disaster risk is often causally related to ongoing, chronic, or persistent environmental, economic, or social risk factors. [1.1.2.2, 1.1.3, 1.1.4.1, 1.3.2]

Development practice, policy, and outcomes are critical to shaping disaster risk (high confidence). Disaster risk may be increased by shortcomings in development. Reductions in the rate of depletion of ecosystem services, improvements in urban land use and territorial organization processes, the strengthening of rural livelihoods, and general and specific advances in urban and rural governance advance the composite agenda of poverty reduction, disaster risk reduction, and adaptation to climate change. [1.1.2.1, 1.1.2.2, 1.1.3, 1.3.2, 1.3.3]

Context

This Summary for Policymakers presents key findings from the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX). The SREX approaches the topic by assessing the scientific literature on issues that range from the relationship between climate change and extreme weather and climate events (‘climate extremes’) to the implications of these events for society and sustainable development. The assessment concerns the interaction of climatic, environmental, and human factors that can lead to impacts and disasters, options for managing the risks posed by impacts and disasters, and the important role that non-climatic factors play in determining impacts. Box SPM.1 defines concepts central to the SREX.

The character and severity of impacts from climate extremes depend not only on the extremes themselves but also on exposure and vulnerability. In this report, adverse impacts are considered disasters when they produce widespread damage and cause severe alterations in the normal functioning of communities or societies. Climate extremes, exposure, and vulnerability are influenced by a wide range of factors, including anthropogenic climate change, natural climate variability, and socioeconomic development (Figure SPM.1). Disaster risk management and adaptation to climate change focus on reducing exposure and vulnerability and increasing resilience to the potential adverse impacts of climate extremes, even though risks cannot fully be eliminated (Figure SPM.2). Although mitigation of climate change is not the focus of this report, adaptation and mitigation can complement each other and together can significantly reduce the risks of climate change. [SYR AR4, 5.3]

The Letters of Martin Duber is an important and extremely well executed text, based upon the three-volume German edition of 1975. It includes a fine 62-page biographical sketch by Grete Schaeder that reviews the major persons and developments in Buber's life, extensive notes to the individual letters of Buber and his correspondents by Mendes-Flohr, a descriptive list of correspondents, photographs, and an index. In all, the editors provide all the requisite resources to enable the reader to plumb the depths of this valuable cache.

What might we hope to find in turning to the letters of a man who is famous for his philosophic writings about the redemptive quality of relationship? We might hope to encounter exchanges that are not mere correspondence, to uncover insights into the ways in which individuals struggle together with matters of ultimate concern. The letters do not only succeed in providing such moments and insights, but they also corroborate Buber's understanding that the most elevated events of ‘the between’ are transient. The letters attest to what Ernst Simon described as Buber's ‘sense of “responsibility for the word“’ (p. xii). However, in the light of the heavy volume of daily correspondence Buber faced, one must admire his honest admission that he is surprised when a ‘real letter’ issues from his pen (p. 288).

Paradoxically, the text gives evidence of Huber's ambivalence concerning the writing of letters. In addition to being demanding work, Buber and many of those who corresponded with him believed that writing was an inadequate substitute for speaking face to face (p. 269). In the letters there are an impressive number of allusions to how powerful such personal encounters with him really were (p. 606). Letters were also problematic for Buber because, even in the context of a dialogue, he valued most highly the silent exchange of glances between persons (p. 288; see also his essay ‘Dialogue’).

The letters vividly illuminate the most important relationships in his life, those with his wife Paula Winkler, Florens Christian Rang, Gustav Landauer, Franz Rosenzweig, and Ernst Simon. All of these were begun before Buber was 40, and they played decisive roles in the development of his life and thought. With the early deaths of Rang, Landauer, and Rosenzweig, Buber experienced grave personal and intellectual losses.

Introduction

The field of integrated assessment of climate change is undergoing a paradigm shift towards the analysis of potentially abrupt and irreversible climate changes (Alley et al., 2003; Keller et al., 2007). Early integrated studies broke important new ground in exploring the relationship between the costs and benefits of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (e.g., Nordhaus, 1991; Manne and Richels, 1991; or Tol, 1997). These studies project the climate response to anthropogenic CO2 emissions to be relatively smooth and typically conclude that the projected benefits of reducing CO2 emissions would justify only small reductions in CO2 emissions in a cost–benefit framework. The validity of the often- assumed smooth climate response is, however, questionable, given how the climate system has responded to forcing in the geological past. Before the Anthropocene, the geological time period where humans have started to influence the global biogeochemical cycles considerably (Crutzen, 2002), the predominant responses of the climate system were forced by small changes in solar insolation occurring on timescales of thousands of years (Berger and Loutre, 1991). Yet this slow and smooth forcing apparently triggered abrupt climate changes – a threshold response where the climate system moved between different basins of attraction (Berger, 1990; Clement et al., 2001). Anthropogenic forcing may trigger climate threshold responses in the future (Alley et al., 2003; Keller et al., 2007).

Editor's Introduction

For the last 20 years, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have played a key role in bringing environment and development issues to the attention of policy makers and business leaders. Many of today's environmental NGOs trace their roots to the international movement which formed at the beginning of this century to protect wildlife and wildlands. But over the decades, the purview and interests of these organisations, and their successors, expanded. Today, environmental NGOs are active in more than 100 countries, working on a broad range of issues affecting human health, natural ecosystems, and sustainable development. They concern themselves, for example, with toxic wastes, pesticides, water quality, air pollution, and the environmental impacts of energy supply and use.

At the same time, development-oriented NGOs are active in many Third World countries, and in some industrialized countries as well. They principally focus their attention on the rate, quality, and equity of economic development in the South; and on the economic and foreign policy dynamics of North-South relations. In the last several years, with positive effect, development NGOs have made common cause with environmental organisations to address common issues. The risks of rapid climate change, which endanger natural systems and threaten to undermine the prospects for economic growth, are often the starting point for this new commonality of purpose.

In this chapter, Dubash and Oppenheimer trace the historical development of NGOs, and the linkages between them, in industrialized and developing countries. Using case studies of the Narmada movement in India, the Green Forum in the Philippines, and the Kenya Energy and Development Organisations (KENGO), as well as specific examples from popular campaigns around environmental issues in industrialized countries.

Editor's Note: The world is changing rapidly under human influences and the changes are the enemy of life. The seriousness of the problem has remained buried until recently in the litter of aspirations for economic growth at any cost and in the convenient and comforting assumption that the biosphere is resilient, capable of absorbing any insult. Recognition of biotic impoverishment as pervasive, even global, and as a threat to economic and political security as serious as war itself is new, not yet a part of the body politic. Yet, for the environment as for any machine, once parts start breaking, damage spreads rapidly.

Michael Oppenheimer offers a physical scientist's review of the physical and chemical changes under way in our world. Although it is common to acknowledge that “everything is connected to everything else”, we rarely recognize the concatenation of physical, chemical, and biotic changes in environment that make a term such as “acid rain” a reality. The complexities acknowledged by Bormann in his assertion that the decline of forests in eastern North America is not simply and certainly ascribed to air pollution become real in Oppenheimer's discussion of the mechanisms.

The effects of changes in environment appear in plants, not as a simple response to drought or heat or toxins such as ozone, but as an increase in insect or fungal damage in trees, a mysterious chlorosis, or unexplained mortality.

Repairing a troubled world will require fundamental alterations in many aspects of human behavior.