A humanitarian perspective on climate services (Speaker: Dr. Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre)

Speaker: Dr. Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and adjoint Research Scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Columbia University

Climate change is a visible reality almost everywhere. With the Paris Agreement there is also a clear political mandate to address not only rising greenhouse emissions but also changing climate risks. Climate services are a key component of effective responses — informing policy makers, practitioners and the general public about what to expect, now and in the future. The Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre has played a key role in the development of climate services focused on humanitarian contexts — with a special focus on extreme weather events, and on vulnerable contexts, especially in developing countries.

This colloquium will present a number of examples of such applications of climate information for decision-making in relation to disaster risk, from early warning across timescales (including forecast-based financing to incentivise early action ahead of the disaster), to attribution of extreme weather events. A key question is how to combine information on the various determinants of changing risks, which include climate-related hazards, but also vulnerability and exposure. In many cases, climate change merely aggravates existing trends in risk, in some cases climate change is falsely blamed for risks that actually have other causes, but in some other cases we are facing entirely new risks that require a shift in humanitarian priorities