Interview: "Climate Change is Happening Very Fast"

These are events which happen gradually, like rising sea-levels and that’s due to climate change as well. DW-Radio talked to Youssef Nassef, the head of the adaptation program at the UNFCCC about how these communities cope with climate change.

DW-Radio: Are there specific techniques that could help small communities adapt to events due to climate change?

Youssef Nassef: Yes, conventional wisdom has resulted in a lot of very elaborate coping mechanisms which are part of their daily life. When people see them from the outside, they feel that this is something we could use now that we are experiencing more floods or more droughts.

For example, there is one very interesting case among the Zaï farmers in Burkina Faso. They adopted this method where they make little holes in land that’s not suitable for farming. The farmers put animal manure in the holes which attract termites. The termites make little tunnels all around and when the rains come, the tunnels serve as a way of harvesting water. The next year they do the same but in new holes, and in five years’ time the whole piece of land is rehabilitated as such. This is a very ingenious way which makes use -- not of high technology -- but of very simple mechanisms which don’t really require any costs. That’s the deal with drought.

In Bangladesh, we also have long-standing mechanisms for dealing with floods, for example. One of them is floating agriculture. In developed countries this technique exists, but it’s very expensive. Whereas in Bangladesh, they’ve developed locally suited ways of doing it -- there are many, many examples and we have a database which collects a few hundred examples on our web site which are fascinating.

Can any of these techniques be used by other people in other communities to combat some of the effects of climate change?

Yes, and we’re actually trying to promote this. Some of these activities may be very specific to the environment from which they emerged and may be difficult to replicate elsewhere. But others are very simple.

There is the example of Peruvian farmers traveling to Bhutan to show them how to dehydrate potatoes. Bhutan was facing the problem that because of the change in climate, it was getting more and more difficult to transport the potatoes from the fields to where they were going to be used because this distance kept increasing.

The Peruvians have been dehydrating potatoes for a very long time -- potatoes emerged in Peru. They have a technique for drying the potatoes to make them lighter and then another technique for re-hydrating the potatoes so they can come back to what they were before they were dehydrated. And they taught them to the Bhutanese farmers and we found that this was very useful for them as a technique to cope with some of the effects of climate change. But we need much more of this to happen.

How many people or communities do you think could potentially benefit from something like that, like learning from another country’s or another community’s knowledge?

I think all of them, without exception, because we have not encountered any local community that would not, in one way or another, be exposed to some of the impacts of climate change, whether they’re a mountainous community or a coastal community or whether they rely on agriculture or fishing or anything else. So I doubt there’s any single community that would not be able to benefit from this sort of information gleaned from other communities.

Is there a limit to adapting to climate change?

The main challenge that poses a limit in adaptation is, I think, the speed of change. At the level of communities, the coping strategies that they have in place have been developed over a very, very long time. So, if you have very rapid changes, that really go beyond the threshold that people can respond to in terms of adaptation. And we have had cases where there has been basically a collapse in the system.

One example is a whole community in Vanuatu which has been labeled as the first climate change refugees. Late last year they had to be totally relocated because the king-waves were too frequent and too devastating compared to before. Their houses couldn’t stand it anymore and they basically didn’t have time to adapt and they lost their way of life.

Another case which is happening right now is the Inuit communities in northern Canada where they’re not able to forecast the weather or the sources of food anymore. The signs that they used to get before have totally changed and people can’t survive that way.

There are many other examples where this is happening. A few years ago we used to see climate change as a long-term issue but now we’re realizing that it’s happening very fast. The threat is much more immediate and urgent to local communities, whether they’re indigenous communities in developing countries, or in developed countries like I just mentioned in Canada for example. We have similar communities in Japan, in Australia and in New Zealand and there is a lot of impact there.

Of course, climate change is a global problem. What makes you hopeful that we are going to be in time for the developing countries to help them adapt?

Well, I wouldn’t call it hopeful -- maybe it’s a kind of cautious optimism that this will happen for a variety of reasons. One of them is that adaptation need not entail the transfer of a lot of resources from the north to the south because we’re starting to realize that there is a lot of knowledge at the level of indigenous communities. Promoting this knowledge will not take much of an effort -- it takes more of a political will at the level of the country itself basically, and of the international community, to help share these strategies -- so this is a place where a lot can be done with very little money.