A Call for Action on Climate Change

Paul Kovacs is a self-confessed non-morning person. Of course, there are always exceptions: late last year, for example, he woke up to an email from the secretariat of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) telling him that the panel’s work had earned the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

He smiles and admits the news put a little extra pep in his step — even though the prize was to be shared with ex-U. S. vice president Al Gore, who appears in the popular movie about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth.

Kovacs credits his work with the Toronto-based Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) as the launching pad that spurred his 11-year involvement with the IPCC.

Prior to his career as a climate change researcher, Kovacs worked as a civil servant at Queen’s Park in Ontario. He was working for the Ministry of Finance in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew pummelled the southern coast of Florida. The event served as a trigger to begin a dialogue between government and insurers here in Canada, Kovacs said. The dialogue explored the question: If an event of such magnitude were to hit Canada, would the insurance industry and Canadians at large be prepared to handle the consequences?

At that time, representatives from the insurance industry, government and the science community met “to look at all of the different kinds of natural perils that can occur in Canada — things like earthquakes or a severe weather event,” Kovacs says.

“We brought in a number of scientists to discuss the different risks and we determined how ready the insurance industry was to do its job. We came out of there with the sense — and I proposed this back to the industry — that we should have this long-term dialogue between researchers and the insurance industry.”

Hence, the ICLR was formed. “From that early work, that’s how I was invited to represent Canada on the IPCC,” Kovacs says.

THE COLLECTIVE GOOD

The IPCC consists of government representatives and researchers from 180 countries. Conceived more than 20 years ago, the panel is essentially a creature of the governments involved. The collective has written four reports, each taking between five and six years to complete, exploring climate-related issues as determined by the government representatives.

Government representatives formulate the questions. They might ask, for example: Are there more severe events happening? Are we prepared for these events? Are we learning from things that happened in the past?

Researchers are divided into teams. Each team attempts to answer different elements of the questions government representatives pose.

“It’s an incredibly rigorous process,” Kovacs says. Each team of scientists reads through and summarizes all of the existing research and literature on the topic that they’ve been assigned. Their summaries, reviewed by another team of researchers, serve as a reflection of what the science is saying. “So in essence other scientists are looking over our shoulders to check to see if we got it right,” Kovacs says.

Once the review group gives its feedback, the working group is charged with explaining how it will modify the findings or “stick with what we said.”

Once that step is complete, politicians representing the governments appearing on the panel review the working group’s findings and offer editorial comments. That aspect of the process, Kovacs says, “was very helpful, and sometimes challenging because politicians look at the questions differently than the scientists. But to communicate what we were finding, I thought that the editorial comments they were offering were often very helpful.”

Once the next round of feedback is taken into consideration, a smaller group of scientists write a summary document that serves as a high-profile report of the project. “And it’s edited one sentence at a time by the governments,”Kovacs adds. “So when the panel says there is a scientific consensus that the climate has changed, that’s incredibly powerful.”

Kovacs participated in the panel’s third and fourth reports (released in 2001 and 2007, respectively). To have a few thousand of his words appear in a report that was drafted over a period of five or six years doesn’t sound very demanding, he chuckles. “But it had to fit into the context of what everyone else was saying, and it had to go through this rigorous process. So, it was very challenging, but very rewarding.”

Having the Nobel Peace Prize bestowed on the IPCC’s work, Kovacs says, recognized “the ongoing effort to understand what’s happening to the climate and communicate it so that decision-makers in government could make better decisions.”

Because of the IPCC’s collective work over the past two decades, there’s no longer a debate in the science community that the earth’s weather is in fact changing, and that the change is accelerating, Kovacs says. “And now, let’s move on. There are a lot of other questions to deal with — like, what do we do about it?”

SHELTER FROM THE STORMS

For some, climate change is a frightening reality, but Kovacs is invigorated by the research opportunities it affords. His primary focus, he says, is to develop better ways for people to protect themselves from the severe weather and events associated with the phenomenon. The ICLR’s research focus encompasses four major Canadian perils: earthquakes, floods, windstorms and wildfire.

On the global stage, Kovacs has offered to continue working with the IPCC. So far, his work with the organization has caught the attention of another global research organization: the International Council for Science (ICS). Based in Paris, the ICS last November decided a global integrated hazard analysis of all natural hazards is a priority and chose the ICLR to head up the project.

Kovacs says the project will explore two trends. The first trend is encouraging, he says. Even though the frequency of severe weather events is increasing, and the global population is expanding, death rates as a result of natural catastrophes are declining. Kovacs says this is a positive sign, but insists there is room for improvement. “Where we are losing ground is the property damage,” he says. “On that front, we’re still seeing losses double every five to seven years. It’s a very disturbing logarithmic trend.”

Although the formalities of the project are still being ironed out, Kovacs says he hopes one day to see the project reach the same scale as the IPCC. “On my boldest of days, I would love to see this in the same way that the dialogue on climate change takes place,” he says. “Let’s organize researchers from all around the world to the greatest extent we can to engage in this dialogue under this overarching framework that we put together, and try to document and communicate what we’re learning about loss control and loss prevention from all of the different hazards around the world.”

The mandate of the IPCC is clearly defined by governments. But the new program’s research on hazards will be steered by the science community. “What do the scientists think need to be dealt with?” Kovacs says, outlining some of the questions the hazard analysis might yet tackle. “Can we facilitate and document that process to help scientists better understand some of the questions that other scientists are raising? Can we direct more of the scientific work to things like loss prevention and loss control?”

Although the project will have a “modest” start — as it stands, Lloyd’s of London announced in late November a Cdn$100,000 sponsorship of the program, Kovacs is in active discussions with the Government of Canada to help secure funding — Kovacs remains confident, that like the IPCC and the ICLR, its research findings will have a great impact.