Climate change adaptation in high income countries (Some broad progress is being made)

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http://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/climate-change-adaptation-high-income-countries-256640

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Climate change adaptation in high income countries[/font]

Published: 9 Nov 2015

[font size=4]McGill-led team developing new ways of tracking adaptation[/font]

[font size=3]We all know that the climate is changing, but how can we best prepare for some of the changes that lie ahead? Should coastal cities change their building codes to accommodate rising sea levels? Should we allocate more resources to tree-planting to reduce urban heat islands? These are examples of local initiatives that can make a difference to climate change adaptation. Indeed, climate adaptation is a rapidly growing concern for the international community, and one of the key areas to watch coming out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris conference will be how commitments to adaptation are enhanced under the post-2015 agreement.

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In their latest study, published today in Nature Climate Change, the researchers compared data from two rounds of national reporting on adaptation from 41 Annex I Parties to the UNFCCC. These countries largely constitute the world’s biggest, and wealthiest, polluters. But there is good news, since the researchers report that between 2010 and 2014, these countries demonstrate that broad progress is being made on adaptation:

• There is an 87% overall increase in climate change adaptation initiatives reported among these nations;
• The greatest increases were in the areas of regulatory actions – e.g. building code changes(139%); surveillance and monitoring of things like heat waves or extreme weather risks (114%); and public awareness and outreach campaigns (101%); and
• The greatest number of initiatives in these high-income countries continue to be in the environment, water and agriculture sectors.

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