Pachauri laments failure on climate adaptation

By Daniel Nelson

Although adapting to climate change has risen up the international agenda “we haven’t really come up with specifics on what needs to be done either at the global level or even more importantly at the local level”, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told OneWorld today.

“What we really need to do is to come up with substance on how communities can adapt,” he said.

He called for policies, money and technologies that would help communities adapt to changing climate - particularly in the most vulnerable regions in the world.

Pachauri pointed out that even if emissions were substantially reduced from current levels global warming would continue for at least few decades – “So adaptation is inevitable and rather urgent.”

He said that the initiative “has to come from the grassroots level. It has to be community based. Of course, one must facilitate this at the international and national levels but the capacity to bring about adaptation and the ability to mobilise all the resources that are required at the local level is essentially something local communities must seize as their responsibility and their mission.”

Pachauri was interviewed during a conference on climate adaptation in Dhaka, Bangladesh, organised by IIED and the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies.