Adaptation conversations are becoming urgent

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to improve their climate literacy so as to understand the projected impacts from the expanding climate crisis and how to adapt their workplaces in the face of these impacts.

Adaptation to extreme events is becoming an urgent conversation in many places.

Take the Pearl River basin in China for example. This is a densely populated area, with some of the largest cities in the world and home to some 127 million people.

To be clear, this basin is prone to flooding with historical records dating back 1,000 years, but as we continue to heat the intensity of these events and their frequency is increasing.

What we see happening here, and in many other places across the globe, is happening at a background heating of +1.3°C (lastest 5-year average) above the 1850-1900 average.

Since we have lost the ability to keep warming at this level and in the next few years we will be at +1.5°C, what will happen to this region and many like it when the globe is +0.2° warmer?

We know the answer to this question!

As a result, not beginning an earnest conversation of how to adapt to repeated events like this, with increasing intensity would be highly irresponsible.

Do you know what the extreme event projections are for your area? How prepared are you for these?