In less than 30 years, the EU will be fully customized to the inevitable consequences of climate change. At the same time, the Swedish government is cutting its budget for this purpose a third, from 137 to 90 million. The need for climate adaptation in Sweden’s municipalities has a bigger gap – this year they have together applied for more than 800 million at MSB.
– I don’t know if politicians understand how radical the adaptation needs to be, says Lisa Schipper who is a professor of development geography at the University of Bonn and who has contributed to several of the IPCC’s reports.
Green areas, flood dikes and cooling fountains are all examples of visible climate adaptations in Sweden. The aim is to secure our homes, health and food in the event of disasters such as floods and heat waves. But to make our communities resilient to worse case scenarios, like the latest report from IPCC predicts, we need to think further than that, Lisa Schipper’s research shows.
Three steps to transformation
In climate adaptation research, they talk about three dimensions of adaptation: Resilience, transit and transformative. Where Resilience is about changes with a more short-term perspective and transformative a more long-term one.
Resilience climate adaptation can mean painting white ceilings in a retirement home to provide coolness. While transit can mean a rebuilding of the old people’s home which means that the air flow is better and the heat absorption is less.
The last and most long-term climate adaptation transforms, that is, transforms, the whole idea of the retirement home. Here, it may be relevant to move the entire operation to another location.
– We must not think as we have always thought. We have to ask ourselves if certain places are sustainable to live in and if we should even grow crops that are sensitive to heat, says Lisa Schipper.