
The character and severity of impacts from climate extremes depend not only on the extremes themselves but also on exposure and vulnerability. In this report, adverse impacts are considered disasters when they produce widespread damage and cause severe alterations in the normal functioning of communities or societies. Climate extremes, exposure, and vulnerability are influenced by a wide range of factors, including anthropogenic climate change, natural climate variability, and socioeconomic development ....Disaster risk management and adaptation to climate change focus on reducing exposure and vulnerability and increasing resilience to the potential adverse impacts of climate extremes, even though risks cannot fully be eliminated... Although mitigation of climate change is not the focus of this report, adaptation and mitigation can complement each other and together can significantly reduce the risks of climate change....
This report integrates perspectives from several historically distinct research communities studying climate science, climate impacts, adaptation to climate change, and disaster risk management. Each community brings different viewpoints, vocabularies, approaches, and goals, and all provide important insights into the status of the knowledge base and its gaps. Many of the key assessment findings come from the interfaces among these communities. These interfaces are also illustrated in Table SPM.1. To accurately convey the degree of certainty in key findings, the report relies on the consistent use of calibrated uncertainty language...
No comments:
Post a Comment