Climate Change: We can't know the future but we have to plan for it anyway

In 2023, the months of June, July and August went down as the hottest northern hemisphere summer in history. Temperatures well in excess of 50 degrees Celsius were recorded in Death Valley, California on 16 July.

But extreme heat was by no means the single defining characteristic of a year that also witnessed epic storms sweep across our oceans, torrential rains in three continents and wild megafires that consumed more than 18 million hectares in Canada alone. That’s roughly the size of North Dakota.

Our world is changing. And it is changing before our eyes. Yet, even as scientists warn us that the extreme weather that tore around the globe this year is set to become the norm in the coming decades, there is still massive uncertainty around exactly how that extreme weather will manifest. And that uncertainty becomes greater still when we try to imagine how climate change will affect our local communities.

Can Londoners expect a little more rain from time to time in the winters to come? Or will they need to make emergency flood planning a routine seasonal exigency? Might summers in Edinburgh become balmy and al fresco dining the norm in the month of August? Or will the Scottish capital need to brace for droughts and heatwaves?

Many different scenarios are possible, says LSE’s David Stainforth. Because, while the big picture on global climate change is clear, at the local level that picture is pretty blurry. And science is not as adept as we’d like it to be in sharpening the focus.

“We know that a warming planet constitutes a massive threat to human societies at the macro-level. What we don’t have is any real certainty on just how this threat will be experienced in our local geographies and communities” says Stainforth. 

 

Adapting to the uncertain

Stainforth is a professorial research fellow at LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. A physicist by training, he is an expert in climate modelling. He is also the author of Predicting our climate future: what we know, what we don’t know, and what we can’t know.

Getting to grips with a changing planet and planning for our future in it is inherently tough, argues Stainforth. One reason is that science cannot furnish us with absolute certainty about the specific details of our future.

“The evidence is abundantly clear on the reality of global warming. The problem is that most of us can’t get our head around things like planetary change. We struggle to see the direct relevance to our own lives and wellbeing—to our own immediate environment,” says Stainforth. “We have pictures of wildfires or flooding in distant places, but we struggle to relate those to consequences for us personally.”

Contextualising threats—making them meaningful to our immediate context and taking actions to mitigate or adapt to them—is contingent on having an understanding of the shape and contours of those threats. And here, the science simply falls short, says Stainforth; which isn’t to say that the science is not rigorous - only that it fails to draw the disparate threads together effectively.

“Climate modeling is highly sophisticated and incredibly important in mapping the different possible outcomes awaiting us. But climate models cannot tell us exactly how climate change will pan out in say, twenty years, in places like London or Edinburgh,” he says. “They can give us an idea, but models can be misleading about the specifics. And if you go all in on one model and build your contingency planning around it, you leave yourself open to many additional risks.”

So what can we do to make climate adaptation real, relevant and effective?

Stainforth is clear: we need to accept that there are more questions than answers on climate change. And from this basis, we need to broaden the scope of our planning and brace for different scenarios.

Leaders and key decision-makers looking to future-proof their organisations and communities would do well to explore a greater range of climate models and scenarios and look for consistency, says Stainforth: Use the certainties we do have as a starting point and build flexibility into adaptation and resilience planning.

“Again, we know with huge confidence that climate change is happening. And the models are fairly consistent on some of the very large-scale changes that we can expect to see. We know, for instance, that a warmer atmosphere holds more water, so we can expect wetter winters across much of northern Europe, even if we can’t say exactly how much wetter,” says Stainforth. “Using the big picture as our starting point, we can go ahead and build an infrastructure plan for more winter rain. But we still need multiple scenarios around this big picture, and to plan accordingly.”

 

 

Making it real

Stainforth is adamant that decision-makers need to build this kind of multiple scenario-planning and flexible response approach, into their future resilience strategies. His book is a call to action, in this sense: a plea for a certain common sense and level-headedness around the way we think about and brace for climate change, but a plea nonetheless. Climate change might be unknowable in its specificities, but what is certain is the scale of the threat to households, organisations, communities and human wellbeing globally.

Stainforth has also co-designed and teaches on an LSE programme for decision makers, from senior executives in business organisations to diplomats, MEPs and policy makers. Climate Change: Economics and Governance will run in February and June of 2024 and Stainforth is confident that it resonates with diverse practitioners.

“With this programme, we are leveraging the multi-disciplinary expertise in LSE to the full. We explore multiple elements from physics to economics, to understand that the threat is real but to use climate models judiciously in order to explore possible futures and build robustness and resilience.”

Both the book and the Executive Education programme are tools to help people and organisations brace for an uncertain future. It’s hard to remain optimistic about that future, Stainforth acknowledges, though it is incumbent on us to do so.

“We are living under immense uncertainty but we are clear about the need to enact dramatic changes in our societies. It’s often hard to maintain the momentum but we need to keep talking, keep planning, and above all, keep focused on the human consequences of our actions and inactions.

I would strongly encourage decision-makers to join our programme at LSE and be part of the solutions that we are going to need so very urgently.”