Climate change and transformations at the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Summit

Reinhard Mechler showed that in a rapidly warming and changing world business-as-usual approaches to climate change adaptation and risk management will soon not be enough to prevent disasters; increasingly transformational approaches are needed as well. Yet, evidence what transformational adaptation may mean concretely at relevant scales of intervention has been largely missing. He presented ongoing work on understanding and informing transformational responses to climate change as undertaken by the Flood Resilience Alliance, where IIASA co-leads the research work. Efforts include considering transformation in urban planning for dealing with coastal flooding in Vietnam and citizen-science flash flood monitoring in peri-urban communities in Peru. A co-edited book forthcoming in 2021 will provide much needed evidence and insight.

The Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC) Virtual Climate Summit has been a fully virtual climate change summit taking place from 9^th – 10^th September 2020 with a broad range of interactive sessions looking at various aspects of climate change and it's impacts. The summit gathered thousands of people from almost all the countries of the world including Britain’s Prince Charles, Sheikh Hasina, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Mary Robinson, Former President of Ireland, Casten Nemra, Marshall Islands Foreign Minister, Michael Köhler, ECHO Deputy Director-General, Krista Mikkonen, Finland’s Environment Minister, and many others.

Related Project

• Flood Resilience