A data engineering approach to tracking global climate resilience
What counts as a climate-resilient road? One country might build to withstand a 1-in-50-year flood, another a 1-in-100-year flood, and both report against the same indicator. COP30 in Belém adopted 59 indicators for the Global Goal on Adaptation. Bapon Fakhruddin of the Green Climate Fund and Matti Heikkurinen of CODATA warn that figures which look comparable often are not. Their answer is not a single global standard but the Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework, which acts as a translator between existing sectoral standards, so communities need not change how they collect data. Building it in from the outset costs far less than retrofitting it and decides whether the Global Stocktake measures genuine progress or merely records the attempt to describe it.
Energy strategy: The path for a prosperous, sustainable future
New Zealand’s electricity supply still turns on how much rain reaches a handful of South Island hydro lakes, and dry years keep exposing how little affordable firming sits behind them. Dr Tim Fisher, Group Managing Director of Tonkin + Taylor, argues the country lacks an energy strategy durable enough to survive successive electoral cycles. The cost is mounting: electricity is 65% more expensive than when the retail market opened in 1999, and project delays have cost NZ$11.8 billion over 25 years. Getting it right could add NZ$22 billion a year to GDP by 2035. Fisher calls for distributed renewable generation, a mandatory firming and flexibility market, gas transition planning, and security of supply that accounts for natural hazards and ageing grid assets.
Climate change is driving widespread marine heat waves across the globe
The largest marine heatwave currently on record covers 63 million square kilometres of the Pacific, roughly 17% of the world’s ocean surface, and climate change is responsible for an estimated 86% of it. It is far from alone. Climate Central finds every major ocean basin running unusually warm: 82.9% of the Mediterranean is under marine heatwave conditions, with parts of the western basin 5-6°C above normal. Those conditions also extend across 39.7% of the Gulf of Mexico, 33% of the Indian Ocean and 23.3% of the Atlantic. Some North Pacific hotspots have now persisted beyond 180 consecutive days. Marine heatwaves are no longer discrete events to be waited out, but a background condition the ocean is increasingly held in.
Drought is usually costed as an agricultural problem. Research from the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) and Politecnico di Milano suggests that is where the damage starts, not where it ends. The 2015-2018 European drought cost €439 billion, cutting EU-27 and UK GDP per capita growth by 2.72 percentage points, reducing investment by over 12% and leaving 5.8 million jobs uncreated. Critically, the largest losses accumulated over the following six years: agriculture absorbs the initial hit but recovers within a couple of years, while manufacturing and construction keep losing ground long afterwards. At 2°C of warming the same event would cost close to €760 billion, with Spain’s GDP loss rising from 2.2 to 7.7 percentage points.
Japan’s earthquake shows extreme heat can turn one disaster into two
When an earthquake struck Kumamoto in late July, the response unfolded in temperatures that climbed into the high 30s and, in places, hit 40°C for the first time on record. At least 38 people died in the quake; some 7,000 sheltered across 130 evacuation centres with water and power disrupted, and one older woman died of heatstroke while sheltering in her car. Glenn McGregor argues this is a compound event, in which heat acts as a disaster risk multiplier, raising heatstroke risk among evacuees while degrading responders’ physical performance. The comparison is instructive: the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake struck in mild April conditions. The climate a disaster lands in is becoming as consequential as the hazard itself.
Colombia’s first fully implemented Early Action Protocol did not wait for the drought to arrive. When forecasts from national hydrology and meteorology institute IDEAM showed a greater than 50% probability of below-normal rainfall from June to August, and a Standardised Precipitation Index at or below -1.4, the trigger was met. The Colombian Red Cross and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) released funds ahead of impact. Some 2,400 people across Tolima and Cesar are being reached: water-retention soil additives for 600 people to stretch irrigation, livestock supplements to prevent deaths during pasture shortages, cash transfers for 900 people without bank accounts, and a community water treatment plant producing 30,000 litres a day. Financed through the anticipatory pillar of the IFRC’s Disaster Response Emergency Fund (DREF), it shows drought response can be pre-agreed and science triggered.