Interview with Professor Bart van den Hurk

We have seen an increasing number of activations of the civil protection mechanism over the past few years, as it has been used to respond to a growing number of natural disasters. Is there anything you could say about the role that climate science has in civil protection?

It’s a no brainer! We clearly need to work together. There are two levels where that is happening. Firstly, in discussions about science, where we prepare business cases for better climate information, early warnings, in the long-term designs of infrastructure for civil protection. Resource allocation and response to extreme events deserve a climate perspective.

Vice versa, it is useful for those climate experts who are used to making adaptation informing scenarios, to look at what scenarios actually mean at the local scale, for instance for the event responses. We need cross-fertilisation. It sometimes still feels like two parallel monologues, rather than one dialogue!

Can you give us an example of what that would look like?

Climate scenarios normally carry a generic, implicit warning that frequency of extremes is clearly increasing etc, but they don’t contain a lot of information on what happens on the ground. It’s interesting for the scenario developers to use concepts where, say, historic extreme events are going to be re-interpreted in terms of climate change, or, more generally, where lessons drawn from these events can be generalised for different conditions. 

For example, take the big flooding in Europe in July 21, which also affected the Netherlands (though not as drastically as Belgium and Germany). A lot of water authorities in the Netherlands asked themselves what would happen if the same happened in their region. To make such an impact assessment we relocated the event and modelled impacts on flood areas, damage and implications for emergency response. That isn’t a climate scenario but a weather scenario, containing a lot of information about the implications of altered conditions.

What about on the difference in culture between emergency response and climate change experts? 

Yes, I feel that there is a bit of grassroots work to be done there. We need to really get to understand each other, to get a joint interpretation of where weather responses and climate change are coming together.

In the climate and the early warning domains, we always talk about probabilities. A Dutch wildfire response expert recently framed it nicely when he said that the firefighters come into force when probabilities are one! That is a spot-on description of their situation. If the event is there, what do we do? Where do we put people? What equipment do we have? The probability of such an event (and trends that can be induced by a changing climate) is the territory of the climate experts. It’s nice if we can reinforce the crossover between these two. 

Congratulations on your appointment as IPCC Co-Chair. Your co-chairmanship of the working group will give you a real influence when it comes to scientific support to policymaking in climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.  What do you hope to achieve through your work in the role?

I really would like to contribute to a shift in awareness or urgency, from signalling that something is wrong, to the notion that we need to take action. The urgency shouldn’t be on the notion that the oceans are heating up, or frequencies of extreme forest fires are increasing, but that we need to do something about it.

I am really looking for an assessment of science that can make a difference in people’s willingness to take action and their agency to do so. I would like to put more emphasis on potential actions and their consequences, and also to pay credit to the difficulty in societal decision taking. It is always about trade-offs, having to give something up to get something else in return. I think our assessment could be clearer where these trade-offs are!

How can we make that risk tolerable? That is a more tangible story than saying, ‘hey, look at how green the world can be and how happy we can be without emissions?’. I would like to tell the story that it is difficult, but inevitable to get into the process that can help us out of here. We have to pay attention to the redistribution of risks and costs, to the fact that there are winners and losers, and that we need to inspire the discussions that make these shifts manageable and acceptable. Businesses and governmental organisations need help in their transition.

In adaptation, nothing is for free.

With adaptation, likewise. Nothing is for free. Building a dyke somewhere takes space, it affects the environment, and ecology. It runs the risk of attracting more development in a protected area, which may add to the total risk. The same goes for fresh water. We can drill more groundwater pumps to overcome short-term shortages but increase the risk of long-term structural inability to meet the demand if consumption of water isn’t going to reduce. Those are the stories that we need to tell much more.

I want to pay credit to how difficult the societal transition is. This transition is a matter for all of us – governmental organisations, civil protection, industry, multinationals, small businesses and citizens. 

Are there any other messages that you would like to communicate?

One of the messages that I communicate is that with increasingly rough climate patterns and weather, we will have an increased likelihood of unprecedented events. There are limits to the protection that can be guaranteed even by the best civil protection agency. We also have to increasingly invest in mental and physical agency for citizens. 

As soon as a disaster occurs and we accuse some kind of authority that didn’t function well, that is not going to contribute to a mentally resilient society! I also call for an understanding that there is always residual risk and with these current climate trends, these risks will increase rather than decrease. 

I would like to see a deeper understanding by citizens on how difficult risk management is, and a recognition that there will be failures in the future. This is part of the societal transition that we will go through under current climate trends.