 Good morning. My name is Salim al-Haqqa. I'm director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development based at the independent University Bangladesh in Dhaka, but I'm currently in Bonn, Germany at the United Nations University here where I'm a visiting scientist and Unfortunately, I can't make it to the meeting in Bangkok as I had hoped to So my sincere apologies for not being there on the other hand I think it's good for my carbon footprint That I don't have to fly all the way to Bangkok and I can give you my talk Remotely, although we won't have a chance to interact with each other, which is a pity So what I'm going to talk about is about the status of adaptation science as I see it and the first point I'll make is to argue that adaptation science is a real thing a number of years ago at an international conference I had a debate with a very eminent adaptation scholar Professor Neil Ager of Exeter University where he argued that adaptation science was not a new science and I argued that it may not be a science yet But it is a science in the making and I think now well over six or seven years later We can see that it is a real science and I'll mention a couple of reasons why I say that Firstly, if you look at the intergovernmental panel on climate change last report the fifth assessment report There are four chapters on adaptation Chapter 14, which looks at planning adaptation chapter 15, which looks at implementing adaptation Chapter 16, which looks at the limits and barriers to adaptation and chapter 16 Which looks at the economics of adaptation in addition There is adaptation sections in many of the Sectoral chapters and regional chapters as well So there's a Significant body of scientific knowledge and papers that have been assessed in the fifth assessment report unlike previous assessment reports So we can say that there's a growing body of knowledge on adaptation science the second element that I would draw attention to is the Community of scientists working on adaptation this has grown as I mentioned the first adaptation futures Conference was held in Australia in 2010 where I had the debate with Neil Adger the second one was held in Tucson in America in 2012 and the third was held in 2014 Fortaleza, Brazil and each time we've had Nearly 600 to 800 scholars participating and presenting papers on their work on adaptation The next fourth one is going to be held in Rotterdam in May of 2016 and the theme for which is going to be urban adaptation and we're expecting well over 1,000 Participants mainly scholars, but also practitioners policy makers and planners as well. So the Community of scientific discourse and research on adaptation is growing very very rapidly And I would argue that we are now if not a mature science certainly a recognized science Now let me move on to what is the science of adaptation like and I will make two arguments here that it is something unique in terms of The kind of science that we will be doing the kind of knowledge that we will be producing for adaptation The first point I'll make is that adaptation is a learning by doing process We cannot do it in theory. We have to practice learn from practice Which means we have to do things we have to learn from them what works and what doesn't work And then we have to inform the next phase of doing in phases and stages Which I call going up the adaptation knowledge ladder one rung at a time We have to go up one rung assess where we are and then decide how we are going to go up the next run And we've already done some quite a lot of work But the challenge is how do we capture? experiential knowledge which comes from doing practice on the ground from Practitioners at the grassroots to planners and decision-makers at sectoral and national level and indeed even at global level We need a good way of co-producing knowledge between practitioner and theoretician We don't have very good ways of doing that, but we're going to have to develop them The second important element about adaptation as a science is that the knowledge experiential knowledge on adaptation so far is actually Higher in the least developed countries who have done national adaptation programs of action and are now doing national adaptation plans There are hundreds of people who have been involved in doing these who have learned gone up the knowledge ladder And I have a lot of experiential knowledge We need to recognize that and we need to be able to share that knowledge in a south-south Knowledge exchange paradigm indeed even a south to north knowledge exchange paradigm Because the presumption as in the case for mitigation and many other sciences that the developed countries in the north Have the knowledge and all we need to do is transfer it to the south does not apply in adaptation When it comes to adaptation the developing countries and poor communities actually have a lot more knowledge About how to tackle the problem then the scientists in the north and it can be a two-way exchange of knowledge And we don't have good ways of doing that We need to find better ways of promoting south-south and south-to-north knowledge exchange My final area of discourse will be to look at what we've learned so far in the last decade or so of Adaptation science and I will make two sets of arguments. The first set of argument is to do with scale Initially we used to think that adaptation was very context specific it happened at a location to locate local scale and Every scale and every location was very different and hence it's very difficult to generalize That is no longer true. Well, that remains true. It is no longer only true There are many ecosystems which are have common elements high mountains for example around the world coastal ecosystems delta ecosystems urban systems Dry land systems have many many common features even if they're located in different continents around the world And there are groups that are now working on these different ecosystem based adaptation aspects who are sharing that knowledge across Continents but with similar ecosystems and that is a good thing and we're learning a lot from each other that way The second element is that it's not just ecosystems there is indeed even a global dimension to climate change adaptation which is in the sense of a growing interest in the issue of Migration people are going to have to move some countries indeed a low-lying atolls in the Pacific Ocean for example may just simply disappear underneath the ocean and the people will have to go somewhere else This is an unprecedented Problem that the globe has never seen before we've had migration before but we haven't had it on this scale And it's a global problem because these people are no longer leaving just because of natural causes or economic causes they're leaving because Global warming human induced climate change is causing them to leave their homes and they're going to have to leave already We are seeing some people moving in future We'll see a lot more and this is a global dimension of adaptation indeed Some people argue and I'm one of them that we need to think of migration as a positive adaptation to climate change in the long run International migration of the victims of climate change need to be absorbed and taken care of at the international level Primarily by the polluters who are responsible for the pollution because we do have a sense of responsibility Attached to this now which in the UN FCC in the framework convention on climate change parlance or process It is called loss and damage from the impacts of climate change and this is a growing area of Interest particularly for the vulnerable countries like the small island Developing states to least develop countries and the countries in Africa are very very concerned about the potential impacts of climate change Which are now unavoidable will happen, but we need to talk about them and we need to figure out what we're going to do When they do happen fortunately at the 19th conference of parties in Warsaw we agreed the Warsaw international mechanism which has Set up an executive committee and a work program to try and discuss these issues Which we can then discuss at the 22nd conference of parties which will be held in December 2016 Not in Paris this year, but the year after where we will consider the work program Finally, let me mention another set of learning that we are Finding as we address the issue of adaptation in the initial years We thought of adaptation to climate change as simply identifying vulnerability And in many cases finding that we are in fact doing things that enhance our vulnerability rather than reduce our vulnerability And so the first act is to stop enhancing vulnerability or to use another phrase to stop doing Maladaptation making ourselves more vulnerable rather than less vulnerable and there are many instances of doing this Building on floodplains for examples building on seashores Infrastructure making it even more vulnerable than it was before we need to stop doing that We need to start practicing a good adaptation measures By and large this analysis has been done and retrofitting is now taking place We have now moved into what I call the second era of adaptation, which is Incremental adaptation as we look at new investments particularly large-scale in infrastructure investments like roads and highways and and ports and embankments We need to think about How do we in make these investments in a manner that will make them Adapted to future climate change because we can now make a very safe presumption that the previous 20 30 40 years of climatic events is no longer in a Useful basis for extending into the future for the next 20 30 years because the next 20 30 years of Climatic changes will be very different from what we saw in the last 20 30 years So we need to look at climate change models, which will inform us about what is likely to happen What is possible? These are just scenarios They're not predictions But they have to be taken into account and they then have to be included in the investment to make the investment Adapted typically it would mean for example a road might be needed to be raised by a meter or a bridge by a meter that would add cost to the Construction typically in the order of maybe 5% or at maximum 10% of an additional cost built into the infrastructure domain of the Investments this is now happening across the board major investments in all countries including developed and developing countries are taking climate change Into account any infrastructure that's meant to last for another five decades Has to take climate change into account and put it in as as an incremental Adaptation cost and this is now happening many many development sectors Developing countries development agencies lenders banks are all putting this into practice. This is a good thing We are now on the threshold of a new third era of adaptation knowledge and science And this is called transformational adaptation. It's still something that we're struggling to define We don't have a good definition. There are some Paragraphs in the fifth assessment of the IPCC that try to address this but essentially it means Instead of looking at adaptation as the risk management just Allaying the risk as I mentioned in the case of incremental adaptation We need to think about coming out on the other side better off than we were before So it's not just coping with risk But it's about in enhancing the ability of countries and people and communities to Progress beyond where they were before just to give you one example of Of what what might think of as transformational adaptation we can think of it in generational terms so the fishers and farmers who are living in very Vulnerable communities let us say on low-lying coastal areas in islands and in continents around the world In time those areas will become Uninhabitable with salinity increase and sea level rise and the people there will no longer be able to practice those livelihoods So their children now need to be invested in to be educated So the children don't have to be farmers and fishers the children can become doctors and lawyers and engineers and Move to a city and take their family with them. And this is what I mean by assisted migration This is a form of adaptation where they end up being better off than they were before and not just coping with the impacts of climate change This is still very much in theory stage We don't have good examples of this yet but it is something that we need to think about as we go forward and I hope that many people here in the audience will be participating in the discussions and I look forward to seeing the results of the The discussions that happen in Bangkok and again my apologies for not being able to be with you