It’s the existential question of our time—what is the meaning of climate change? A group of Tufts University-based researchers has taken on one aspect of that question and found, perhaps not surprisingly, that when it comes to climate change, meaning is a commodity in short supply.
A recent Feinstein International Center report on how climate change might affect humanitarian spending—with projected increases in the staggering range of between 32 and 1,600 percent—has lead Director Peter Walker, to call for more “meaningful data” to help close the gap, according to an IRIN news report. At the low end of the scale, only increased frequency of disasters was taken into account. The high end factors in changes in intensity, as well.
Rather than predicting the future, the point of the report was to say “Stop making wild and sensationalist predictions and admit the real problem is that we have been negligent in the data we collect, and so have placed ourselves in a situation where we are hard-pressed to say anything meaningful about what the future will look like," IRIN quoted Walker as saying.
The report, which used several methods to determine what type of stress climate change-related disasters could put on humanitarian aid budgets in the next 20 years, found a need for a “more rigorous and systematic collection of disaster-related data and more constructive interaction between the humanitarian and climate change communities on future research, planning, and action.”
Part of the problem is miscellany of data prediction ranges, means and methods of collecting data, data uses and extrapolation, and ultimately what question the data is being applied to. Because of the all the wild cards involved, researchers should be "be more concerned with the rigorous and systematic gathering of data," according to the IRIN report. “The future is ‘inherently unpredictable,’ and aid agencies have ‘to let go of their old comfortable linear models of change’ and become ‘adaptive, flexible, and open to acting upon feedback,’ said Walker.”
Jolie Breeden is the lead editor and science communicator for Natural Hazards Center publications. She writes and edits for Research Counts; the Quick Response, Mitigation Matters, Public Health, and Weather Ready Research Award report series; as well as for special projects and publications. Breeden graduated summa cum laude from the University of Colorado Boulder with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.