Climate change specialist shares global action plan

KIHEI - About 30 Maui-ans got a sneak preview Wednesday of the launching of an international organization to collect research information about the risks of climate variability and get it into the hands of policymakers.

The formal introduction of the International Program on Climate Change and Variability Risks will come soon, probably in September. However, one of the co-founders, Vietnamese scientist Nguyen Huu Ninh, had a few hours free after three days of conferences at the Pacific Disaster Center, so Executive Director Ray Shirkhodai asked him to speak to as many people as could be collected on a few hours' notice.

The audience included disaster center staff, inventors, Boy Scouts, engineers and a student from Seabury Hall and his mom: just the kind of "end-users" Ninh says he always thinks of when spreading his message.

The message is that the globe is warming, and 90 percent of the increase is due to human activities. He named his talk "Climate Change-gate: A Global Scandal."

"Only about 30 percent of the people (worldwide) have heard about climate change," he said, although he believes humans have only 10 or 15 years to take action before the change becomes catastrophic and irreversible.

Ninh was one of the authors of the chapter on Asia titled "Climate Change: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability," of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (along with Al Gore) in 2007. He is now on the team working on the Fifth Assessment.

On Maui, his talk ranged from examples of how vulnerable parts of Asia would be to changes in rainfall, sea-level rise or other changes to his struggle to bring environmental research to Vietnam. He was studying molecular biology in Hungary in the 1980s, he said, when he learned about climate change and decided to devote himself to studying it.

He is chairman of the Center for Environmental Research, Education and Development in Hanoi.

"We use too much resources, large cars, large houses," he said. "Ten percent of the population has 90 percent of the GDP (gross domestic product)."

The challenge is "to learn to live together," and he said it is as important to get the message to ordinary people as to policymakers.

Shirkhodai explained that the Pacific Disaster Center is concerned about risks. Originally it was set up in Kihei with federal money to help manage disasters like storms or volcanoes, taking advantage of rapid communications to help managers assess and direct recovery efforts.

Over the past seven or eight years, it has expanded its vision to assessing risks before they occur and devising methods of reducing or eliminating them.

The International Program on Climate Change and Variable Risks will aim to address policy implications by bringing together research from fields that normally might not interact, with a view to refining policy implications of knowledge bases.

"There is a lot of good work coming in, but it is not unified," he said.

The idea arose from a meeting of expert groups last year at the East-West Center. So far, not much money has been spent, but the organization likely will seek grants from such sponsors as the National Science Foundation.

It will be a virtual organization, rather than a bricks-and-mortar center, although Maui and Hawaii likely will be "a center of gravity" for its work because of the disaster center's role.

* Harry Eagar can be reached at heagar@mauinews.com.