Private sector is vital for adaptation to climate change

For Laura Canevari, a consultant with the British firm Acclimatise, engaging companies in discussions on the topic means creating a resilient economy, guaranteeing jobs and development.

By Karina Toledo, in Fortaleza

Agência FAPESP – Climate change is becoming an increasingly difficult reality to ignore, and humans need to adapt themselves to reduce their degree of vulnerability. In the face of this urgent requirement, scientists have begun to engage formulators of public policies in discussions on the topic. However, little attention is being paid to one important actor in society: the private sector.

This assessment was made by Colombian Laura Canevari, a climate change adaptation consultant, during the international conference Adaptation Futures 2014, held in Fortaleza, Ceará, on May 12–16, 2014. With an undergraduate degree in Marine Sciences and a master’s in Climate Change Management from the University of Oxford, Canevari has been an activist, defending the need for coastal areas to adapt to rising sea levels.

She currently works for Acclimatise, a British firm that both provides technical assistance to government institutions and private companies so that they can understand the risks associated with climate change and helps to identify viable adaptive solutions.

According to Canevari, the public sector plays the important role of regulating and establishing an appropriate environment to enable adaptation to occur, but it is the private sector that puts such actions into practice. To engage companies in the initiative, however, scientists will have to adapt their language and translate the scientific concepts into actual everyday experiences.

Below are several excerpts from the interview that she granted to Agência FAPESP.

Agência FAPESP – What is your background, and what is your field of work at Acclimatise?
Laura Canevari – I have an undergraduate degree in Marine Sciences and a master’s degree in Climate Change Management from the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. Before starting work at Acclimatise, I was a huge defender of the need for coastal areas to adapt to rising sea levels.

Agência FAPESP – Do you work more with the public or private sector?
Canevari – Initially, our focus was the private sector, but we’ve now begun to focus more on the public sector because international negotiations are more focused on adaptation and governments are more concerned about climate change. We recently developed the National Adaptation Plan for Kenya, for example. We have helped to develop adaptation strategies for the cities of London and Leeds [both in the United Kingdom], Moscow and five other Russian cities. Often, what we do for governments is promote institutional capacity by helping to identify gaps and needs at the institutional level. If a country would like to begin thinking about climate change, it needs to determine what its institutions have to be capable of handling, such as coordinating information from the various ministries, collecting and storing information, and using meteorological services to obtain precise data about the climate. We work in several industries, such as energy, transportation, retail and supply chains.

Agência FAPESP – In your lecture, you said that academia, with regard to discussions on climate change adaptation, is very focused on the public sector and should pay more attention to the private sector. What makes you think that?
Canevari – I don’t think that we should stop investing time and energy in the public sector. It’s important because it allows us to regulate the climate change adaptation needed and to create the support and favorable environment that allow it to occur. However, we should not look to the public sector as the implementer of these measures. It’s the private sector that will really put adaptive solutions into practice. The public sector has to allow companies to invest more securely in this type of topic. It’s not the first time that I’ve talked about the need for academics to change their way of thinking about which sectors of society are most important for them to have a dialog with. However, we scientists tend to stay in our comfort zone, in which we all speak the same language and deal with problems in the same way. A dialog with the private sector requires a change in the discourse about climate issues. We speak about public policies with an academic mentality, and this is not going to work. We need to change the way that we approach the problems and solutions.

Agência FAPESP – How can scientists manage to engage the private sector?
Canevari – We need to recognize that it is an important actor because that will make us curious about how it thinks. Academics are used to being somewhat secluded in academic life, but they quickly saw the need to communicate information to governments. Thus, they made an effort to understand what resonates with those who govern in order to discuss issues that come from science and to turn them into public policies. However, academics need to understand that the private sector has different ways of conceiving of and handling these risks. For a businessperson, handling risks means continuity of production. Therefore, talking about business continuity is a way to approach questions about adaptation without actually using the term. We need to use the language. We talk a lot about the “4 degrees Celsius” scenario [referring to temperature elevation by 2100], and it seems like everyone understands what this means from an environmental standpoint. However, what does 4 degrees Celsius mean to a company? We did a risk analysis for a port in Colombia, in which we looked at the impact that a temperature increase would have on how the equipment that removes cargo from vessels and takes it to a warehouse would work. This equipment is sensitive to thermal stress and does not work as well when it is very hot. Instead of going to the private sector and saying “There is a 4 degrees Celsius threat,” what we should really be saying is that the equipment will begin to work more slowly and be less efficient in performing the work and that this will affect profits. The bottom line is that we need to approach the issue of profits and how climate change will affect business performance. Another way to appeal to companies is to ask “How will you maintain your social and environmental commitment to operate?” If the workforce is outside, in the elements, and there is a high incidence of thermal stress, that constitutes an occupational safety risk. The company could lose its ability to operate in a particular area if it doesn’t concern itself with analyzing how the thermal stress caused by high temperatures affects its employees. It’s work that transforms ideas into real-life, everyday experiences.

Agência FAPESP – If everything is a question of profit, why is it important to stimulate the private sector to adapt?
Canevari – It is about building a resilient economy. We need to stop ignoring the private sector because it’s an important part of the community that offers jobs, goods and services. When we think about the factors that determine a society’s wellbeing, we have public policies that establish regulations; that provide codes of conduct for people to interact non-aggressively with each other; and that guarantee freedom of expression, democracy, etc. These are important components, but so are the products and services that people want to buy. People also want to be employed because that it is how they gain recognition in society. It’s not just about the money, but rather because when you have a job, you assume a social role. Additionally, the private sector has the money and the potential to invest in activities that can go beyond the organization itself.

Agência FAPESP – Is it already possible to observe the adaptive actions that the private sector has undertaken?
Canevari – There are two types of companies that are taking the lead in adaptive actions. First, there are the companies that make major investments in durable infrastructure, like oil companies, energy companies and ports. They are companies that expect their facilities to last 30 or 40 years. In this type of company, you also usually have pressure exerted by the stakeholders and society, which expect higher standards in environmental and social terms. The second type includes the companies that are adapting and that are sensitive to climate factors, such as those that produce or sell agricultural goods and companies with strong dependence on water. They are companies that are significantly affected by climate changes and that respond to these as a way of surviving because if they do not improve their power and water efficiency standards, there can be conflicts within the community that they are a part of as well as with the media. However, there is not much being done in Latin America, which is a shame because there are great opportunities in countries like Brazil, where it’s possible to start doing things the right way. Many new investments in climate-resistant infrastructure can be made. It’s much cheaper than adapting after things are ready. We have an opportunity that the developed nations have already lost, which is to begin on the right foot. We’re learning from the experiences of other countries, and we know what is worth doing; we just need to put it into practice.