A High Cost to Deal With Climate Shift

NEW YORK — The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has described the notion of “adaptation” as those initiatives designed “to reduce the vulnerability of natural and human systems against actual or expected climate change effects.”

The implication, of course, is that regardless of what countries, businesses or individuals do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the planet is going to warm up. Everything from coastal geography and weather patterns to the global tableau of arable land, such that we’ve come to know and rely on them, will be — indeed, already are — in flux, and we had best start planning.

Just how drastic those changes will be is anybody’s guess, but it seems certain that poorer countries, which did little to contribute to the problem, are likely to be hit hardest by climate change’s inexorable reordering of things.

But current investment is a low benchmark, the authors argue, and inadequate to close the development gap between rich countries and poor ones, much less contend with climate change as a multiplier.

Closing the development gap — the only way to avoid a Sisyphean state of rich-poor patronage, the authors argue — and removing the additional vulnerabilities to climate change are going to be substantially more expensive.

Earlier estimates of the cost for infrastructure adaptations in Africa, for example — from $22 million to $371 million, according to the United Nations’ most recent calculations — are “clearly absurdly low,” the researchers say.