WMO Press Conference 13 October 2020

So thank you very much for joining us and thank you, as always, for UNTV, for for facilitating this.

This is the press conference of the World Meteorological Organisation.

We are this morning launching a new report on the state of climate services in 2020.

Without further ado.

Oh, and just to say, we've sent everything electronically.

The press releases are available in all official languages.

[Other language spoken]

You should have everything you need.

So without further ado, I will introduce you to Doctor Max Dilley, who's in the room with me.

He's the world meteorological director in charge of climate services.

I'm hoping that remotely on the line joining us via Zoom is our Secretary General, Professor Petri Telus.

So I'll pass the floor to to Doctor Dilly now, and who will say a few words about the report.

Thank you, Claire, and good day to everyone.

It's a pleasure to be here to release this 2020 report on the state of climate services.

This is the second in a series of such reports.

The first one last year was on the state of climate services for agriculture and food security, and these reports are prepared at the invitation of the Conference of the Parties that serves as the meeting of the parties to the Paris Agreement.

We thought it would be appropriate to release this particular 1 today because today is the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction and the theme of this year's report is on risk information and early warning systems to interventions that are proven to save lives and protect livelihoods.

There were 16 other organisations and initiatives that contributed to this report.

We'd like to thank them and in particular the Agence France to develop more and the climate risk and early warning system initiative that contributed financially as well as substantially.

And now, if it works, he's joining us remotely.

I'd like to turn the floor over to the World Meteorological Organisation Secretary General, Professor Petri Tallis, who is going to present the findings of the report.

Over to you, Petri, if you were able to connect.

Thank you, Max, and I hope that you can all, all hear me well from, from, from, from Finland, where I'm going in quarantine and, and, and, and so I, I, so it seems that everything is functioning well.

So good morning to everybody.

And, and from WMO's side, we have, we are very much concerned of the current situation with the COVID, but we are also much more concerned of the, of, of the impacts of climate change.

So if we if we fail with the climate, the mitigation, then we would see problems which are of very different magnitude when it comes to human suffering and and also economic losses.

For recently, there have been some positive signs coming from some of WMO members, for example, European Union as a, as a name to become carbon neutral by 2050.

And a few weeks ago also China announced that they are planning to become carbon neutral by 2060, which is good news.

And, and also in the United States, there's been good progress, especially private sector and several states have been investing in in climate friendly technologies.

But today we are talking about the, the status of disasters and, and, and the impacts of climate change so far and how well countries are are prepared to deal with those issues.

And I will show you some slides.

The report that we are publishing today is going to be summarised in the forthcoming slides.

So the slides are clearly up already.

And first of all, I would like to thank 16 partner organisations who have been contributed to this report.

Maybe, maybe show what is the status of disasters and impacts of climate change so far and how, how, how we are coping with those issues.

What is the status of observing systems and early warning systems, which is a way to tackle these problems that we soon demonstrate.

And I would like to thank also the French authorities for, for, for the development agency for, for financially supporting our work.

And we have also finance estimate for cruise.

We have several donor countries who have been contributing to build up of of such services in less developed countries.

And also European Commission has been supporting improvement of climate services in a, in a fairly extensive programme that they are at the moment finance.

Could I get the next slide please?

So on this slide, we are showing what's, what has happened in, in, in, in real life during the past 50 years.

And, and almost all of the disasters they are, they are related to weather, water or, or climate.

And, and, and that's, that's a backbone of, of all disasters.

And we have seen more than 1100 disasters.

And, and here we are talking about major disasters, not only small anomalies, but major, major ones for like strong typhoons or, or hurricanes or, or severe drought or severe flooding, flooding related problems and, and, and, and the amount of disasters has been, has been growing.

If you look at these these bars on the left hand side, you can see that the fifth years ago we had only 700 cases.

But during the past that two decades, we have seen altogether more than 7000 disasters.

And a good news is that we have been able to reduce the amount of casualties and that's very much because of improved early warning services and and these deaths, they have mostly been taking place in LDC countries.

It's a most vulnerable and, and the early warning capacities are usually quite limited.

And what is already fairly striking is that the economic losses have been dramatically increasing.

And, and that's vastly related to the impacts of, of, of, of climate change.

And there's a will let in the LDC countries to improve their and since countries to improve their services.

And, and that's why several of those countries have indicated that they would like to improve their, their, their rewarding capacities.

And all all together we have we have seen losses of 150 billion U.S.

dollars during the past past five years.

And in especially seeds seeds countries, those are the most vulnerable ones and their economies have been hit, hit the hardest that we have seen up to 800% GDP losses related to the Caribbean hurricanes as an as an example.

[Other language spoken]

And what is the status of early warning services?

Here we talk about multi hazard early warning services.

Our desire is to improve services not only for weather related phenomena, but also the water and, and also also to others like tsunamis or earthquakes delay the the disasters.

And, and at the moment we have situation where where 40% of our members out of our 193 members have proper early warning services and 1/3 of our members don't have proper capacity.

So that's, that's a big fraction of the world's population.

And, and, and, and, and that's a, that's, that's a challenge.

And, and that's a challenge when it comes to how to mitigate the climate change impacts and, and, and the growing amount of disasters that we have studied seeing next, please.

And if you look, look at various regions, you can see that some regions are better prepared to, to, to face these challenges and, and the capacity gaps.

They are majoring in LDC countries and, and especially in African, African countries, for example, the North American countries and the Caribbean countries, they are, they're better prepared and, and, and they're, for example, United States is very much supporting the early warning service capacity of Caribbean countries.

The, the, the no hurricane centre in, in, in Miami is, is supporting, supporting those countries and, and WMO side, we are organising annual hurricane committee meetings for the preparedness to these, these kind of events.

And you can see that also in South America, we have severe, severe gaps.

And, and also in six countries there's that there's better preparedness as compared to the global, global elaborates and, and they are also exposed to, exposed to such such phenomenon.

Actually, we, we, we don't get too much information from those countries, which is, it is a slight obstacle.

[Other language spoken]

And then these early warning services, they're based on observations.

So, so this weather forecasting business is, is related to observations.

And we, we calculate the, the, the, the, the weather behaviour for the coming days and coming weeks and the coming months based on observations.

And if these observations are missing, then the quality of the, of the forecasts are, are, are poor.

And if you look at this map, you can see that in, in Europe, in Japan, Australia and in most parts of North America, we have very good coverage of the stations and the stations are more or less reporting fairly well.

And, and that's the case also in, in, in some parts of Brazil too.

But, but we have severe gaps in observing capacity in, in Africa, especially on the, on the, on the Pacific seats countries and also also some of the Caribbean countries.

And this is having a negative impact on the quality of the forecasts there.

So the accuracy is poorer and, and, and, and that's, that's, that's our challenge.

How to, how to improve observing systems.

And, and, and these are also having impacts worldwide.

If you, if you, if you're interested in longer term forecasts more than one to two days, then these gaps are having impacts also worldwide.

And especially these longer term forecasts for one week or two weeks, they're having fairly negatively impact because of these gaps.

And that's we, we have to find some, some additional resources for that from the governments, But we also, we are working also together with the several development agencies and development finance institutions to improve the situation.

[Other language spoken]

And, and, and this COVID is also one of our, our challenges.

So because of the COVID, we have seen also lock lockdowns in, in various countries and, and establish what we are following, what is the status of our members because of, because of the, of the COVID lockdowns.

And, and you can see that that quite many countries are already having at the moment difficulties in, in running their, their, their business with which is this red colour here.

And, and these yellow colours indicate the countries which are concern of their, their capacity for the near future, how they can maintain their observing systems and their service capabilities.

And, and you can see that, for example, South African countries are, are very much concerned and, and, and only 17% of their countries have have feel that that everything is fairly good, would say sorry, sorry.

It's only only only only very few countries say that the things are proper.

The African countries also the situation is not, not, not not that good in European countries.

Almost half of the countries are well prepared to face the situation.

And the observing systems in in less developed countries, they are usually manual.

And that's an extra, extra challenge here.

So once you have automatic weather stations, you can you can run the systems in also in this lockdown conditions.

And that's the case in in European countries and also in in a fraction of Asian countries.

[Other language spoken]

And, and some countries during the recent year have been facing actually triple challenges.

We have this locust problem.

It has been hitting some NE Eastern African countries and some some Middle East countries and, and, and, and, and, and, and that and, and at the same time we have had both drought and butting problems and, and this COVID situation is, is also causing problems for the, for the, for the service capabilities of those, those countries.

But we have been able to run early warning service improvement programme there and, and, and, and, and we have been able to able to enhance the the yield in in those countries and, and to prevent more severe problems.

Of course, it's already already causing major challenges for those those countries next please and, and, and what is the status when it comes to financing to those, those activities that I have been already already mentioning?

We have a growing amount of financing for climate mitigation and which is good news and, and this is crucially needed, but but there's only very limited financing for the climate adaptation.

And we should keep in mind that this negative trend in climate continues on the 2000 and 60s, even in the case of, of success of, of Paris, Paris agreement implementation and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and we should growingly pay attention to adaptation, which is also needed to prevent both human losses and, and economic, economic, economic losses.

And here, here are some sums which are needed for, for successful adaptation.

And, and there's, there's a new adaptation Commission, which is chaired by previous Secretary of Senate Ban Ki Moon and, and, and he has recommended that this Commission has recommended to pay all your attention to climate adaptation.

And one very powerful way to adapt to climate sense is to invest in early warning services.

The World Bank has estimated that you have, you're getting the money back at least tenfold that you invest in those, those services.

It's also economically viable to invest in those, those services.

Next, please finally our recommendations so, so it's, it's clear that the large fraction of our 193 members are having limited capacity when it comes to observing systems and, and also in their early warning service capacity and, and and also there's a challenge to understand the the forecasts.

Sometimes the forecasts are correct but the action thereafter is is limited.

For example, 1 1/2 years ago there was there was cyclone hitting Mozambique, Zimbabwe and and and Malawi.

And in case of of of Mozambique, the forecasts were correct, but but the authorities were not able to understand the impacts and, and, and therefore there were plenty of casualties and economic losses which could could have been prevented by having proper action.

And, and, and we also very much promoting now services which have also the impact embedded.

So this impact based forecasting is very much needed and we have to enhance the financing for, for, for the, for the early warning systems, but also the observing systems and, and, and, and, and both the governments have to take care of that.

But also the development agencies should pay growing attention to the gap that we're having, especially in Africa and, and, and the island States.

And, and then climate finance is, is, is clearly an issue.

And, and, and as I said always, the less developed countries have have been emphasising this.

And, and that's, that's also very much our, our message for the, for the climate finance financing institutions and the, and then we have to enhance the monitoring and evaluation, the consistency and the and, and feel the data caps as, as, as how we always show you.

But that's all from from our side.

And, and I'm sure that both me and, and Doctor Billy are ready to answer any of your your questions.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you, Professor Tallis.

[Other language spoken]

So you can ask your question either to Professor Tallis or to.

Doctor Dilly, I see Christophe folked from Agence France Press, so has his hand raised, so please go ahead.

[Other language spoken]

I just had a question about there's two things actually.

1 is what are the priorities in terms of early warning systems?

[Other language spoken]

What warning should we get on what phenomena or what is the most urgent?

I know that your colleagues yesterday talked about heat waves, for example.

Is there other other systems that that need urgent implementation?

And then do you have, I saw the figures you put in the report, but do you have an idea of how much it would cost to have?

Efficient early warning systems.

For the threats that are facing all of us, how much, how much you think investment is needed in that?

[Other language spoken]

Perhaps I will answer to the first question and I would like to ask Doctor Billy to answer to the second second question.

So this early warning, as I said, we are very much favouring multi asset early warning services so that we can we can take into account heat waves, drought, flooding, storms and also also tsunamis and the and the coastal innovation problems and, and, and we are very much favouring build up of of of these kind of centres where where the various players in countries come together.

In some cases, the met services are already having having all of these elements under 1 umbrella.

But in many cases, for example, the hydrological and meteorological services are separate and, and, and we have seen several countries joining their forces and, and they have built joint centres for that.

But if you look at the economic losses and, and, and the, the, the amount of disasters, flooding problems and, and storms are causing the biggest economic losses and they are also the most frequent ones.

But this of course depends on the, on the region in the world.

For example, Africa typically suffers because of drought and their economies are very much based on agriculture.

And also employment is very much based on, on, on, on agriculture.

And also it's, it's a matter of life and death.

And, and they're both this, this drought and, and, and the availability of water.

[Other language spoken]

And because of climate change, we expect that these drought problems to become more severe.

And, and there's been also observed in developed, developed countries like in, in Western United States, Australia, Siberia and Canada.

So this, so it's it's difficult to say which is which event is most important, but this depends on, on, on, on, on the region in the world.

I'd like to ask Doctor Billy to say the numbers related to the investments needed.

[Other language spoken]

So the estimates that were given by the Global Commission for adaptation last year were that for adaptation overall something like on the order of 180 billion US would be needed annually for the period 2020 to 2030.

Now that is not an estimate exclusively for risk information and early warning systems that would cover a wide range of services that are needed by all of the different climate sensitive sectors, agriculture, water, health, energy and and so on.

So the costs of full coverage of risk information and early warning system for all major hazards.

Would be.

Some percentage of that 180 billion a year.

We work out those figures on a case by case basis for each sub region, as the Secretary General said, depending on what hazards are present, which systems are in place already and where the gaps are.

But I think also it's important to recognise that it's not just how much financing, but how that financing is allocated.

Unless that those resources are going into the operational systems that these countries depend on, that money is not going to result in effective early warnings.

The Secretary General gave the example of the Caribbean.

It's true there and it's true everywhere in the world that no individual country is self reliant and self-contained when it comes to these types of systems and services.

They all rely on this global grid of observations on global models, on regional models, and then finally the provision of services that takes place at the country level.

So it's very important that that entire system be resourced so that the countries that have the lowest capacities get the highest level support from the regional and the global levels.

And if those investments are properly targeted at all three of those levels, any country in the world can provide state-of-the-art warnings.

Thank you for that.

I see Bianca Rothier from Brazil's Global TV has a hand up.

[Other language spoken]

Yes, very well.

[Other language spoken]

The report says that determination of warnings is weak in many developing.

[Other language spoken]

Confirm if it's the case of Brazil, how do you evaluate the system in Brazil?

What needs to be improved there?

[Other language spoken]

So thanks for the question.

And as I was showing on the on the map, there were plenty of green dots in in Brazil.

So Brazil has invested in, in, in observing systems and it is good news.

And, and the most of the stations, they are reporting the, the observations well.

And that's having a positive impact on the quality of the, of the services in, in, in Brazil.

One of your challenges is that you're having three separate services in Brazil.

You have one for agriculture, which is the very much the National Weather Service and, and then you have one for, for, for aviation and, and then you have a third one for, for marine services and, and the cooperation of of those three actors is very much recommended.

And, and by joining forces, one could improve, improve the services.

And globally, I would say that one of the issues that we are very much interested in Brazil is what's going to happen to the Amazonian rainforests.

And and there are some, some climate scenarios which are showing that that region may become dryer in the future, which may have a negative impact on the on the biosphere there and availability of water in Brazil.

So I think that Brazil has a good reason to invest in early warning services and climate adaptation, keeping also that risk in mind.

[Other language spoken]

Central China Television remotely and then one from the from the room here.

[Other language spoken]

Good morning, Professor Tallas and Mr Dili.

I'm Jing **** a correspondent of CCTV.

[Other language spoken]

As the Professor Tallas said that China has announced to achieve the carbon neutrality before the 2060, it was a good news.

So my question is that what does it mean?

And if China's goal is achieved, it will lower global warming projections.

[Other language spoken]

So I would like to first of all thank the government of China for for such an such an announcement.

And Sinai is contributing 25% of the global emissions and, and, and, and one of your major challenges is that your energy production is very much based on coal-fired power plants.

On the other hand, you have also you have have world recording investments in renewable NHC.

You have invested a lot in in the solar and the wind energy and, and you have also become important exporter of such technology worldwide.

And and China itself will also suffer because of climate change.

One of the challenges that you may face is related to availability of water.

The the glaciers of Himalaya, they are melting and and that's why we are getting less and less water to the big Asian rivers.

And some of them are the rivers in also in China, some, some are also to India.

Then you are also you have especially your your eastern part of your countries.

It's fairly low lying and the sea level rises threatening cities like Shanghai and and many of your economic activities, they are taking place on the on the East Coast.

So you have a good reason also from Chinese perspective to improve, improve the situation and pay growing your attention to climate, climate mitigation and also electric vehicles.

They are very much needed as part of the solution besides discharge, getting rid of coal-fired energy and these, these electric vehicles, they also offer new financial opportunities for China.

There's, there's growing market for electric vehicles and, and, and, and, and that, that may be an opportunity for you.

And finally, I would like to say that that you can, one of the challenges that China is facing is air quality.

And, and you can mitigate the both the air quality challenge and the climate challenge by by converting the energy systems to become carbon climate friendly and, and also the transport system to be become more based on electric, electric vehicles and public transportation.

When I visited China for the first time in the early 90s, there were plenty of people using bikes and, and that that would be also also 11 solution to the traffic challenges in in China.

But All in all, I think that this announcement is great and since at least European Union countries and China are now sharing common, common vision, that's very good news and, and, and, and I hope that also USA will will join that that, that the club in the in the near future.

[Other language spoken]

Yes, Boris Angelsen, a local freelancer.

I often have problems with facts and precise figures.

In this kind of report I read that 79% of disasters involve weather would in the in the past 50 years, 79% of disasters involve weather, water or climate related hazard.

If I single out those concepts which are very hazy, like disaster involving whether climate related hazards remains only two words of and or so how can you reach such accurate figure 79 nine percent in the past 50 years with concept which are as vague as the soul or God or the universe.

My second slide I have a problem with.

Why do you write 1/3 of every 100,000 people, 100,001 million or one billion 1/3 is 1/3.

I cannot understand this kind of pseudo accuracy.

And the third one, of course, the best early warning system seems to be in the Carribs and North America and Asia Pacific.

But aren't these the areas where precisely you have most typhoon and tsunami?

And of course Africa has also its roads and but early warning is of course mostly needed in typhoon, tsunami and such hazard related region, it seems to me.

[Other language spoken]

So if I start perhaps Doctor Billy make compliment, but I but I say, so first of all, these numbers depend on how how you set the criteria.

And here we are talking about the major, major events like like the heat wave that was hitting Europe in 2003 or, or major typhoons or hurricanes which have been hitting both Asian countries and the Caribbean, Caribbean countries, or major drought events which are sometimes hitting African countries.

And these numbers, what is the fraction of, of weather related events?

They vary from 80% to 90%.

So it depends how you how you set the the criteria.

And the remaining ones are typically earthquakes, tsunamis and, and, and volcanic eruptions.

So, so they represent 10 to 20% of the of the total.

But the basic, basic message is that that the, the main, main, main disasters are, are are related to the expertise area of WMO and, and, and, and, and because of climate change, we have seen a growing amount of such, such such events.

And then you, you, you and of course you were right there saying that 1/3 of the of the population worldwide, they are they, they, they are not having proper services.

And that's, that's depends how you set the numbers.

I think you I forget what you said.

And then we have excellent early warning services in typically developed countries in, in West European countries, North American countries like like USA and Canada, and some advanced Asian countries like Japan and China and South Korea and, and the Pacific countries like Australia and New New Zealand.

And, and of course, the impact of various phenomena.

They are, they are also driving the interest of the, of the countries to invest in early morning services and, and for example, the Caribbean countries, they are fairly well prepared and, and they are very much supported by, by the, by the hurricane centre in Miami, by, by USA.

So, so WMO is also a family organisation where we are very, very freely sharing our know how and, and, and also also data and, and that's happening when it comes to early warning services.

And, and for example, in the Pacific area, developed countries like Japan, Australia, New Zealand, they are also supporting some of the some of the six countries in the, in the, in the, in the region.

But we have major gaps in the, in the, in the service services in LDC countries, which are mostly in Africa.

And for example, in Caribbean, we have Haiti.

The preparedness is, is not excellent.

And, and that's the case also in on several Pacific seas countries.

And, and those countries are have so limited both manpower resources and, and and financial resources that, that they cannot afford similar things that, for example, Japan is having, having the same same part of the world.

Max, would you like to compliment?

If I could just add a couple of additional points.

We are in relation to the the accuracy of the figures.

When these data began to be collected in the 1980s, there was not nearly as much interest in the precision as there is today.

And the World Meteorological Congress now has approved a procedure by which every hydrometeorological hazard event will get a unique identification number that will allow a very precise association of any associated losses and damage with each event, which has not been the case for this whole 50 year period up until now.

So over time, that is going to really help with the attribution of losses to particular events.

It's not an overnight fix, but I think that will greatly improve the precision of these figures in the future.

The reason we use the number of people out of 100,000 is because that was what was approved in the indicators for something called the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

So in this particular domain, of course, WMO works very closely with the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, which is the custodian of the Sendai framework.

And we used, there's a table in the back of the report that shows that we used as many of the Sendai indicators as we could and on this was one of them.

And finally, on the point about which hazards are important in which regions, I think This is why we associate risk information and early warning systems because the hazards are present to different degrees in different regions.

Some regions have no risk of from typhoons or tsunamis.

They have other hazards where in other regions those are the main hazards which are present.

So in order to design the early warning systems.

It's very important first to be very clear on which hazards are actually creating risk factors, and then focus the warnings in on the hazards that are present.

Thanks very much for that.

I can't see anybody else asking any questions and I know you have to get ready for the for the UN briefing.

So thank you very, very much indeed for joining us.

Thank you, Professor Tallis.

Thank you, Doctor Dilli.

And obviously, if you have any further questions, please just let me know.

So thank you very much indeed, and goodbye.

[Other language spoken]