Understanding flood risk associated with climate change | Ayoola Apolola | TEDxAUCollege
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gAlG3qbrus Video ID: 0gAlG3qbrus ============================================================ good day everyone it's an absolute privilege to be here today to speak to you about the climate crisis and the urgency to address this crisis as as it relates to flood risk I grew up in the city of Lagos Nigeria which is Africa's most popular city and as some of you may know it is widely described sorry Legos is widely described as a fastpaced vibrant and a chaotic City however this picture doesn't tell you the full story of how Legos looks like because this is also lagos a beautiful coastal city and this is also lagos a beautiful city with an interesting night night life unlike many European countries of the world that has four distinct Seasons Lagos and Nigeria at large has a tropical wet and dry seasons meaning we have roughly six months of extra of persistent rainfall another another 6 months of dryness or low rainfall now it didn't matter where I lived in Lagos Nigeria when it trained and it flooded just like everyone including school children I would sometimes roll the sleeves of my trousers to navigate the flood sometimes need deep and on my lucky days I would have to hang on to a truck to navigate the flooded areas now at the time I due to my background inan planning I didn't think of this reoccurring flood as a thing of climate change I attributed it to the impact of the Rapid urbanizing City of Lagos but as times went as time went on I realized that there was a shift in the onset of our seas which affected the duration and the intensity of flooding and so I became more Curious I was anxious and the anxiety basically was because the seas that brought us joy and um times where we look forward to to plant our crops and to escape the scorching Sun of the dry seasons became seasons of ien fear and dread people basically feared for their lives for loss of their lives properties and livelihoods so I anest this my climate anxiety to pursue a master's degree in climate change science and policy because I needed to understand the signs that beled the increasing flood risk and true to my motivation I graas the science that under that underl this flood risk and science tells us that as the climate continues to warm the atmosphere's capacity to hold more water vapor increases which means that we have more drier days and more intense W days and so to quantify this as the climate continues to warm we would see extreme precipitation could increase by 7% on the average per degree of warming Global surface temperature has increased by 1.2 de since preindustrial area and according to the ipcc this code we are locked at 1.5 degre before 2050 even though we cut our emissions by half and so there's an urgency to act quickly but sadly we are still drawn back by debate that says that humans are not drivers of this change that we are basically victims of a continuously changing natural cycle but this is not true according to S ISAC Newton quoting the law of inasia now it says that a body will continue at a state of rest except acted upon by an external force and this change and this the change of the body will be directly proportional to the impact of the force applied upon it so what we know is that the sun emits radiation to the Earth in form of it the Earth absorbs some of this heat and reflects some back into the atmosphere and as man continues his um pursuit of comfort in a world of finite resources through fil Fel burning and um more emissions of greenhouse gases it begins to warm our climate increasingly and this is basically what we refer to as the climate crisis and so this graph you see on on your screen shows you how the Earth has control the climate by itself naturally for over 8,000 800,000 years this is just a snap snapshot in time but we could see that from the point closer to zero which is 10,000 years where we had where we came into the stable planetary condition where we could actually predict our Seasons man's input in the climate has caused the spike that we have we have experienced today so basically man is the driver of climate change as we have it in science now the urgency to adapt and to mitigate the impact of climate change done on me when I modeled the impact of climate change on flal flood risk in Lagos Nigeria and by PL flood I mean extreme pre I mean flooding caused by extreme precipitation now from the study findings I realized that business as usual climate part for Humanity is not an option now this is because I mean for the present day 100 Year inflow which is the one in 100 year um rainfall magnitude if we continue on the trajectory of the business as usual it could become a one in a 20 year rainall magnitude meaning that we would see more frequent extremes from future climate scenarios what this research also revealed is that flooding is and would be more significant in areas that are predominantly occupied by the urban Po and so I decided to combine the trajectory of the climate change with the projected population growth and I found out that for this particular climate trajectory we would see an exposed population to flooding increase by 124% now this is actually alarming and more concerning is the fact that the climate crisis would widen the social economic gaps that already existing in in in our society take for example the recent flood RS that happened in Pakistan this is 6 months after the floods that happen in Pakistan and according to the World Health Organization we have about 10 million persons who still do not have access to save drinking water forcing them to drink potentially um reading disease reading of the estimated 33 million flood victims affected at the time as of today about 21 million persons including 9 million school children still require humanitarian assistance now among the areas that that were hit by this flooding the most the most vulnerable places in Pakistan were most affected were children who already suffered from malnutrition low School enrollment for sanitation and um poor access to drinking Waters existed so essentially what climate what climate change what the climate crisis does is widen is already wi soci economic socio economic gaps now following the ratification of the United Nation sustainable development goals in 2015 which aimed to eradicate poverty end Global hunger and to protect the planet by 2030 an inquiry of this an inquiry of this after eight years of policy adoption would be as the for World dominated economy which we have lived in and the consumer society which we basically participate in as it driven us closer to this 17 targets when you consider the fact that the sustainable development goals propagates the need for a decent work and economic growth but we are still largely living in a climate or in a world that is strongly rooted in fil FS do we isn't it contradictory to continue to pursue sustainable um sdg8 with for Wells wouldn't this continue to also increase the socio economic Gap that we already see existing so in essence what climate change does is to expose the social injustice that we already have in our world and to also show us the um sorry about that okay um okay yeah so in l I think I'll just skip that climate change has been broadly talked about as a doomsday story where there is a cliff and once you get to the cliff it is irreversible but for me I do not see climate change as a cliff I see climate change as the Redemption of humanity and what my charge would be to you today is not to propagate the story of climate change as a doomsday but actually as an opportunity to change the way at which we see things for example if we begin to look at climate change as a way to solve Insurgency and um radicalization of youths in fil foil or oil rich countries we could see that shifting from fil foil and energy to renewable energy could solve insurgencies in those countries I mean why would a country like Nigeria who is rich in oil so rich in oil still have insurgents who are us who do not go to schools fight around with arms so transiting from fil foil to renewable energy could help us solve the climate crisis finally my D my urge for you today is that become Innovative become inventive and if you can't be any of this support inventions we should begin to see Solutions or begin to support solutions that would help us reduce atmospheric CO2 and store them in carbon sinks we should also begin to see solutions that takes us away from this fos economy into renewable energy over time is has shown that man is a good Problem Solver you've connected the ends of the World by building ships roads and different technological advancements medicine has showed us that we could cure all sorts of diseases including polio Corona virus and a vaseline as small as the penicillin and so I believe that if we have the right kind of mindset and we pursue what we have thought upon we'll be able to the climate crisis thank you