Abstract
The death toll of recent heat waves in developed countries has been remarkably high, contradicting the common assumption that high levels of economic and technological development automatically lead to lower vulnerability to weather extremes. Future climate change may further increase this vulnerability. In this article we examine some recent evidence of heat wave-related mortality and we conclude that while economic wealth and technological capacity might be a necessary condition for adequately coping with adverse climate change effects, they are not sufficient. Questions of awareness, preparedness, organizational issues, and actor networks have to be addressed in a proactive and focused manner in order to avoid future heat wave damages. We propose some practical consequences for heat wave adaptation measures by adopting a risk governance framework that can be universally applied, as it is sufficiently flexible to deal with the multi-level and often fragmented reality of existing coping measures.
Highlights
Climate change is already underway and will continue in the future
Measurements show that Global Mean Temperature (GMT) has already increased by 0.76°C compared to pre-industrial levels, and the climate system is committed to an additional increase of 0.6°C due to historic emissions (IPCC 2007)
The question arises: How might an improved heat wave risk governance architecture for Europe look like that capitalizes on the flexibility of systems and variety of national approaches, one that at the same time ensures comparability, cooperation, and a comprehensive analysis of changing risk conditions? First of all, we think it appropriate to characterize what we mean by risk governance, and why we assume it to be indispensable in the case of heat waves in Europe, before we give an outline of such an architecture
Summary
Climate change is already underway and will continue in the future. Measurements show that Global Mean Temperature (GMT) has already increased by 0.76°C compared to pre-industrial levels, and the climate system is committed to an additional increase of 0.6°C due to historic emissions (IPCC 2007). Various heat wave events in the recent past, which led to numerous deaths, have raised the attention of both scientists and decision makers across the globe We examine this issue from an integrated risk governance perspective. We focus on Europe, heat waves do frequently occur in other continents where many countries often are perceived to have much lower coping capacities. In particular the heat wave events of 2003 and 2010 in Europe lead us to correct these underlying assumptions It seems that even the most advanced countries need to rethink their existing risk governance structures. (section 2), we look at existing coping strategies (especially early warning systems) in Europe (section 3) Based on this background, we present a risk governance perspective and apply it to heat waves (section 4). The final section draws some conclusions and links the heat wave case to the wider picture of climate policy
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