Page 65 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

model, worked up with the Dutch government, which looks at water scarcity
using big data fusion, sensors and satellites. However, we should be careful as
this is not a linear activity: for example, there are 1700 Gigatons of methane
gas under the icepacks of the Arctic and Antarctic, which are four times more
polluting than carbon. Imagine it in terms of a CO2 product. If that is released
at a faster rate than we expect it to at the moment, we could rapidly go from a
2° scenario to a 6 or 9° scenario. Therefore, we have to make sure that our
modelling does not get us into a sort of routine linear approach but also takes
into accounts other surprise factors; the so-called Black Swans.

The next thing you ought to do is look at our critical infrastructure.
During super storm Sandy, for example, the root problem was not so much
dealing with the water itself; the problem was that the water led to power cuts
and once, with a power cut on the US grid, everything stops entirely: it’s the
knock-on effect of a climate-induced type of crisis, like in the big city, which
prompts us to think of the causality of things.

We have got ageing critical infrastructures, we need to stress-test them, we
need to do exercises with them and see how we co uld harden them against cli-
mate scenarios; we need to do defence capacity-building: as we see how to train
military forces, we need to make sure that we don’t only train them to fight the
ISIL forces on their territory (although that would probably be our priority),
but we also train them to deal with issues like resilience, disaster relief and
humanitarian support. We need to train the Engineering Units, the forecasters
in their ability to interact with the police or border guards in emergency situa-
tions as well.

We should also make sure we have adequate military capabilities. For
example, the Dutch sent very sophisticated Apache helicopters to Afghanistan,
which after two months were completely ruined because their systems were too
sophisticated to deal with dust in Afghanistan. Russian helicopters instead,
being far more primitive, turned out to be much more effective. We need to
look at flat-bottom boats since many climate change scenarios, for example for
the Nile delta or the Mekong, are going to revolve the clash between freshwater
and seawater; and the ability to operate in delta-type conditions, where you can’t
unfortunately send an aircraft carrier, will be crucial.

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