Amid the uncertainty associated with a complex system, science is now able to accurately forecast the trajectory of the weather and, more importantly, the role that we humans play in the evolution of our planet’s functioning since the Industrial Revolution. According to former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, greenhouse gas emissions are an “inconvenient truth” that are in large part the result of the energy model and lifestyle of the citizens of that country. But today its leaders, more than listening to science, are focusing on opinion polls divided between those who believe in the responsibility of humans for global warming and those who do not.
Among us there is something similar to what scientists call “the inconvenient truth”: The role of humans exacerbates these changes and not only threatens the climate, but also our own vulnerability to the globalized environment. Professor Andres Etter of Javeriana University – notorious Colombian scientist and expert in ecosystems – made public in an international magazine last year his discoveries that show that 50 percent of Colombian territory already reveals an obviously severely damaged ecological footprint as a result of the historical and widespread dismantling of ecosystems and the collapse of biodiversity.
That is why today we cannot talk about adaptation, as is suggested in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its report on March 29. The risk of extreme climatic events and natural disasters is not being confronted in a coherent manner or with an adaptation model based on the ecosystems. In simple terms: the ecological reconstruction of the ecological territory.
The Development Plan had to be modified as a result of the winter heat wave. The derailed locomotives are still visible, bringing more vulnerability to the critical spots in the territory. We have not understood, as a society, that building prosperity in the humid Andean tropics can only be achieved if the “adaptation” mentioned by the United Nations panel becomes a state policy. This issue is still full of omissions. The second to last report of the Comptroller of the Republic to Congress draws attention to the municipalities’ obligations in the conservation of the watershed-supplying aqueducts, which have barely been fulfilled. This led to a warning for the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development. It is not clear how the coordination between the Adaptation Fund, the National Environmental System and the National System of Prevention and Attention of Disasters will work; in many cases this would be a reparative function.
At this point our representatives and technocrats seem to be trapped in a web of electoral cycles that they cannot escape, like in the U.S., this “inconvenient truth” about climate change.
For this reason, this winter wave will not be the last one, and it will not find us mentally, institutionally or territorially prepared either. Science has spoken; why does no one seem to be listening?
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