Top government adviser warns of "four Katrinas in one year"

Jonathon Porritt, chair of the Sustainable Development Commission and one of the government's top environmental advisers, has today warned we are entering an era of catastrophic climate shocks in which the prospect of "four Katrinas in one year" is an "entirely credible threat".

Speaking at a conference earlier today hosted by reporting software specialist SAS, Porritt warned that increasingly frequent "climate induced shocks" would become a reality over the next 10 to 20 years and would result in a dramatic acceleration of government's climate change strategies.

"[Carbon legislation] will all be gently, gently until we get dramatic climate events to jolt us out of our complacency," he said, adding that in a perverse way the world needs "four Katrinas in a year" or for a city like Miami to be wiped out in order to make it aware of the true scale of the climate change threat.

Porritt said that governments were tending to adopt carbon emission legislation that allowed a high degree of flexibility, allowing them to tighten requirements on businesses to cut emissions very quickly if climate shocks result in public calls for even greater action on climate change.

Commenting on the government's imminent Carbon Reduction Commitment cap-and-trade scheme and the existing EU emissions trading scheme, he observed that politicians could make caps "eye wateringly tight" if and when public perception of the climate change threat falls into line with scientific predictions.

Speaking to BusinessGreen.com following his keynote address, Porritt said that businesses needed to prepare for both the physical threat of climate-induced shocks such as flooding and drought and the likely legislative fallout of such events, arguing that those businesses that invest now to cope with tighter environmental legislation and significantly higher energy costs will be best positioned to prosper in the long term.

"[These threats] are entirely credible," he said. "People forget… but everything that we are seeing changing in the climate today is a consequence of the emissions we put into the atmosphere 20 years ago, not emissions we put into the atmosphere yesterday… So some change, some level of climate-induced shock is inevitable now, absolutely inevitable – and many people believe we are already witnessing that in many areas of the world."

The most astute businesses are already preparing for such a scenario, according to Porritt. "The key concept here is resilience - future proofing what any company needs to do to become better adapted and better equipped to cope with these potential shocks to the system is what good visionary management is about now," he argued. "Companies now realise we live in a world of what some people call radical discontinuities…so smart management teams are already thinking how to proof our business against that discontinuity."

In a wide-ranging interview, Porritt also advised business leaders to prepare for a world where flying and meat consumption would have to be subject to huge cuts.

He argued that government targets of reducing carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 could be met without a fall in the quality of living, but warned that current per capita levels of aviation and meat consumption were not conducive with sustainable levels of emissions.

Porritt predicted that levels of business travel would fall over the coming decades as firms seek to cut costs and emissions, and also warned that public awareness campaigns to reduce meat consumption were in the pipeline.

"These campaigns are coming and it will be interesting to see which supermarket is the first to move and actively promote reduced meat consumption, " he said, adding that progressive businesses should consider having meat free days in their staff canteens.