4 myths about working on climate change in global development

Climate change is now a core focus of global development, and the demand for experts to help take action to combat it continues to grow. But there are several misconceptions about engaging in climate work, from the skills involved to the sectors it touches. Devex spoke with several climate experts to debunk four common myths. Myth 1: You have to be a hard scientist to work on climate change. This is perhaps the biggest misconception about working on climate change. There are certainly lots of climate science and research jobs, but there are as many development jobs that are not science-related, if not more. And if you ask Jo Scheuer, who spent four and a half years as director of climate change and disaster risk reduction at the Bureau for Policy and Program Support at the U.N. Development Program office in New York, there is not even a pure climate scientist. Speaking to Devex, he used UNDP as an example, which employs legal professionals that supported the Paris climate negotiations or engineers that work on energy projects. “Climate change specialists, to begin with, is a very vague or broad term because if you work on climate change there are so many aspects to this,” Scheuer said, adding his belief that most people on his team have not studied climate science. Hope Herron, senior climate change specialist at Millennium Challenge Corporation, told Devex that many jobs related to climate change are tied to soft skills, such as communications and policy implementation. There’s also going to be a big need for people with a finance background because the biggest question following the climate summit in December is how to finance environmental investments at the national level. What you’re most likely to find in development organizations, Scheuer noted, would be a mix of climate specialists in a particular issue like agriculture and water resource management and people engaged in traditional development work such as capacity building. Myth 2: Climate change affects only one sector. Global warming is tied to emissions, and plenty of discussions center around how to promote the use of cleaner or renewable energy. But climate change is not just about energy. “Climate change affects nearly every sector from a wide variety of risks,” Kelly Tobin, a former recruitment manager at Engility Corp., told Devex. Tobin also noted the common belief that mitigation is just about clean energy and energy efficiency, to the point of forgetting the importance of land use, land use change and forestry in both mitigation and adaptation. Some may also not associate climate change with disaster risk reduction. Research has shown that changes in climate can boost temperatures over time, increasing the prospects of weather-related natural disasters. As such, limiting global warming to the lowest number possible is “the most important disaster risk reduction measure we can make,” Scheuer said, “because we will limit the increase of intensity and frequency of climate related disasters in the future: The floods will not come more often. They will not be stronger.” Myth 3: Climate change can be dealt with separately from development. With the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris climate agreement, the trend, according to industry veterans, will be that climate change will be integrated into all aspects of development work. And it’s only logical, as development is a root cause of emissions, according to Scheuer: “It's development that makes choices that either contribute to global warming or not, that are exposing your investment to climate risks or not,” he said. The development community, he argued, needs to understand the importance of climate risk much better and the climate community needs “to move out of the environment field and massively go into the finance ministries, to planning ministries” to make sure that the countries invest in climate change mitigation and adaptation because an investment in mitigating and adapting to climate change is an investment in sustainable development. Ideally, he added, for instance, all agriculture specialists would understand the issue and factor that into their work, knowing how a changing climate will affect an agricultural development initiative. Someone might ask themselves: “So if I plant something today for today's climate, is that still going to be the case 10 years from now or am I actually now putting something in place that uses way too much water, drains the groundwater? So basically will my investment be gone in a few years because the climate does no longer support it?” Myth 4: All climate change work aims to 'prevent' climate change. Although the Paris climate agreement stresses the reduction of emissions to prevent disastrous climate change, there is equal emphasis on strengthening countries' ability to deal with climate change impacts. Many are, in fact, working to manage the effects and impacts of climate change. For a Millennium Challenge Corp.-funded road project in the Philippines, TetraTech, for example, recommended larger storm drain culverts, better landslide protection measures and higher bridges following an environmental impact assessment indicating that with climate change, precipitation over the country is projected to increase.