Iceland review - 2016, Page 45

ICELAND REVIEW 43
ICELAND REVIEW 43
No country can be exempt from the effects of climate
change. It’s a global problem, so it really demands a
global solution,” asserts Hugi Ólafsson, director of
the Department of Oceans, Water and Climate at Iceland’s
Ministry for the Environment and Natural Resources. “Iceland
produces about 0.01 percent of global emissions and unilateral
action by us does not matter much—and that is also true for
bigger countries. For us to take any meaningful action we need
this global foundation.”
I meet Hugi in Reykjavík in mid-January, a few weeks
after he returned from the United Nations Climate Change
Conference (COP21, the 21st yearly meeting of the Conference
of the Parties) in Paris, where he represented Iceland as the
country’s chief climate negotiator. Adopted by all 195 of the
participating member states and the European Union (EU),
the agreement, which will govern greenhouse emission meas-
ures from 2020, is considered a major milestone in climate
negotiations. Hugi is clearly pleased with the result. “I was very
happy. People were pretty adamant that we probably wouldn’t
get many other chances to get a truly global agreement but
still I would say that the agreement exceeded my expectations.
I have been to 11 of these COP meetings and I have never
encountered such a positive atmosphere and businesslike atti-
tude—and there was genuine joy at the end,” he states.
OCEANS OF CHANGE
The impacts of climate change in Iceland are being seen in the
country’s glaciers. Due to warming temperatures, they have
retreated by, on average, one meter per year—and there are
more extreme examples. According to the Glacier Research
Society of Iceland, Sólheimajökull glacial tongue, a popular
tourist destination in the south of the country, has retreated
roughly 900 meters since 1995. “The most visible indications
of climate change are glaciers,” Hugi affirms, adding: “We
have very good historical records of monitoring them and
they are pretty much all receding. There may be some partial
reversals but scientists warn us that if this trend con-
tinues, they will disappear in one to two centuries.”
One of the consequences of this will be
a change to the water cycle. Glaciers are
important water reservoirs and regulators,
and most would find it strange to live
in a land called Iceland if it were
largely devoid of ice, Hugi points
out, adding that the disappear-
ance of Iceland’s glaciers
would also signal that
global warming
had probably
reached dangerous lev-
els for Icelanders and human-
kind in general. Even if Iceland were
able to deal with disappearing glaciers with-
out suffering negative consequences for the econ-
omy and social welfare, Hugi stresses that it would be
wrong to make light of such a profound change in nature.
Extensive research on glaciers in Iceland is ongoing. “We
want to make the glaciers accessible, like a real life classroom
on climate change, both for Icelanders and visitors. We collect
pictures and data so we can use glaciers as visible indicators of
the changes—changes we can literally see.”
Aside from higher temperatures and a changing landscape,