CBC NEWS
Executive Director Laurie Laybourn warns that climate projections once expected for 2050 are manifesting decades early, leaving emergency services and national planning severely under-resourced.
For CBC News coverage of severe wildfires across Europe, Laurie Laybourn, Executive Director of the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative (SCRI), provided expert perspective on how rapidly accelerating climate impacts are outpacing government forecasting. Speaking to CBC Radio's What on Earth, Laybourn highlighted that France's official scenario planning originally projected current scales of wildfire destruction for 2050, demonstrating how real-world climate risks are rapidly compressing timelines and leaving emergency services severely underfunded and under-equipped to handle present-day threats.
Laurie Laybourn, executive director of a think tank called the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, says France conducted scenario planning in recent years to predict how bad climate change could get.
"Its projections of the scale of wildfire destruction for 2050 are happening now," Laybourn told CBC Radio's What on Earth.
He also says French fire services unions "have been arguing that they don't have the funding and the facilities that they need to handle this kind of wildfire risk."
