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The World Climate Change 3 conference which is being held at Geneva's International Convention Center this week is focusing on adaptation, rather than trying to curb carbon emissions. The politically onerous task of trying to actually stop or at least slow down global warming is being left to the Copenhagen Conference in December, and that is being billed as the make or break event for the future of the planet--or atleast for the future of the human race on this particular planet. WCC3 is proof, if any were needed, that Climate Change is already a nasty reality that can no longer be ignored much less halted in the foreseeable future. Is Switzerland exempt? Not exactly. Speaking to a group of Media 21 journalists, the Global Humanitarian Forum's CEO-Director General, Walter Fust, noted that the Swiss government is already being forced to consider the effect that melting permafrost will have on the country's highway system. Cows are another issue. Swiss cattle reportedly give off more greenhouse gas in the form of methane than all the cars with less than three-litre motors in Switzerland. Scientists in Lausanne have been investigating dietary changes that may reduce the methane. Garlic looks like a winner.

As its name implies, WCC3 is only the third climate change conference to be held in nearly 20 years, and the focus on adaptation is new. "Until recently, adaptation was the poor stepchild of the climate change debate," Michel Jarraud, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization, told reporters. With natural disasters ranging from droughts and uncontrollable forest fires to super-charged cyclones and Biblical-scale floods, the effects of global warming are increasingly hard to ignore. "I firmly believe that every country needs to have a risk assessment officer," Fust, who previously headed the Swiss Development Corporation, said. "You need that kind of expertise if only to decide what you need to insure against."

In fact, technology is producing a number of innovations that may soften the impact of the looming catastrophe. Improvements in satellite monitoring and computer modeling make it possible to make much more educated guesses about which way the weather will go in the near future. Dr. Jack L. Hayes, head of the US National Weather Service, who arrived in Geneva for the conference with Shere Abbott, US President Barack Obama's point person on climate change, noted that in the US it is now possible to give a pretty accurate forecast for about a week. "We are working on extending that," he said. Efforts are also being made to spread weather information quickly through low-cost communications networks. Farmers in Africa are already getting tips via cell phone that should help them make more informed gambles on when to plant and what kind of seeds to use. The UN's International Strategy for Disaster Relief, head quartered in Geneva is taking the lead on warning against serious risks.

What WCC3 is hoping to do is to spread the knowledge more uniformly, and to raise awareness of what can and needs to be done. Africa, for instance, is commonly known as an astronomical "black hole" as far as automated on-the-ground weather sensing information is concerned. An initiative now being developed would put weather sensing equipment on cell phone towers which are popping up like mushrooms across the continent. The information would then be sent by satellite to the WMO in Geneva, analyzed, and dispatched back to where it can be used on the ground. "Why should we care about Africa?" WMO's Michel Jarraud asked rhetorically, and promptly answered his own question, "Our estimate is that it takes anywhere from six to ten days before a weather event anywhere on the planet has an effect on the rest of the planet. Strengthening Africa will benefit Africa, but it will also benefit the rest of us. It is a win-win situation."

And it is increasingly clear that we need a win--not just new technology but some fundamental changes in attitude.  Someswhar Singh, who also talked to journalists at the Media 21 seminar, remarked somewhat somberly, "We are on a planet that is dying. The question that is usually asked is: what can I do?--not what can we do? After all that has happened, we are still not asking the right question."