Unquestionable Need for Climate Adaptation

Extreme climate and weather events are becoming more frequent and severe. The cost of the resulting damage and losses is USD 16 million per hour globally. A significant part of this stems from our lack of understanding of nature’s interconnections. Our current systems and infrastructures are no longer sufficient to handle these challenges – we must urgently adapt to the changing climate. And once again, nature itself offers solutions, as it was highlighted by Professor Jan Pokorný, co-founder and research director of the research organization ENKI, o.p.s., at the Business Council for Sustainable Development in Hungary (BCSDH) Business Breakfast and Forum, which focused on climate adaptation this March.

According to a report from 2025 by the World Economic Forum, the leaders who were surveyed ranked extreme weather conditions as the second greatest risk factor using a two-year outlook and the top risk from a ten-year perspective.

Ignorance affects climate adaptation
"Improper landscape management – stemming from ‘plant illiteracy’, i.e., the low level of human knowledge about plants – is leading to an increase in continental droughts, rising local temperatures, and the development of an arid climate, interrupted by torrential rains and extreme weather events. This ignorance also affects climate adaptation, as we fail to properly utilize nature in this process. People do not understand the role of plant transpiration in the ‘air-conditioning’ function of vegetation, its impact on the water cycle, or the interactions between plants and the atmosphere. By gaining a deeper understanding of these processes, we can equip ourselves with numerous tools for both climate mitigation and adaptation," Professor Pokorný said in his thought-provoking presentation.

Adapting to a changing world
The BCSDH's Towards Net Zero survey, published in January 2025, highlighted that while 91% of companies are feeling the impacts of climate change, only 16% have a climate adaptation action plan. Moreover, Hungary is disproportionately vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change relative to its small contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions.

As BCSDH President Attila Chikán Jr. stressed in his opening speech to the business breakfast, "the frequency of extreme weather events has increased, and the business sector must also prepare for this. We need to assess how these changes may impact business operations and develop strategies for adapting to our changing world. Although several international developments are working against sustainability efforts, this does not mean that companies can relax their commitments regarding climate change. The climate change is not slowing down – it is becoming increasingly severe."

Increasing reporting obligations have led to growth in the number of sustainability strategies and the use of related metrics, significantly impacting climate adaptation and the assessment of physical risks. Integrating sustainability considerations into financial decision-making clearly facilitates resilience planning. Global and European trends may lead to a softening of sustainability goals and expectations about decisive action. However, regardless of what happens with climate targets, conditions are already changing, and this process will only intensify. The need for climate adaptation is unquestionable.

Offering sunlight to the living system
Professor Pokorny explained to Diplomacy&Trade in summary of his lecture at the BCSDH event that “thanks to sunshine, we are here and we live because around in space it's a temperature about minus 2,065 degrees Celsius. So, let us appreciate sunshine and let us learn what we can do with the solar energy. We can see it and measure it and understand it already on the level of basic education. If the sunshine reaches dry land, the land will be hot, the hot air will go up and we will dry up civilization. If what we offer to sunshine are water and plants, plants will grow, ‘eating up’ carbon-dioxide. However, one molecule of CO₂ in, one molecule oxygen out – and a hundred molecules of water evaporate, resulting in local climatization, which means adaptation. Let us take this in a broader scale. It's not just that we have to adapt to high temperature. We can buffer, we can decrease the extremes of temperature between day and night. So, it helps to offer the sunlight to the living system, that is plants, forests, meadows and so on.”

Managing nature to help climate
So, that is what humanity should do mitigate the effect of climate change. Giving an example from his home country, the Czech Republic, the professor points out that farmers manage agricultural lands that make up in 54% of the territory of the country. Another 34% is managed as forest. “It means that we have 88% in the hands of land managers who thus have a responsibility and society should respect it. If we have more, higher level production and more green stuff on the fields, we will have natural cooling.” As for businesses in cities, he adds that “let us think how to recycle water from sewage plants or how to recycle mainly rainwater, for instance by creating green façades, instead of letting this water disappear and leave dry surfaces. If we don’t act in that responsible way, we cannot – and should not – be then surprised that we have is hot weather and desert. We did it.”

Heat generating parking lots
In his lecture, the professor mentioned the example of parking lots as a textbook example of how something man-made can affect the climate adversely. “Where once you had wet meadow, now you have supermarkets or large halls of shopping centers with large plots covered by concrete or asphalt and used as parking lots. So, when the sunlight reaches this surface, more than 60% of its energy is actually transferred into heat, which means the asphalt surface of the parking lot is of 60 degrees Celsius. This high temperature heats up the air, which goes up and sucks humidity from around it. So, what to do? Let us collect rainwater from these parking places and channel it to trees or green lawns, which will help cool the air and recycle water. It may sound very simplistic what I'm saying, but let us cooperate with the technical people who will find the solution and figure out how to do it. My main message is that we should understand it from childhood and what is good and what is bad. We cannot always avoid to have dry places but we have to be aware that we are spoiling climate and therefore, we must do our best to mitigate this problem.” He agrees that in this particular example of parking lots, the creation of multi-level parking garages could be a proper technical solution as their smaller footprint allows freeing up a lot of space to nature and thus avoid having large hot surfaces.

Green, green, green
When asked to mention positive examples in conclusion, Professor Pokorny said that “you will be surprised to find some in Kenya, in Africa. I'm very, very surprised that a man, who is a teacher, was able to make a green island on two hectares. He simply saves rainwater and cultivate plants there – a solution he survived the dry period with. Then, we have groups of people in India who successfully cultivate several hundred hectares in an area that is of not so favorable climate. To give you a positive example from closer, we have towns in my country buying a hundred hectares to create green parks with three layers: fruit trees, some shrubs and then the vegetation – green, green, green.”