Already, this is being seen in the US where the west coast is suffering through its longest dry spell in 1,200 years according to a recent paper published in the leading journal Nature. Cities across America’s west are grappling with how they manage dwindling water supplies. Snowfall across much of the US was also below average in February.

In California, the statewide snowpack was just 38 per cent of the average as officials grow more concerned for the coming wildfire season.

The most recent summary of drought conditions in the US shows that April has seen heavy rains in some parts of the country, including the midwest and south, which has led to some recovery. But in the country’s west, many locations have set records for the driest January-to-March period on record. Across the US, about 69 per cent of the country is abnormally dry or in drought, and seasonal outlooks don’t show much relief.

Associate Professor of Real Estate Jesse Keenan from the School of Architecture at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana said that throughout history, civilisations have adapted to a changing climate. Those that failed to do so didn’t survive. Keenan said populations across the world are following this same pattern now, but contending with a rapidly warming climate, rising sea temperatures and more intense weather extremes on a scale never seen before.

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“There is nowhere that will escape climate change, nowhere is immune, they might just have higher and lower levels of risk,” he said.

While there has been some major adaptation in the way sectors perform, there’s still a long way to go. But Keenan says the key to adaptation is doing it at a pace that isn’t too fast or too slow. The former will create collateral consequences, while the latter will mean it’s too late to act.

“As a society, we’re making progress, but there will always be people always left behind,” he said. “Not everyone can afford to adapt ... for [people with] middle and upper-class incomes they will feel the pain of climate change on their wallets.”

“Climate gets backed into the economy at every level, it makes the world more expensive... The implication [of climate change] is that it will be harder for people to retire, there will be lower education outcomes, more debt, greater global inequality.”

“[Adaptation] requires a lot of stakeholder engagement, it requires translating climate science into decision-making where there is already so much uncertainty, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act. We need a lot more information from the bottom-up and top-down. [We] can never predict the future, but that doesn’t mean you can’t plan and develop a baseline to support action and decision-making.”

Last week, the latest report of the United Nations chief climate body warned the goal of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees is no longer likely to be achieved.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees would require global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest and fall by 43 per cent by 2030. Over the same time, methane would also need to be reduced by about a third.