Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Climate adaptation: We have no choice, and it’s not enough

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

Our global environment is changing in ways that we are beginning to observe in our lifetimes:

• Climate is warming by as much as a degree centigrade per decade in parts of the Polar North.
• Permafrost is thawing.
• Species ranges are shifting northwards in latitude and upwards in altitude.
• Sea level is rising.
• Sea ice is shrinking.
• Polar ice is thinning.
• Pervasive droughts are beginning to grip parts of the world.
• 50 and 100 year rain storms are happening multiple times in a decade.
• Warming is wreaking havoc on cultures around the world.  Inuit communities are losing their villages and traditional hunting grounds. Bangladeshi farmers are losing their coastal fields to saltwater incursion.  Pacific islanders are poised to lose their atolls. This week, Nature published a story about how the thawing of the Thorthormi Glacier in the Himalayas threatens the nation of Bhutan.

Tim Killeen, head of Geosciences at NSF, once said that if you look at model projections of climate, they all say the same thing up to the year 2030:  Based on the gases we have already emitted, and the inertia in the ocean-atmosphere system, we are committed to climate change at least to this point, and there’s little we can do about it.  This means we have no choice but to start adapting to things like changing seasonality in temperatures and precipitation, food production, sea level rise, and species distributions.  The most recent IPCC synthesis report echoes this.

After 2030, however, models diverge depending on which socioeconomic path we choose.  How fast we de-carbonize the economy will determine the extent to which we mitigate warming and how much further adaptation we will need.

There is vigorous debate about the role of adaptation in a world where mitigation is clearly needed.  Adaptation has long been assailed by the environmental community as giving up.  And now that we need it, old thinking is hard to break.

In a recent article in Yale 360 (Learning to Live With Climate Change Will Not Be Enough), David Orr argues strongly for mitigation over adaptation, although he recognizes that  adaptation strategies in the near term are prudent to meet the changes to which we are already committed.

Today, Bowdoin College’s Environmental Studies program, in partnership with the The Nature Conservancy and the McKeen Center for the Common Good, hosted a symposium, “Changing Environments, Changing Societies: Community Responses to Environmental Uncertainty.” It  included a mix of international and regional scholars and practitioners, social and natural scientists, and issues like biodiversity, water, food, public health, and infrastructure/urban planning.

What were some of the main outcomes this group synthesized about adaptation?

The urgency is clear regarding the rate of and magnitude of climate warming and the need for adaptation in coming decades (it’s with a sense of irony that we concluded this point at 3:50 pm on the same day that 350.org launched one of the largest climate awareness campaigns in history).

It’s also clear that adaptation around the world and here at home is still in its infancy.  We have a long way to go and little time to get  there.

And although it’s clear that technological solutions to adaptation will probably be important, including things like

• sea walls,
• new crops
• improved infrastructure (dams, culverts, storm drains)
• new energy grids
• carbon sink management
• beach nourishment

what struck me was how the group emphasized more the importance of human solutions.  If there was one mantra today it was that society needs to learn how to become flexible, resilient, and proactive.

What does this mean?

• It means we need to start thinking about new geographies.  We currently conceive of our places within residences, cities, states, and nations.  Instead, we should focus more on neighborhoods and watersheds…and how the people in each of these scales interact and affect one another. We all remember what happened with Hurricane Katrina: Americans were glued to their televisions, hoping the people of New Orleans would soon be helped by federal and state responses. They weren’t.  And although there are other important factors like institutional racism that make Katrina a more complicated story, we can’t afford to let adaptation become another Katrina.
• We need to build coalitions within these geographies.  Not only the traditional alliances that come to mind—like cities working with one another—but new alliances among nontraditional partners (everyday citizens, energy producers, health care providers, civil engineers and maintenance crews, town planners, etc.).
• We need to develop local leadership to make the new alliances in the new geographies effective.
• We may need these new institutions to do things we have not really thought about before, including assisting the migration of people (and even entire cities—think the Outer Banks of North Carolina or South Florida) and thinking about what to do with abandoned infrastructure.  As Michael Orbach put it, what do we do with Houston and all of the oil refineries that will be under water in 100 years?
• We can learn important lessons from anthropologists who show why the social-ecological structure of the Greenland Inuit has allowed them to survive while the Greenland Norse culture perished.
• We need to do a better job planning how to mobilize health responses.  In New England, we have nitric oxides from cars and VOCs from trees, and (at least in some months) sunlight.  Those are three of the four key ingredients of ground level ozone.  The only ingredient missing is warm temperatures, which is on the way.  So what is New England doing to prepare for the increasing number of respiratory illnesses that impact places like Washington DC, Atlanta, and Los Angeles?  Let’s hope that electric cars come online soon, which would remove nitric oxide from the ozone equation and hopefully solve this issue.
• We need to think about our diet choices and how these can be viewed as adaptation (or even mitigation) strategies.  Eating less (or no) meat not only helps reduce carbon emissions, it allows us to be more flexible in producing more calories from plant crops on a given acre of land.
• We need to think about being proactive with infrastructure likely to fail with increased severe weather, such as 50- and 100-year storms.  The Oyster River Watershed project (New Hampshire) that Michael Simpson, Colin Lawson, and colleagues produced is interesting.  Using GIS and hydrological models, they were able to show that more-frequent severe rainfall events from climate change will blow out culverts and bridges throughout the watershed. The cost of replacing this damaged infrastructure, along with the roads that are often blown out, can be 70% higher than installing infrastructure now that can handle stronger storms.

All in all, an interesting day.