Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

In this week’s issue of Science: Bangladesh at the front lines of adaptation

Friday, October 30th, 2009

In “Hot, Flat, Crowded—And Preparing for the Worst“,^1,2 (subscription required) Mason Inman lays out how Bangladesh is already coping with climate change.

Bangladesh is being hit with multiple kinds of challenges:

• salt water incursion as sea level rises, affecting water supplies and crops along the coast
• concentration of rainfall events into fewer but heavier downpours, which leads to both drought in winter months (and failure of crops) as well as severe floods during the summer monsoons that wipe out crops and destroy infrastructure

Some excerpts:

Bangladesh is striving to become a global showcase for climate change adaptation. Earlier this month, its government approved a wide-ranging strategy for dealing with climate change that includes ramping up civil engineering projects to control flooding and protect farmland from rising sea levels. Researchers here are also testing crops that better tolerate floods and drought. Realizing that time-honored approaches to living off the land no longer suffice, Bangladesh has implemented more community-level projects than any other country to gird people for climate shifts.

The World Bank estimates that as much as $100 billion a year is required to prepare people in vulnerable areas for climate change. That’s assuming the world gets its act together to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. If not, says disaster expert Ian Burton of the University of Toronto in Canada, “then the cost of adaptation is going to be enormous.”

It would be interesting for someone to estimate what the more-catastrophic adaptation cost scenarios look like compared to mitigation costs.  This would make it clear what it costs to mitigate now vs. trying to adapt later when it’s more difficult to do so (if at all possible by that point).

We essentially have four choices:

(1) mitigate now, adapt now
(2) mitigate now, adapt later
(3) mitigate later, adapt now
(4) mitigate later, adapt later

#1 will likely be the least expensive option in the long term, and it will help us sustain the fewest impacts in the near term.  It gives us the most flexibility in terms of how we shape the future, and it buys us the most insurance against catastrophic change.  The Stern Review suggested global  mitigation costs of 1-2% world GDP (about $600 billion-1.2 trillion/yr).  That number goes up the longer we wait.  A recent Congressional Budget Office estimate of the Waxman-Markey House bill for a U.S. cap-and-trade program was $22 billion/yr  (roughly the cost of a postage stamp per day for the average American household) by the year 2020.

By eliminating the up-front costs of adaptation, #2 might appear to save money, but if we don’t adapt to change we are already committed to, the costs associated with warming impacts may be large as we lose coastal real estate and farmland, sustain infrastructure damage from more severe storms and flooding, lose crop productivity, and face public health concerns from things like heat waves.  This option is like refusing to pay a few hundred bucks a year for homeowners insurance but then having to pay several hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild after a fire.

#3 doesn’t make much sense because we will end up spending twice on adaptation—once to confront near-term changes we are already committed to and once again to deal with (or at least attempt to deal with) conditions getting much worse.  Moreover, mitigating later may be too late to avoid potentially dangerous temperature rise, and it reduces our chances of lowering atmospheric CO₂ if climate change is irreversible over hundreds of years.

#4 is truly a losers game.  Ecologically, socially, and economically, it would likely be catastrophic in all terms.

An ounce of prevention may indeed be worth a pound of cure.

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

¹Inman M. (2009) Hot, Flat, Crowded—And Preparing for the Worst. Science 326:662-663.

²Bowdoin people can access the article here.