Archive for the ‘climate adaptation’ Category
| Newer Entries »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.
Posted in climate adaptation, climate change science, food and agriculture, sea level rise | 2 Comments »
Chicago 1995: How social disparities lead to environmental disasters
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
As I mentioned in the last post, heat waves have the potential to harm or kill a lot of people. Who are the people most likely to suffer first? The experiences from the Chicago 1995 heat wave offer some insights for urban America. Eric Klinenberg’s 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago is as relevant as ever to the current conversation about climate change.
Some excerpts from a U. Chicago Press interview with Klinenberg.
The heat made the city’s roads buckle. Train rails warped, causing long commuter and freight delays. City workers watered bridges to prevent them from locking when the plates expanded. Children riding in school buses became so dehydrated and nauseous that they had to be hosed down by the Fire Department. Hundreds of young people were hospitalized with heat-related illnesses. But the elderly, and especially the elderly who lived alone, were most vulnerable to the heat wave.
“It’s hot,” the mayor told the media. “But let’s not blow it out of proportion. . . . Every day people die of natural causes. You cannot claim that everybody who has died in the last eight or nine days dies of heat. Then everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat.” Many local journalists shared Daley’s skepticism, and before long the city was mired in a callous debate over whether the so-called heat deaths were—to use the term that recurred at the time—”really real.”
[T]he black/white mortality ratio was 1.5 to 1.
Another surprising fact that emerged is that Latinos, who represent about 25 percent of the city population and are disproportionately poor and sick, accounted for only 2 percent of the heat-related deaths…Chicago’s Latinos tend to live in neighborhoods with high population density, busy commercial life in the streets, and vibrant public spaces. Most of the African American neighborhoods with high heat wave death rates had been abandoned—by employers, stores, and residents—in recent decades. The social ecology of abandonment, dispersion, and decay makes systems of social support exceedingly difficult to sustain.
The heat wave was a particle accelerator for the city: It sped up and made visible the hazardous social conditions that are always present but difficult to perceive. Yes, the weather was extreme. But the deep sources of the tragedy were the everyday disasters that the city tolerates, takes for granted, or has officially forgotten.
Related Post: Say so long to your furnace and hello to a new air conditioner
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paraflyer/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
Posted in climate adaptation, environmental justice, race and class, social science, urban | 3 Comments »
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?
Posted in behavior, climate adaptation, climate change science, environmentalism, food and agriculture, nature and culture, policy | 2 Comments »
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