Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome

Dec 3

Roughly 10 years ago I had the opportunity to work on an environmental literacy course for the City University of New York, and, in doing the research for the course, one of the key points that stuck out for me was the idea of the “Tipping Point”[2]; this is where we move beyond the “Point of No Return” with increased global warming spiraling into runaway climate change with very unstable and extreme weather patterns.

The very sad truth is that we are now beyond that tipping point. While the alarm bells were being sounded loud and clear over 10 years ago, the situation has worsened, with no signs of any major improvement. The recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)[3], indicates that we are 1°C (roughly 1.8°F) above pre-industrial levels and will arrive at 1.5°C by 2030. This is a little more than 10 years away as I write this, and we are already witnessing these extreme weather phenomena; I cited many of these examples in a previous article- There's Something Happening Here if you want to go back and read them.

Now we have the UN Environment Program Emissions Gap Report 2019 (see UNEP (2019). Emissions Gap Report 2019. Executive summary. United Nations Environment Programme, Nairobi. http://www.unenvironment.org/emissionsgap) and to quote:

"The summary findings are bleak. Countries collectively failed to stop the growth in global GHG emissions, meaning that deeper and faster cuts are now required."

The Impacts are Clear

Being in the middle of emerging phenomena makes it challenging at best to understand the system in its entirety and the emerging threats. What we do know is what we commonly refer to as climate change is certainly having a destabilizing effect on weather patterns and consequent impacts on our environment. Human settlement and consumption are exacerbating this, not only in the green-house gases that are emitted, but in the ways in which we interact with our environment.

Let me take just take one aspect to illustrate how critical this is becoming. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, over 18 million people have been displaced due to extreme weather events in 2018. Most of these displacements have been internal, within the borders of the impacted country. We have witnessed this in all major disasters here in the US. Just take the Camp Fire that impacted the town of Paradise, California; besides the dramatic loss of life and destruction of homes and buildings, over 35,000 residents were displaced. Roughly 20,000 of those displaced residents have moved into the nearby town of Chico which has increased the population from 92,000 to over 112,000, with the resulting effects: increase in real estate costs and rentals, rise in the homeless population, strain on town utilities and services. This is the portent of the future to come.

Hard Fact and Hard Choices

The political structures are ill equipped at the moment to fully address the scope and scale of these threats and impacts. While some political leaders at the country or regional levels are tackling this challenge head on (a good example is the 100 resilient cities program[4]), other political leaders at many levels are reluctant to take the dramatic steps to reduce our common carbon footprint and, furthermore, to invest what is necessary in the immediate future for robust mitigation measures against natural hazards, such as flood barriers/sea walls, levees, storm cellars (for tornados), seismic retrofitting (for earthquake), and forest maintenance, and establishing tougher building codes and zoning restrictions. Many of these measures are unpopular, as they do not show any immediate “Return on Investment” and require political will and fortitude and, moreover, broad social support in the face of development interests, which is why these efforts are often stymied. However, we do know there is a clear ROI over time; a report by the National Institute of Building Sciences demonstrates a return of $6 for every $1 invested in mitigation measures.

The Return on Social Capital

On the social front, our natural local community structures are weakened as our 24hrs./365 day/year always on culture leaves little time for us to attend to local issues and to connect across traditional local community and faith-based groups. With an increasingly transient society, it is challenging to muster a sense of community in order to gain consensus around concrete measures to deal with the impacts of climate change.

But this was, and is, not always the case; we know that social capital, social ties built through the development of tightly-knit community networks (not just social media), enhances the pre and post disaster response, according to Dr. Daniel Aldrich Director of the Resilience and Security Studies Program at Northwestern University; increasing social networks within the community, and between the community and the power structure (government, private sector, and CBO/FBOs with solid and responsive governance) boosts the capabilities of a society to be resilient to the impacts and to recover from a disaster.

We urgently need to build our resilience capacities at all levels of society in the face of these hazards and threats.

So How Do We Get There?

As the US Marines state: we improvise, we adapt, we overcome the obstacles presented to us, so let's stop admiring the problem and do something about it:

Make sure you can help when the time comes by preparing yourself and your household.
Build mitigation and prevention at home and in your business; take the extra time to eliminate flood and fire risks at home and increase resilience at your place of business through business continuity and disaster recovery preparation.
All disasters are local, and the first responders in most situations are the citizens on the spot (this means YOU), so we need to build our response capacities at multiple levels, from our communities on up; make a Red Cross CPR Course and CERT training a part of the primary school curriculum for one and add it in corporate orientations as new hire training for all staff.
Get to know your neighbors and get involved. This may be as simple as volunteering through the Citizen Corp Council or taking part in a local community or faith based organization to find out how you can lend a hand, on an every day basis and when an emergency arises.
Longer term, we do need to work on reducing our carbon footprint, and we also need to begin making the long term investments to harden our infrastructure from the hazards we face: undergrounding powerlines in highly vulnerable regions, localizing energy through greater use of renewables (wind and solar) with energy cells, and increase in energy efficiency through our global supply chains, transportation infrastructure, and consumer habits.