[D66] How to Adapt to the End of the World | bloomberg.com

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(Artikel uit vorig jaar..)


  New Climate Debate: How to Adapt to the End of the World

By
Christopher Flavelle
bloomberg.com
September 26, 2018, 10:00 AM GMT+2
6 min
View Original
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bloomberg.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2F2018-09-26%2Fnew-climate-debate-how-to-adapt-to-the-end-of-the-world>



At the end of 2016, before Puerto Rico’s power grid collapsed, wildfires
reached the Arctic, and a large swath of North Carolina was submerged
under floodwaters, Jonathan Gosling published an academic paper
<http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1742715016680675> asking
what might have seemed like a shrill question: How should we prepare for
the consequences of planetary climate catastrophe?

“If some of the more extreme scenarios of ecocrisis turn out to be
accurate, we in the West will be forced to confront such
transformations,” wrote Gosling, an anthropologist who’d just retired
from the University of Exeter in England.

Almost two years later, as the U.S. stumbles through a second
consecutive season of record hurricanes and fires, more academics are
approaching questions once reserved for doomsday cults. Can modern
society prepare for a world in which global warming threatens
large-scale social, economic, and political upheaval? What are the
policy and social implications of rapid, and mostly unpleasant, climate
disruption?

Those researchers, who are generally more pessimistic about the pace of
climate change than most academics, are advocating for a series of
changes—in infrastructure, agriculture and land-use management,
international relations, and our expectations about life—to help manage
the effects of crisis-level changes in weather patterns.

 

In the language of climate change, “adaptation
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-20/hurricane-proof-homes-are-real-why-isn-t-anyone-buying-them>”
refers to ways to blunt the immediate effects of extreme weather, such
as building seawalls, conserving drinking water, updating building
codes, and helping more people get disaster insurance. The costs are
enormous: The U.S. government is considering a 5-mile, $20 billion
seawall
<https://www.wnyc.org/story/army-corps-proposes-giant-hurricane-barrier-across-new-york-bay/>
to protect New York City against storm surges, while Louisiana wants to
spend $50 billion to save parts of its shoreline
<http://coastal.la.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2017-Coastal-Master-Plan-Released_2017-04-21_Final.pdf>
from sinking. Poorer countries could require $500 billion a year
<https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2016/05/unep-report-cost-of-adapting-to-climate-change-could-hit-500b-per-year-by-2050/>
to adapt, according to the United Nations.

But some researchers are going further, calling for what some call the
“deep adaptation agenda.” For Gosling, that means not only rapid
decarbonization and storm-resistant infrastructure, but also building
water and communications systems that won’t fail if the power grid
collapses and searching for ways to safeguard the food supply by
protecting pollinating insects.

Propelling the movement are signs that the problem is worsening at an
accelerating rate. In an article this summer in the /Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences/, 16 climate scientists from around the
world argued that the planet may be much closer than previously realized
to locking in what they call a “hothouse
<http://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252>” trajectory—warming of 4C or
5C (7F or 9F), “with serious challenges for the viability of human
societies.”

Jem Bendell, a professor at the University of Cumbria who popularized
the term deep adaptation, calls it a mix of physical changes—pulling
back from the coast, closing climate-exposed industrial facilities,
planning for food rationing, letting landscapes return to their natural
state—with cultural shifts, including “giving up expectations for
certain types of consumption” and learning to rely more on the people
around us.

“The evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and
uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation,
destruction, migration, disease and war,” he wrote in a paper he posted
on his blog
<http://iflas.blogspot.com/2018/07/new-paper-on-deep-adaptation-to-climate.html>
in July after an academic journal refused to publish it. “We need to
appreciate what kind of adaptation is possible.”


It might be tempting to dismiss Bendell and Gosling as outliers. But
they’re not alone in writing about the possibility of massive political
and social shocks from climate change and the need to start preparing
for those shocks. Since posting his paper, Bendell says he’s been
contacted by more academics investigating the same questions. A LinkedIn
group titled “Deep Adaptation” includes professors, government
scientists, and investors.

William Clark, a Harvard professor and former MacArthur Fellow who
edited the /Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences/ paper, is
among those who worry about what might come next. “We are right on the
bloody edge,” he says.

Clark argues that in addition to quickly and dramatically cutting
emissions, society should pursue a new scale of adaptation work. Rather
than simply asking people to water their lawns less often, for example,
governments need to consider large-scale, decades-long infrastructure
projects, such as transporting water to increasingly arid regions and
moving cities away from the ocean.

“This is not your grandfather’s adaptation,” he says.

Diana Liverman, a professor at the University of Arizona School of
Geography and Development and one of the authors of this summer’s paper,
says adapting will mean “relocation or completely different
infrastructure and crops.” She cites last year’s book /New York 2140/,
in which the science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson imagines the
city surviving under 50 feet of water, as “the extreme end of adaptation.”

Relocating large numbers of homes away from the coast is perhaps the
most expensive item on that list. The U.S. Federal Emergency Management
Agency has spent $2.8 billion
<https://www.nrdc.org/experts/rob-moore/congress-wants-know-why-fema-buyouts-take-long>
since 1989 to buy 40,000 homes in areas particularly prone to flooding,
giving their owners the chance to move somewhere safer. But if seas rose
3 feet, more than 4 million Americans
<https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2961> would have to move,
according to a 2016 study in the journal /Nature: Climate Change/.

“The government’s going to have to spend more money to help relocate
people,” says Rob Moore, a policy expert at the Natural Resources
Defense Council who specializes in flooding. The alternative, he says,
is “a completely unplanned migration of hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of people in this country.”

 

Cameron Harrington, a professor of international relations at Durham
University in England and co-author of the 2017 book /Security in the
Anthropocene/
<https://cup.columbia.edu/book/security-in-the-anthropocene/9783837633375>,
says adapting to widespread disruption will require governments to avoid
viewing climate change primarily as a security threat. Instead,
Harrington says, countries must find new ways to manage problems that
cross borders—for example, by sharing increasingly scarce freshwater
resources. “We can’t raise border walls high enough to prevent the
effects of climate change,” he says.

There are even more pessimistic takes. Guy McPherson, a professor
emeritus of natural resources at the University of Arizona, contends
climate change will cause civilization to collapse not long after the
summer Arctic ice cover disappears. He argues that could happen as early
as next year, sending global temperatures abruptly higher and causing
widespread food and fuel shortages within a year.

Many academics are considerably less dire in their predictions. Jesse
Keenan, who teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and advises
state governments on climate adaptation, says warnings about social
collapse are overblown. “I think for much of the world, we will pick up
the pieces,” Keenan says. But he adds that the prospect of
climate-induced human extinction has only recently become a widespread
topic of academic discourse.

Even mainstream researchers concede there’s room for concern about the
effects of accelerating change on social stability. Solomon Hsiang, a
professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies the
interplay between the environment and society, says it’s too soon to
predict the pace of global warming. But he warns that society could
struggle to cope with rapid shifts in the climate.

“If they are indeed dramatic and fast, there exists substantial evidence
that many human systems, including food production and social stability
more broadly, will be sharply and adversely affected,” Hsiang says.

For Bendell, the question of when climate change might shake the Western
social order is less important than beginning to talk about how to
prepare for it. He acknowledges that his premise shares something with
the survivalist movement, which is likewise built on the belief that
some sort of social collapse is coming.

But he says deep adaptation is different: It looks for ways to mitigate
the damage of that collapse. “The discussion I’m inviting is about
collective responses to reduce harm,” he says, “rather than how a few
people could tough it out to survive longer than others.”

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