Adapt or Perish
The climate is changing. It doesn’t matter what — or who — is causing it.
In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (known to its friends as the IPCC) released a report that warns of a global climate calamity that could occur in our lifetimes…and certainly within our children’s:
Marine ice sheet instability in Antarctica and/or irreversible loss of the Greenland ice sheet could result in multi-metre rise in sea level over hundreds to thousands of years. These instabilities could be triggered at around 1.5°C to 2°C of global warming.
Also in 2018, the U.S. Global Change Research Program released Volume II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, covering climate change impacts, risks, and adaptation. My top take-aways:
The impacts of climate change are already being felt in communities across the country. More frequent and intense extreme weather and climate-related events, as well as changes in average climate conditions, are expected to continue to damage infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities. Future climate change is expected to further disrupt many areas of life, exacerbating existing challenges to prosperity posed by aging and deteriorating infrastructure, stressed ecosystems, and economic inequality.
and
Impacts within and across regions will not be distributed equally. People who are already vulnerable, including lower-income and other marginalized communities, have lower capacity to prepare for and cope with extreme weather and climate-related events and are expected to experience greater impacts.
Almost a year later—in November 2019—a team of more than 11,000 scientists from over 150 countries officially declared in BioScience that the world is in a climate emergency:
The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity. Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature’s reinforcing feedbacks (atmospheric, marine, and terrestrial) that could lead to a catastrophic “hothouse Earth,” well beyond the control of humans. These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.
And now Swedish climate activist (and almost-17-year-old) Greta Thunberg is Time’s 2019 Person of the Year:
“I want you to panic,” she told the annual convention of CEOs and world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January. “I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”
So do I.
The climate is changing.
It’s not changing at some far-off date in the future, in some island country that you’ll never visit. It’s happening now, and it’s happening here in the United States. In Miami. In Louisiana. In Alaska.
The argument I keep hearing, over and over, concerns whether or not this change is coming as a result of humans. It seems pretty clear-cut to me.
But it doesn’t matter. Seriously. It just doesn’t matter.
The cause isn’t the issue. Is doesn’t matter if the cause is humans, fungi, or the polar bears. It’s changing all the same.
There are two things we can do. We can mitigate, and we can adapt. That’s not an “or” statement. Most of us are already familiar with mitigation — it involves processes that can reduce the amount and speed of future climate change by reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases or removing them from the atmosphere. Carbon-neutral energy sources, such as solar and wind, represent mitigation efforts. What may be less familiar is adaptation.
Adaptation: The process of adjusting to new (climate) conditions in order to reduce risks to valued assets.
Relocating buildings out of flood plains or further inland from rising seas are examples of physical adaptations. Using smaller amounts of water during times of drought is an example of behavioral adaptation.
Let’s get started.
Adaptation is inherently local, but here are some tools to help you on your adaptation journey. Full disclosure: I’m the co-managing editor of the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit. It’s amazing. But I’m biased.
