Early in her new book, Sink or Swim, Susannah Fisher notes lack of ambition and urgency in climate adaptation planning; we are missing the window to scale up necessary actions in order to have positive effects.
Since adaptation involves considering where and how people will live from now and many decades into the future, it is perhaps far from surprising that political initiatives and agreements so far are neither holistic nor system changing. Fisher looks at the vexed subjects of movements of people, food, nature, and conflict.
Hard choices
Fisher affirms that hard choices are needed, and they must be made not just for people, but with them. With the major diversions of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and – subsequent to the drafting of this book – the Trump administration, the challenge of engaging enough governments, corporations, and international institutions in a renaissance of adaptation policies is going to be very tough.
Difficult technological transitions
Fisher examines the imminent horizon of threats to the goal of 1.5°C (2.7°F) of warming. She is hopeful at points, but realistically sceptical about technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – which are more rumours than industries at present. As a planet we have to proceed with the assumption that such technologies may not appear on a desirable scale until after 2050. It certainly does not help that transport, agriculture, and buildings sectors have yet to be adapted for a low carbon future.
Risks to the poorest and the natural world
Whether it is more fires, droughts, floods, or wrecked infrastructure, we can expect impacts of all these types of disasters to be partly or mainly caused by the ongoing changing climate. We can also expect all of these disasters to fall the heaviest on the poorest and most vulnerable in our world. The fact that nature in general can be obliterated in the course of these types of changes is as obvious as it is global.
The coastal city as a possible victim
Let’s consider, as Fisher does, the presence of so many major cities at or close to sea level. The sea level is rising; saltwater is penetrating further inland into agricultural areas; the weight of tall buildings combines with groundwater extraction to cause the sinking of cities.
How their inhabitants will cope with such continuing changes remains an ongoing burden for adaptation initiatives. Additionally, many parts of the world depend upon glaciers melting on regular cycles for their water supply. They are facing a daunting challenge of adaptation as glaciers continue decades-long decline.
If the future of the climate emergency includes such huge changes as the decline and collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which Fisher mentions at several points, then the implications for crop growing seasons and the length and severity of winters in northern Europe are both negative.
The future: stubborn optimism is essential
Quoting UN negotiator Christiana Figueres, co-author of The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, Fisher favours “stubborn optimism” as an enduring posture. In fact, “stubborn optimism” could be a summary of her own book.
If we can build a Thames Barrier in London to protect at least 1.5 million people from storm surges in the Thames Estuary, then can we not respond with a mixture of hard physical barriers and nature-based solutions – mangroves, peatlands, salt marshes – to contain rising seas?
But even for the richest states, country-protecting scale-up of such adaptation policies will be hard, take decades, and shift labour and skills away from other forms of infrastructure. Fisher writes about the problems of adjusting ports to adapt to sea level rise and more powerful storms. She also comments on the threatened city of Miami and how a retreat of investment – presumably leading to a retreat of people – could be highly damaging in and of itself. Using yet more fossil fuel energy to create steel-reinforced concrete barriers would certainly not be a good global option for these conditions.
The unrestrained emissions sectors
Flying and shipping are two areas assisting in the mobility of people and goods. Neither sector has made timely steps towards radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions; both sectors want alternative fuels, though much could be said about these in terms of environmental effects, absence of scale-up, and questions of certification. All of Fisher’s key areas – movements of people, food, nature, and conflict – have embedded transport issues.
Barriers to adaptation
When breaking down barriers to adaptation, Fisher suggests they include:
- available funds;
- plans not translated into actions;
- poor incentives to reduce risk, not least as long-term risks are not adequately priced in financial markets;
- failure to model adaptation in terms of how people may already be vulnerable;
- absence of reliable indicators to judge whether adaptation plans are working;
- how maladaptation is possible if actions which serve one vulnerable community shift problems to another (a possible example being exactly how coastal and estuary protection is done);
- the availability of international resources and its short-term nature; and
- limits to adaptation that force hard choices (e.g., where and when might a choice be made to abandon a section of coastline to the ocean).
Migration and populism
How, if, and where people might move to are already problematic issues which are being exploited by unscrupulous populist politicians. Planning re-locations assumes it is possible to determine how many people may actually be involved: some may not wish to move at all, and some may have serious impediments to moving such as their own health.
Shoreline management plans will be considered rational planning by some, and not consensus science by others. It would, of course, have been wise to start year-on-year cuts in emissions back in the early 1990s, but global emissions and temperatures continue to rise.
Food under pressure
Food prices are rising already. With shorter growing seasons in key exporting states – the USA, Australia, Brazil – and periodic droughts as a factor, it is difficult to see how food prices will trend downwards. It is easy to suggest countries should meet more of their own food needs themselves. But countries across the Middle East, for example, are importing ‘embedded water’ in the form of foods they would struggle to grow in a testing climate. Everywhere, using land to feed domesticated animals seems likely to come under increasing pressure to convert to feeding people directly.
Some concluding thoughts
Whilst I am definitely in the camp of “stubborn optimism” alongside Susannah Fisher, her book does raise the question of how long into the future adaptations can be adopted to meet the specific challenges of differing locations and circumstances.
Failures to arrest and cut emissions at a global level appear like a promise that hundreds of millions of people will be forced to move in future decades. Adaptation to this in potential home countries, no matter how liberal, can be considered highly challenging. As whole states become unliveable, how well are other states going to be equipped to cope?
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