As I walked past the magazine stand at the supermarket this week my eye was caught by the front cover of the this week’s Listener (on sale last week). “Rising sea levels & extreme weather — why NZ needs to get serious,” it said. A cautious peek inside suggested Ruth Laugeson’s article might deserve a comment on Hot Topic so I parted with four dollars and brought it home to look more closely. It does indeed deserve mention here if only because it’s the sort of straightforward treatment of climate change that we should be able to expect of serious journalism. Laugeson has been reading Mark Hertsgaard’s book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, which I reviewed a few weeks back on Hot Topic. Hertsgaard argues that we must plan adaptation to the now unavoidable changes at the same time as working to avoid much worse and likely unmanageable change.
Tag: adaptation
Adapting to climate change in Vietnam and the Philippines
I stumbled across a documentary programme on BBC World during the weekend, Nature Inc. It visited two Asian regions where the impacts of climate change are being experienced and described the active local measures under way to cope with them. It’s the sort of programme we ought to be seeing a great deal more of as the evidence of climate change effects accumulate around the world. The narrator presumably felt obliged to mention in passing that sceptics dispute the impacts of climate change identified by the local people, but that kind of disputing will surely wither in the face of the realities such populations are facing. Facing with energy and purpose in the two cases covered by the short documentary.
Continue reading “Adapting to climate change in Vietnam and the Philippines”
Bangladesh: lessons in adaptation
A basket case, said Henry Kissinger of Bangladesh in 1974 after the civil war that liberated it from West Pakistan (the side he backed). Mark Hertsgaard in Hot (reviewed here) reports a rather different picture. I thought it worth dwelling longer on what he has to say about Bangladesh than was possible in the review because he shows the Bangladeshis as far from passive even in the face of what look like daunting odds, and because he underlines the case for assistance.
Bangladesh’s ambassador to the US, in conversation with Hertsgaard, firmly refutes the Kissinger perspective.
We are now feeding ourselves, 140 million people. We have cut our population growth rate in half. All Bangladeshi children are immunized against major childhood diseases. Our economy has grown an average 5.5 percent a year over the last seventeen years. We are not a basket case at all.
Hertsgaard acknowledges the advances, but recognises the threat they are under from climate change. The vulnerability of Bangladesh is well known. Two-thirds of the country stands less than sixteen feet above sea level. The three feet of sea level rise that Hertsgaard regards as unavoidable will displace an estimated 20 million Bangladeshis. Soil and water in coastal regions are already becoming too salty to deliver traditional rice yields. There’s plenty to suggest that Bangladesh appears doomed in the face of fifty more years of global warming. However, says Hertsgaard, spend some time inside the country and things look different.
He singles out the human factor. It counts for a lot in adapting to climate change. Bangladeshi biologist, Saleemul Huq, an influential advocate for the poor within the global climate change discussions, spoke to him of the resilience developed by people who have been dealing with floods and other disasters for centuries, “so they have greater capacity than rich people who are not used to facing catastrophe”. The months Huq spent researching among river communities of fishing families were an eye-opener for him, brought up in more favoured circumstances.
I got to know the poor as individuals, not as an abstraction. I saw they were extremely resilient and often ingenious at coping with the circumstances they faced.
Huq and others have subsequently developed an approach called Community-Based Adaptation in which experts on climate change impacts work together with poor communities in a dialogue of equals where local solutions which draw on the experience of local people can be devised.
Hertsgaard describes some of the adaptation measures he saw when visiting the Bangadeshi countryside. In one village a farmer had taken some simple steps to protect his family against the storm surges of cyclones. With NGO help he had elevated his mud and thatch house five feet above ground, on a mound of packed dirt with hard dirt steps leading up to the entrance. He explained to Hertsgaard that it had worked well and that during the last two cyclones they hadn’t had to go to the cyclone centre, which gets very crowded and short on food and water. Their own food, rice and fish, was kept dry during the floods in a basket made from tightly woven strands of bamboo, which floats.
In another village they relied on “floating gardens”. The villagers wove water hyacinth plants into a watertight mesh. The one Hertsgaard saw measured about fifteen feet long and ten feet wide and floated in one of the many ponds in the village. The mesh was covered with a few inches of topsoil, which was planted with vegetables. Since the structure floated it simply rose higher in flood inundation. The same village was also seeking to diversify its income sources by establishing, with NGO help, a tree nursery that grew mango and other fruit trees as well as medicinal herbs. Seedlings were sold in the local market.
These are very local and specific small measures, but the Bangladeshi government, in spite of its frequent dysfunctional bouts, has also been working on the wider picture for the past twenty years. With help from foreign donors it has invested $10 billion to bolster defences against floods, cyclones and drought. It has also pursued climate-focused agricultural research and is testing varieties of rice that could survive immersion in salt water for longer than two weeks. If successful that would help farmers cope with flash floods that mix sea and river water and will occur more frequently as sea levels rise. The government has developed an action plan to prepare for climate change on many fronts. But it will need money. Early estimates suggest that the first five years of work on the plan would cost about $5 billion. Some of this Bangladesh itself will pay for, but it can’t meet it all and it calls on the international community “to provide the resources needed to meet the additional costs of building climate resilience”.
Huq puts the obligation of the rich countries this way:
It is poor countries that are suffering the brunt of climate change, but it is the rich countries’ greenhouse gas emissions that caused this problem in the first place. If we follow the principle of “the polluter pays” they are obligated to pay damages. It is important to understand that this is not charity, like money given to poor countries for economic development. This is compensation.
US chief climate change negotiator Todd Stern told the Copenhagen climate summit that he “absolutely” rejected the suggestion that the US owes a “climate debt” to the rest of the world. Hertsgaard comments that as a lawyer himself Stern must surely know that in a court of law damages are damages, regardless of one’s intent.
I appreciated the attention Hertsgaard gave to the way Bangladesh is trying to face up to the challenges of climate change adaptation. The changes are real for them. They may be congruent with challenges they have long faced as part of their normal life, but they are mounting and threatening. Some of the adaptive measures he describes may turn out to have only been buying time as the sea continues its inexorable rise, but they are worthy of respect. They are also worthy of assistance.
The poor ask far less of life than we are accustomed to demand and the help they are seeking is not large by our standards. We would help them most, of course, by seriously taking in hand the task of drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but while we continue to refuse this we at least owe them a measure of compensatory assistance.
Adapting to Climate Change
Adapting to Climate Change is a reassuring sounding title, but the content of this book makes it clear that there will be nothing straightforward or easy as human communities try to ready themselves for the coming climate crisis. Editors Neil Adger, Irene Lorenzoni and Karen O’Brien have been doing on research in the area for a number of years and worked closely together in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on adaptation. They convened a conference in 2008 at the Royal Geographical Society in London and the resulting papers are the basis of this book, now published in a paperback edition.
Heart of the city
We tend to become riveted on the efforts of national governments to address greenhouse gas reductions, so far with dismal results. But as a valuable new study reminds us, city administrations can play a significant role in mitigation and with more immediate effect. Cities and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Moving Forward is to be published in the journal Environment and Urbanization in April and has been made available online in advance. The lead author is Daniel Hoornweg, lead urban specialist on Cities and Climate Change at the World Bank.
A large share of global greenhouse gas emissions is attributable to cities. But the study points to cities’ ability to respond to climate change at a local and proximate level; cities usually offer more immediate and effective communication between the public and the decision makers than national governments. Cities, say the authors, are credible laboratories of social change, with sufficient scale to bring about meaningful changes. The potential co-benefits of mitigation and adaptation are largest in cities.
The study proposes a path forward for cities which clearly measure and communicate their emissions. They can identify and tackle the largest issues first. They can get help from citizens, other cities and national governments. The study recognises the pragmatism with which cities have been able to tackle other issues such as waste management and water supply, seeing that as a likely indicator of the way they can address climate change.
Cities vary greatly in their per capita levels of greenhouse gas emissions, and the study includes many interesting analyses and comparisons. It is surprising – and encouraging – to see how much work has been done on the measurement of a large number of cities’ per capita emissions. The study refers to 100 for which peer-reviewed studies are available, discussing some of them in closer detail. In most countries per capita greenhouse gas emissions are lower in cities than the country-wide average, but there are often considerable differences between cities within the same country. For example, the per capita emission level in the USA is 23.59 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) per annum. The average level of emissions for New York residents is considerably less at 10.5 tCO2e, yet Denver’s approaches the national average at 21.5 tCO2e. The difference between the two cities is mainly attributable to New York’s greater density and much lower reliance on the automobile for commuting. A review of Denver’s emissions which includes the embodied emissions of material such as food and concrete coming into the city has emissions rising to 25.3 tCO2e per capita, which is above the national average.
Chinese cities are atypical in that, generally, their GHG emissions are, on average, much higher than per capita national averages. For example, Shanghai’s emissions are 12.6 tCO2e per capita, while national emissions are 3.4 tCO2e per capita. This reflects the high reliance on fossil fuels for electricity production, a significant industrial base within many cities and a relatively poor and large rural population, and hence a lower average per capita value for national emissions.
The study offers interesting material relating to Toronto where researchers have broken down the city into districts. Wealthy neighbourhoods and distant sprawling suburbs had significantly higher emissions, dramatically so by comparison with a dense inner-city neighbourhood with good access to public transportation.
Greenhouse gas inventories are obviously important in giving city government bodies reliable information to work with, to share with their citizens and to determine where best to direct mitigation efforts. The study considers that while the making of inventories is still an evolving process it is robust enough already to be operated by all cities, at least by those with more than a million inhabitants. I thought of Mayor Len Brown’s plans for emission reductions in Auckland over the next fifteen years when I read this, and realised that this important pre-requisite should be within that city’s reach.
A striking feature in the study for me was the table which lists the policy tools available for city-level action on climate change. Transport figures heavily in the policy goals. Land use zoning can be used to reduce trip lengths, to encourage transit-oriented development zones and to introduce traffic calming to discourage driving. The quality and linkages of public transport can be improved and its services expanded. Employee transport plans can be facilitated. Driving and parking restrictions can be applied, and softened somewhat for fuel-efficient vehicles. The city fleet can be made up of fuel-efficient vehicles. All these are mitigation measures, some of them regulatory, some service provisions. Unfortunately in New Zealand at present those relating to public transport would come up against the Minister of Transport’s benighted determination to put public transport on short rations and spend the money on new roads, but at least in the case of Auckland there are signs of steel in the new Mayor’s public transport intentions.
Next on the list are policy tools relating to building efficiency. Zoning regulations can promote multi-family and connected residential housing. Energy efficiency requirements can be part of building codes. Public and private retro-fitting programmes can be co-ordinated.
The increase of the local share of renewable and captured energy generation can be obtained by building codes requiring a minimum share of renewable energy, by district heating and cooling projects and by waste-to-energy programmes.
Adaptation appears on the list with measures to reduce vulnerability to flooding and increased storm events and to extreme heat. Tree-planting programmes and green roof requirements figure here.
City officials and elected representatives don’t have to scratch their heads and wonder where they can start in the battle to reduce emissions or adapt to the climate change impacts which can’t be avoided. Nor do they have to join the “after you” brigade of international governmental negotiators. They can get under way immediately, either to lower their emissions substantially or, if they are already low to keep them that way as the city grows or becomes more prosperous. Cities can also work co-operatively in their endeavours. Some of the largest are already doing so. The study remarks on the C40 organisation, a group of large cities committed to tackling climate change, currently chaired by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York. Relative to the world’s top nations they are collectively a very big player and anything they prove able to achieve must be significant in global terms.
As we watch what looks like the sad spectacle of implosion in the US attempts to tackle climate change at the national level one is wary of sounding enthusiastic about mitigation prospects, but this paper is nevertheless a positive reminder that not everything depends on a handful of anti-science Republican congressmen. Cities can carry hopes which their countries currently largely deny.