Recognition of Resilience is Growing ... ...But We Can’t Forget that Other Thing

I went to a meeting put on by a local civic/environmental group not that long ago. It was billed as a meeting on climate change, and I thought I would drop in and see what people might talk about, or even whether I could help answer any questions.

The guest speaker that kicked things off was from a regional quasi-governmental planning organization and his remarks were focused only on resilience in the local watershed. This was not surprising given what my state and others have gone through relative to extreme weather events. And for that reason, it was giving the audience something they wanted to hear about. There were numerous questions from attendees, all having to do with resiliency or something close to it.

 Let me digress for a moment ... Resiliency is not defined by everyone the same way when it comes to climate. I am using it mean resistance, as in the ability to resist the impacts of climate change, particularly extreme weather. To others, resilience is the ability to bounce back after something bad happens, as in taking a punch but not letting it knock you out. For me, I use the first definition, because I think resilience must be about adaptation to live with climate impacts. I think the other definition gets too close to the idea of rebuilding houses on a recognized flood plain after they have all been destroyed by a flood.

 For those of us who wake up each day hoping that the public will become more attuned to the climate emergency that we face, the fact that people are understanding that extreme weather is being fueled by climate change is good news. The latest survey information shows that statistically.

Weather events seem to also have finally tipped the media scales a bit, especially since extreme weather events give the kind of photos and videos that weather reporters love to appear in and which producers dream of showing. Thankfully, climate change is being mentioned as a factor during these clips.

 Resilience is becoming a big focus in New York City. It has (as all cities should) an interdisciplinary Panel of Experts on Climate Change (NPCC) that monitors and reports to City Officials on climate change and its potential impacts.

First convened in 2008, the NPCC is a group of 20 climate experts who advise policymakers on the latest science and strategies to address hazards facing the five boroughs.

The sea levels around New York City have already risen about a foot since 1900, a higher rate than the global average. The NPCC’s latest estimates project sea levels around the city to continue to rise between half a foot and just over a foot in the 2030s. The panel expects sea levels around the city to continue to rise at least another foot — or up to almost two feet — by the 2050s.

In recognition of this kind of forecast a plan to build a resiliency wall around much of Manhattan surfaced last year. It has an attention-getting price tag of $52 Billion. You can see more about it here.

But ... back to the local meeting I was sitting in on in my area. As I said, it was all about resilience. There was no discussion of climate mitigation or climate change in general.

That meeting has caused me to step back and view the focus on extreme weather and resilience in a different way. I am suddenly realizing that that we might be in danger of taking a great leap forward on recognition of resilience and supporting efforts to increase it. But in doing could people start losing sight (or never gain it is the first place) on why we are having to talk about resilience? It makes me wonder whether people can easily get into a mindset that climate change “has happened”, and there is nothing we can do about it, and so now the job at hand is resilience.

 In all the media coverage last year on extreme weather (and I include droughts and heat waves here in addition to wildfires and storms) I heard little mention of how the world is doing on getting control over rising greenhouse gas emissions and how it is doing relative to reducing them. There were no statistics or reference to emissions and/or climate change markers. Climate change was mentioned as though it was a given, and all the focus was on extreme weather and resilience.

 This is not good.

 If people think we have reached “peak climate” how will they push their governments, businesses, and other entities to focus on emissions reductions? 

 It is important to understand that the average person could likely not explain to someone else the greenhouse effect. They could not cite any statistics relative to concentrations of CO2 and the fact that emissions in most of world are still rising and those concentrations in the atmosphere are building up and not staying static. They would not be able to answer a question as to how long CO2 stays in the atmosphere before dissipating. 

 They don’t know that most, if not all, countries and companies are not meeting emission reduction goals or that in the case of countries, even if they met their goals most are set lower than the need for reduction identified by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and acknowledged by climate scientists far and wide.

 They don’t understand the lag effect of emissions build-up, as in the fact that there are effects already baked in that we haven’t felt yet.

 If people ever begin thinking that job #1 is now resilience, then they are not understanding that we need to stop digging the hole that got us into this mess. They need to understand that we need to do two big jobs at the same time: mitigation and resilience. That will be hard, and it will take a lot of personal resilience on the part of all of us (and on our wallets). But if there is another alternative, I haven’t come across it yet.