Climate Change Risks Part 2: Adaptation Strategies and the Pursuit of Climate Change Resilience

If you have not read part 1 of this two-part summation of the International Panel on Climate Change. published on February 27, 2022, then I would suggest you do so before tackling this posting. The report entitled Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, assesses the natural, ecological, social and economic impacts unfolding across the globe as atmospheric warming increases. In part 2 we focus on adaptation strategies, energy strategies and actions in pursuit of climate change resilience.

We have a fairly good idea of what adaptation means, and our thirst for the energy we know is among the major causes of our current climate change issues. But what is climate change resilience?

Adaptation requires us to adjust our global behaviours: our socioeconomic systems, processes, practices, and infrastructure to withstand the impacts of a warming world. Building resilience into the adaptation equation means we can create a new global society that can take the external stresses thrown at us by climate change without breaking.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines resilience as the “capacity of social, economic, and environmental systems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance, responding or reorganizing in ways that maintain their essential function, identity, and structure, while also maintaining the capacity for adaptation, learning, and transformation.” Resilience, therefore, is the bridge between mitigation and adaptation, encompassing change processes that impact human behaviour, and as a result, outcomes.

Can we be fully resilient to climate change impacts? Probably not, but we can certainly narrow the gap in terms of our capacity through mitigation and adaptation to create appropriate socioeconomic conditions to absorb most of the body blows humanity will endure this century and well into the next few that follow. That’s because many climate scientists posit that the latency effect of the damage already incurred will undoubtedly affect human civilization for centuries to come. A climate change resilience strategy to combat this would involve negative-zero carbon mitigation infrastructure. In other words, we would be reducing the total volume of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to levels below those in the mid-20th century. Even then we will need to put in place resilience strategies to adapt to a return to lower emission levels.

Diminishing Overshooting 1.5 Celsius

The greatest fear that climate scientists have is embodied in warming exceeding a global mean atmospheric temperature increase beyond 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). That’s because the risks become increasingly more severe with each incremental 0.1 Celsius (0.18 Fahrenheit) rise. Our resilience capacity increasingly diminishes as atmospheric temperatures creep upwards. But we have the means through the implementation of energy diversification to increase resilience capacity.

Diversification and decentralization of energy production away from the monolithic power generation and distribution that characterizes our current world would be a good first step to achieving climate change resilience. What it would entail is a vast increase in the capacity for all types of renewable energy including small-scale hydroelectric, wind, solar, and geothermal. It would also require improvements in capacity and ability to store and efficiently address intermittency and any of the other vulnerabilities we have identified that are of current concern and that have held us back from fully implementing a rapid transition.

Socioeconomic Resilience Requires Adaptive Capacity

Climate change is hazardous to human health and the well-being of all creatures great and small, as well as the plants and forests that sustain us. As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, our current health systems models have failed the test in a global crisis. To achieve a healthy Earth and well-being will need significant investment in our healthcare infrastructure including early warning and response systems, improvements in freshwater capacity, better implementation of deterrents for vector-borne diseases, faster vaccine development and production and distribution capacity, and significant investments dealing with the mental health consequences arising from dealing with the worst that nature will throw at us in the coming decades.

Climate Resilience Avoids Maladaptation Strategies

One of the great concerns of the IPCC is countries locking into strategies that in the short-term seem correct, but over the long-term will lead to maladaptation. What are some of the reasons why maladaptive strategies get implemented?

• The primary one is governments not recognizing climate change risks.
• Second, we see strategies that package adaptation with other community-driven goals that water down and reduce the amount of money going to combating climate change impacts.
• Third, governments lack a sense of time in implementing adaptation, In other words, they don’t see much beyond the next election cycle.
• Fourth, governments fail to recognize that adaptation strategies have to accommodate shifting climate change conditions. Implementing solutions to address a risk that has already been superseded by new realities is maladaptation at its worst.

In a 2015 posting on this site, I described good examples of maladaptation strategies and, in particular, described how in Fort Lauderdale, where my wife and I were spending a month, was throwing away its money on infrastructure build that since that date has already demonstrated the fallacy of maladaptive implementation. Similarly, one sees maladaptive strategies along the Jersey Shore in the U.S. post-Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and in New Orleans and South Louisiana after numerous hurricanes in the last few decades.

Like the parishes of South Louisiana where low-income earners in that state live, maladaptation really hurts the most marginalized populations and settlements. Indigenous, rural and informal settlements in the Developing World are at the greatest risk of environmental degradation from climate change.

The latest example of a lack of strategy in allowing unrestricted informal settlement growth around urban communities can be found in Brazil. There around Rio de Janeiro, recent above normal rainfalls, combined with government-sanctioned deforestation in areas above 1,000 metres in elevation has led to devasting mudslides and flash floods that have killed hundreds in hillside settlements.

Climate Resilience Strategy Characteristics

In the IPCC report, it describes what makes for positive climate-resilient development stating that it:

1. Integrates adaptation measures with mitigation to create sustainable outcomes.
2. Involves more than just human society but also ecosystem co-existence.
3. Includes the protection and maintenance of global ecosystems because climate change doesn’t stop at geopolitical borders.
4. Notes that opportunities to implement climate-resilient development are not equitably distributed around the planet recognizing the need to address exposed risk sites and develop adaptation measures for coastlines, small islands, deserts, mountains, and polar regions.
5. Overcomes the divergent interests of different population groups, reconciling and building equitable and just outcomes.
6. Incorporates the knowledge that comes from science and historic cultures that have successfully practiced sustainability.
7. Includes integrated actions in urban environments where most of us live addressing new builds, retrofits, urban planning, infrastructure, and other land use.
8. Safeguards biodiversity and ecosystems through restoration and protection while avoiding damaging climate-change adaptation and mitigation strategies.

The Window to Create Climate Resilience is Closing

The report concludes that we are already at a point where climate change is disrupting human and natural systems and states, “societal choices and actions implemented in the next decade determine the extent to which medium and long-term pathways will deliver higher or lower climate-resilient development.” And in the last paragraph in the summary for policymakers concludes with this statement:

“Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”