Sun, October 15, 2023
A firefighter walks through Sequoia National Park during a prescribed burn, one of California's resilience strategies to battle the growing risk of large wildfires.
Last month, we heard yet again about the need to stop global warming at about 1.5 degrees centigrade above preindustrial levels. The International Energy Agency outlined a plan to meet that goal, and the United Nations secretary-general implored nations to get serious about cutting emissions to make it a reality.
That goal is a fantasy. This summer, global warming already yielded monthly average temperatures that exceeded preindustrial averages by 1.5 degrees. It took more than a century for global annual average temperatures to reach the first degree, which happened around 2015. Climate data suggest that the next half-degree is likely to happen by the early 2030s, if not sooner, and that 2023 will be the warmest year on record.
The reality of rapid warming requires that every country create an adaptation strategy to become more resilient to the effects of climate change. Adaptation means lessening the harm caused by storm surges, floods, heat waves, fires and other weather-related perils. It requires new infrastructure, early warning systems and better awareness of how changes in the climate will harm things we value. The best adaptation strategies go further to pursue resilience — the ability to bounce back from destructive changes.
Adaptation to the consequences of global warming doesn’t come just from singular activities, like flipping a switch; it’s processes that will affect all of society and can easily go awry. Similarly, a serious resilience strategy can’t be piecemeal: It involves power grids and other infrastructure that must be managed at a large scale, and every locality needs to learn from ideas that get tested around the country and world. That’s why we need a national approach that assesses how local efforts fit together, how much money to spend on each component and which policies actually work.
The U.S. currently invests far too little in adaptation projects and has no comprehensive national adaptation strategy. The unprecedented climate spending in two recent laws — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act — is long overdue. But they primarily focus on reducing emissions, devoting a small fraction of total spending to resilience and adaptation.
Even California, a national leader on climate issues, last year allocated only about one-fifth of its multiyear climate budget to resilience efforts such as shoring up the water system against drought. This year, with a tighter budget overall, that proportion is declining. A national adaptation and resilience strategy would help states, in addition to the federal government, set goals for the right spending to ensure effective adaptation while also aggressively cutting emissions.
Read more: California is working on solutions to worsening climate change. Will they be enough?
Any national approach will, of course, build on adaptation projects that localities are pursuing. California and its electric utilities have learned how to reduce the risk of wildfires by cutting power to fire-prone areas, clearing brush, hardening power lines and experimenting with new control systems. The Southwest is, belatedly, planning for a more parched future by seeking new sources of water, investing in ways to purify wastewater and seawater, requiring more frugal water use, managing snowpack runoff more efficiently and reallocating water from the region’s crucial river, the Colorado.
Miami is building artificial reefs that can help blunt waves and wind during storms. New York, battered by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and hit recently by floods, has strengthened its defenses such as seawalls and subway floodgates. Houston and New Orleans are bracing for more frequent and severe flooding by improving seawalls and stormwater systems.
The federal government must knit these scattered efforts into a coherent national approach. It is starting to shift its behavior — slightly. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is putting more resources toward disaster resilience and has raised federal insurance premiums, including an increase in rates for flood insurance, to better reflect real risks. The Pentagon is, among other efforts, working to protect military bases from rising seas and stronger storms and building microgrids to insulate bases’ electric supply against climate-related interruptions.
Read more: Opinion: What Gov. Gavin Newsom could learn from China's response to climate change
These actions are important. But they remain isolated around the country and limited to government, still failing to consider the system as a whole. For example, because the climate can change in unexpected and dangerous ways, it’s important to run stress tests — such as assessing how stronger storms could affect supply chains that in turn affect the economy — much as central bankers periodically look at extreme economic events.
Five years ago we predicted, with a colleague, what’s confirmed in today’s news: that warming rates would accelerate. That prediction was not taken seriously at the time because the scientific consensus was that warming would happen more slowly. If the country had a national adaptation strategy that included stress tests, we could have assessed how outlier predictions such as ours — which often come to pass in climate science, since the consensus leans conservative — would affect the country.
A strategic view would also make it easier to identify and fix maladaptive policies that put us at greater risk. Many states, for example, cap premiums charged to homeowners and others who insure against wildfires, hurricanes and other perils. Rather than letting the market reflect the true risks of living in certain areas, this approach can mask the real dangers faced by some properties. The result: Major insurance companies are paring back coverage, which means that governments are more likely to get stuck covering big losses from climate-related destruction. Already AIG, Allstate, Farmer’s and State Farm are exiting parts of the California market. That market response has spread to Florida and other states on the front lines of harsh climate impacts.
Investing in more adaptation projects makes good economic sense too. In 2019, a commission co-chaired by Bill Gates, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva reported that a $1.8-trillion investment in adaptation worldwide could generate $7.1 trillion in benefits by 2030, including by creating more jobs in vulnerable communities.
At the global level, the populations most vulnerable to rapid warming include about 3 billion people who are contending with poverty, fragile housing, scarce affordable clean energy and other challenges. Although these communities contribute just a tiny fraction of the carbon emissions that cause global warming, the world is spending billions more on getting them to reduce those emissions than on the more urgent goal of helping them adapt to the impacts. On the national level, we don’t even have estimates on how much money the federal government could save by investing more in adaptation than in rebuilding communities after they’ve been demolished by extreme weather events.
Even with a global crash program to cut emissions — which is essential — climate change will worsen for at least the next two decades. We need national strategies that can help us bounce back from increasingly devastating hits.
David G. Victor is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, professor of innovation and public policy at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and professor of climate and atmospheric science at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Veerabhadran Ramanathan is a distinguished professor emeritus of climate sustainability at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and climate solutions scholar at Cornell University.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
FEATURE-Artists join with climate activists, scientists to paint a greener future
Md. Tahmid Zami, Thomson Reuters Foundation
Wed, October 18, 2023
In this article:
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Artists call out fossil fuel projects in the Global South
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Climate change evidence highlighted in art works, exhibitions
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Art gives local problems visibility in global conversations
By Md. Tahmid Zami
DHAKA, Oct 19 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Investors in U.S. energy technology firm GE Vernova had some unlikely visitors in September when Ata Mojlish, a Bangladeshi new media artist based in Texas, joined activists to deliver climate-themed works to four financial companies in New York.
GE Vernova - a recently re-branded subsidiary of General Electric - is planning to supply turbines for large liquefied natural gas (LNG) power projects in climate-vulnerable Bangladesh, motivating Bangladeshi artists to join international campaigners in calls for GE to back non fossil-fuel energy instead.
With scientists and policy experts stressing the urgency of climate action ahead of this year's COP28 U.N. climate summit, artists are using their talents to highlight mounting evidence on the impacts of the climate crisis and to push for a response.
Earlier in Boston, a few blocks away from GE's headquarters, Mojlish and other artists had put on an exhibition called "Electric Bangladesh: Fossil Free Futures", in collaboration with Market Forces, an Australia-based climate advocacy think-tank which contributed information about fossil fuel projects and their impact on local people in coastal Bangladesh.
For the show, Mojlish created a set of collage pieces called "Daily Diet 1-2" depicting power plant machinery as sea vessels viewed from above, overlaid with cables and equipment, taking the people and animals of southern Bangladesh to another world.
His aim, he said, was to shed light on actions that harm the climate, such as investing in fossil fuels like natural gas.
"Art has a transformative energy and I have seen a visual work communicate what a thousand words could not," he said.
Fellow multimedia artist Debashish Chakrabarty created bold retro-style posters in red, yellow and black, sporting blunt captions including "LNG is not green" and "LNG is not clean".
Chakrabarty - who regularly posts his art on his social media accounts - said the exhibition, probably the first uniting Bangladeshi artists aiming to hold companies from the Global North accountable for pollution, also intended to inform Western citizens about what is happening in other parts of the world.
"We wanted to tell these corporations that we people and civil society know what you are doing, and you should do better," he added.
A spokesperson for GE Vernova said its technology helps generate 30% of electricity globally and it makes the world's most efficient gas turbines, adding that natural gas is a "critical alternative to coal and other higher emission fuels" as countries make the transition to renewable energy.
Munira Chowdhury from Market Forces said GE's planned LNG plants in Bangladesh would add about 430 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e) to the atmosphere over their lifetime, almost double Bangladesh's annual emissions.
GE has extensive wind energy capacity and could play a major role in building more renewable power in Bangladesh, she added.
The firm's spokesperson said by email that GE is "committed to strong, concerted action to decarbonise the energy sector while increasing access to more sustainable, reliable and affordable energy in countries such as Bangladesh".
OPENING DOORS TO SCIENCE
Climate experts and communicators say it can be hard to make climate discussions - often couched in technical terms - understandable to ordinary people, especially those who speak languages other than English.
Artists can help untangle those concepts, said Deborah Hart, co-chair of CLIMARTE, an organisation that has harnessed art for climate action since 2010.
"Artists bring incredible skills to the table - they are complex systems thinkers who can take risks and be ambitious, and they care deeply about the issue," she said.
Since climate art took off as a recognisable trend in the early 2000s, its practice has grown rapidly.
Artists have picked up the theme in creative ways such as installations with the sound of dying glaciers, pencils crafted from a dead oak tree and luxury soaps made of raw sewage seeping out of flooded city drains.
More artists are working with climate scientists, meanwhile, to turn their findings into poignant experiences that can be experienced by a wider community of people.
Blane De St. Croix, an American sculptor and installation artist, left the confines of his studio and began researching landscapes, taking up academic fellowships and speaking with scientists over the last seven to eight years to inform his art.
His latest show is at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery in the United Arab Emirates - which will host COP28 in Dubai in December - with the exhibition's sculptures delving into the fragile local ecology and connecting local problems, such as salinisation and ocean pollution, to global warming.
They include "High Peaks: Himachal", a work featuring giant white pedestals topped by Himalayan peaks from which ice melts down like dripping wax, a reminder writ large of scientists' warnings that the South Asian mountain range may lose 80% of its glaciers by the end of the century.
"I want people to enter into the climate conversation through my art opening doors for them," De St. Croix told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The artist's video interviews with scientists are shown alongside his works, boosting interest in their climate research.
One paper on climate change highlighted by De St. Croix got 160,000 hits on the internet, he said.
"As I open the door to the public and create a platform, it can create unexpected impacts," he explained.
REACHING HEARTS WITH NATURE
While some artists are focused on scientific facts or activism, others explore the profound connections between people and nature - and imagine a better world.
A 2023 study found that artistic visualisations touched Americans' feelings more positively than data graphs and helped overcome political divisions on the relevance of climate change.
"We have to be brutally honest about why we are here, with a clear sense of what genuine climate justice looks like - and artists can impress the urgency of making the turn towards a greener future upon people," said Hart from CLIMARTE.
One veteran artist seeking to elevate hope over despair is Anoma Wijewardene, a painter born in Sri Lanka who calls herself a "citizen of the world".
Wijewardene has held several exhibitions touching on climate and ecology, with her first climate paintings dating back to 2005. They explore how humans relate to the natural world, conceived as both material and "numinous", or spiritual.
Her last climate-themed exhibition in London in 2019 featured nine paintings, each with patterns resembling landscapes touched with fiery orange and crimson where a small, lonely red figure lingers, symbolising the young climate activist Greta Thunberg on a boiling planet.
"I was so inspired by Greta that she crept in (to the paintings)," said Wijewardene.
The artist plans to continue focusing on climate change because of her personal concern about the issue. The key, she added, is to touch deeper human emotions.
"You need to show the beauty of nature to reach people's hearts – combining science and technology but also love - and that's how you change people," she said.
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