Mitigation and adaptation

Climate Change adaptation.  As we have started last Sunday, there are two ways of dealing with Climate Change issues - through mitigation, by reducing our carbon emissions at all levels (personal, organizational, country, or globally), and through adaptation.  The former is preventive, the latter, reactive.  Both are equally important and while many will always opine that prevention is better than cure, the reality is the world will continue to progress, populations grow, we will use more electricity and people will buy more cars.  What all the mitigation measures intend to do, is slow down the emissions and hope technology can come up with ways on how to reverse the process.  In the meantime, we have to prepare.

How do we prepare for the effects of climate change?  First we have to recall what the effects of climate change are.  As we have outlined in the previous "Carbon Footprint" series, climate change/global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect due to the increase in carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases or GHGs) concentrations in the atmosphere.  This increases the average atmospheric temperature of the earth - very minute increases that is measurable over time, but which can have devastating effects for mankind.

Because of the temperature increase of the earth's surface and surrounding atmosphere, two things can happen - the average temperature of the surface water covering 75% of the earth's surface will slowly increase, resulting to a slow melting of the polar ice caps which will eventually increase mean sea levels.  Warmer seas especially along the tropical regions of our oceans actually feed to more destructive weather disturbances.  An analysis of Typhoon Haiyan shown on the Discovery Channel showed that the warmer waters of the Pacific Ocean contributed in whipping up the 300 kilometer per hour wind which devastated Tacloban.

Then we hear of the cold front which threatened Eastern Europe a while back.  And we hear the unbelievable news of flooding in Saudi Arabia.  Just this week, a polar vortex plunged the American northeast into life-threatening sub-zero temperatures.  It has come to a point that climate change cynics and critics are losing out in the onslaught of unusual climate disturbance all over the world.  And this is just the weather.  We have to contend with sea-level rise in the years to come.

On the short- and medium-term, we need to prepare for worse weather situations, not to mention those of calamity proportions.  Already we get proposals for weather-proof designs of houses, stronger and more resilient infrastructure, more permanent disaster preparations, that we even are proposing to establish a full-blown government department to take care of future disasters.  The Philippines is not a stranger to typhoons since time immemorial, but now, Filipinos are becoming more aware of preparing for typhoons.  All our actions now should be on an adaptation mode - incorporating climate resilience in all aspects of living.

But over time, the world needs to prepare for the inevitable - sea levels will rise.  This will mean that all over the world, islands will disappear and low-lying areas will be inundated and will become under water.  We have 7,000++ islands, Indonesia has 10,000++, and many countries in the world, most of which belong to the third world/developing category will have large swatches of land submerged.  If we project far enough in the future, many of the coastal cities of the world will be partly or wholly disappear from the face of the earth.  Many will consider this as a doomsday statement, but the way things are, if we will not act individually and as a specie or race, this is a certainly.

In Tacloban, they have reacted to the storm surge - they passed a resolution prohibiting construction 40 meters from the water line of the coast.  It's a good move in the right direction though I thought this was too simplistic and needs to be fine-tuned.  Distance from the water's edge should not be uniform but should depend on the topography of the land and bathymetry of the water body.  It might be less than 40 meters in some areas and more in others.  But it's a good start; they can always amend it and improve it later.

Eventually, we need to rethink land use, especially in our cities.  Not just in how we zone them but above all in locating them.  Most of the world's cities are in the coastal areas and in river mouths.  This is the most ideal site for settlements in the olden times, as we have discussed in a column in 2012.  But city planning, especially city locations has to be rethinked now.  This is part of national adaptation.  We cannot just build on areas where these maybe underwater in time.  We do this while we do climate mitigation, too. (To be continued)