Conclusion

This conclusion highlights the urgency of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions and building resilience before only risky alternatives, such as certain kinds of geoengineering, are the only ones left. It briefly outlines the backsliding, active and by omission, that has occurred under President Donald Trump and stresses the urgent need to reverse this trend. It then emphasizes how silo-breakers, translators, and communicators play key roles in helping communities understand their climate risk and how to implement resilience measures. Finally, it underlines that building resilience involves protecting the most vulnerable members of society first.

Buffer Growing Inequality

Climate change will touch virtually every country in the world and every region of the United States, but it will not affect every place and person equally. Small island states, for example, face an existential risk from sea-level rise and industry loss. The impacts of climate change deprive communities of resources, and social prejudice can impose the bulk of that scarcity on women and girls, with severe consequences. This chapter describes how climate change magnifies existing economic and social inequalities and identifies strategies that can help buffer this effect. Looking through a wide-angle lens, it views the nexus of climate change and inequality from a global perspective before homing in on the United States.

Make Markets Work for Resilience

This chapter looks at how more transparent disclosure of climate risks can make markets work for resilience. In a world in which climate risk is reflected in the prices of assets traded in the market, everyone will be pressured to manage the risk and protect the value of their holdings. This chapter looks at four markets where we might expect climate risk disclosure to cause prices to change most readily: equities (company stocks), debt (bonds issued by companies and governments), property (real estate), and insurance. It argues that disclosure and better risk information can propel climate resilience at a systemic level, but it can also prove highly disruptive. Fear of disruption and its consequences has led different groups to throw sand into the gears to delay a day of reckoning, but that day is coming. If communities are unprepared, investors, banks, and insurance companies could panic and pull back indiscriminately from parts of the stock, bond, property, and insurance markets. The insights learned from these markets can illustrate how each could drive resilience on a large scale.

Relocate People to Safer Ground

Whether the world is prepared for it or not, climate change will drive large-scale migration. The impacts of climate change—both slow-onset changes, such as sea-level rise and drought, and sudden-onset events, such as extreme storms and wildfires—push people from their homes. Managed well, migration can yield enormous benefits, offering greater opportunities for those who relocate and injecting new talent and energy into receiver communities. But climate change threatens to unleash “disruptive migration,” that is, sudden migration that could strain social, economic, and political stability. The task ahead in the face of climate change is to encourage managed, gradual migration that minimizes disruption, moves people out of harm’s way, and turns displacement into economic opportunity. This chapter outlines the strategies and tools that exist to make this possible.

Work with Human Nature

Human beings are not psychologically well-equipped to prepare for the impacts of climate change. We are not good at dealing with dangers we have trouble picturing in our minds, and we often succumb to excessive optimism. Human beings are also reluctant to pay short-term costs that are certain in exchange for future, uncertain benefits. Given the enormity of the climate resilience challenge, this chapter outlines how citizens are at risk of feeling overwhelmed and therefore paralyzed by the scope of the problem. If we are going to build resilience to climate change successfully, it argues, we are going to have to work around these cognitive limitations. Human nature is hard, if not impossible to change, so it is best to deploy a variety of approaches and “nudges” that work with human nature, not against it.

Lawyer Up

Media attention has focused most intently on lawsuits seeking to force action to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and to hold fossil-fuel companies to account. Even if the courts fail to resolve the essential challenge of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, they will surely find themselves enmeshed in litigation for years over who pays for the damage. In courtroom after courtroom, judges will reach decisions that can contribute to or hinder resilience. This chapter explores how litigation over the harm caused by climate change impacts could offer greater clarity on who should pay for the damages and thereby spur decisions to invest in resilience on a large scale. As the severity and frequency of climate change-related damages grow, corporate directors and officers, architects, engineers, manufacturers, and others who have a duty to consider foreseeable harm and to manage the risk, will likely find themselves on the receiving end of litigation alongside fossil fuel companies and governments.

Rethink Where and How We Build

Communities tend to learn things the hard way, reacting in the wake of disasters rather than in anticipation of them. Virtually all existing infrastructure was designed to withstand the extremes that we have experienced in the past. Historically, scientists could not project the impacts of climate change with much precision, so our existing design choices and plans for infrastructure have largely ignored the risks posed by those impacts. This chapter identifies strategies that communities and individuals can adopt now to strengthen their building practices to endure new extremes driven by a changing climate. Among other things, it analyzes how improving building codes and standards and insisting on wiser land-use policies, especially in the absence of a “no more” moment, can serve as a bulwark against the destruction that climate-fueled disasters bring.

Introduction

Once regarded as a threat in the distant future, the impacts of climate change are now daily new stories. The introduction defines resilience and argues that resilience is urgently needed in the United States and other places to enable communities to cope with the climate impacts they are already experiencing, as well as with future impacts. Building resilience is not a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissons, but it can blunt some of the worst impacts, save lives, and protect the most vulnerable in society. Insufficient progress in cutting emissions has made the resilience imperative all the more urgent. The introduction, lastly, explains the authors’ motivations for writing the book and provides an overview of ten lessons essential for advancing climate resilience.

Reconceive National Security

This chapter focuses on climate change as a global disrupter of military might and social order. The connection between climate change and national security may appear tenuous to some, but climate change threatens to drastically reshape the security environment, reshuffle geopolitics, and upend some traditional assumptions about what it means to prepare for and win wars. The national security establishment in the United States and other countries will need to reconceive national security. Climate change can create new power vacuums where bad actors can take root, threaten power bases previously thought to be invulnerable, and intensify resource competition among countries. To prepare, the US government needs a framework to ensure that national security plans, policies, and strategies account for the accelerating impacts of climate change.

Get the Data and Make Them Usable

As climate change advances and its impacts become clearer, more and more communities around the world will need deeper insight into the future, both immediate and distant. Decision-makers will require information to make high-impact, hard-to-reverse decisions about water, agriculture, and where and how to build infrastructure in a world experiencing climate change. They must model the projected evolution of droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires so that they can help people get out of harm’s way, and they will need data to make disaster-relief operations more effective. The world’s capacity to collect and analyze climate and weather data has exploded. Yet many of the people who need these data lack both access to them and the means to make them useful for decision-making. This chapter describes this data paradox and offer a few ideas on how to escape it.