The recent Climate Change Committee report on the UK government’s lack of preparedness for climate breakdown reveals negligence at a historic scale.
The report lays bare years of successive Governments’ failure to prepare the UK for the breakdown that is now upon us, with far worse to come.
From heat exposure to rising flood risk to national infrastructure, homes and harvests, countless lives and livelihoods are at severe risk. Conservative estimates project impact to the UK economy into hundreds of billions, before 2050.
Faced with these stark facts, can any of us still believe that the government is primed to simply come and save us? Awareness is dawning among UK communities that it’s down to all of us to respond to the dangerous climate change we’re experiencing here and now. In our cities and neighbourhoods, at work, and everywhere else that we have power. Yes, Government must act urgently. …And with this taking too long, and worse changes to come, hyper-local, community-based adaptation action is the shape of our future.
Despite popular protestations, raising awareness of adaptation does not disrupt or delay the urgent case for limiting climate breakdown through global decarbonisation. Quite the opposite: decarbonisation and adaptation need each other. What’s more, more often than you think, they’re the same thing…
…This is the vision of strategic adaptation. From housing retrofit to upland flood management, community led and ecologically sound adaptation measures can draw down carbon, and protect against impacts; reduce emissions and reduce energy bills. All while transforming public awareness of the climate threat and building the democratic support we desperately need for climate mitigation: a win-win-win-win.
Watch this space for more on climate adaptation from the CMp’s forthcoming Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience (SAFER) campaign, including:
– building the case and the field for hyper-local community based adaptation action
– our demand that Government produce appropriate adaptation policy and implementation response, to fulfil their most basic responsibility: protecting its citizens (and their children) from wholly foreseeable threats.
The recent chaos caused by a major power outage in Portugal and Spain is a timely demonstration of the vulnerability of contemporary industrialised societies. Every such ‘warning shot’ builds the case for serious disaster-preparedness, and for ‘redundancy’ and back-up plans to become standard systems approaches. The time to act is now, not after an unprecedented disaster.
I've never heard anyone come up with a logical reason why the terrible drought and vast starvation conditions that we saw in the Horn of Africa won't get far worse in the coming decades. Now, it's true that we have substantial food growing reserves right now, but what if those reserves disappear someday?
So, is there a logical reason why you, your children and/or your grandchildren might not be dead of mass starvation someday, instead of succumbing to old people's diseases? No?
Then somebody should be planning to best survive the coming problem. What partially inhibits the permafrost from thawing? What are the financial and environmental costs of each alternative? What inhibits a few of the megafires? Any brains out there, asked the zombie?
For about 20 years, since I first heard of Peak Oil, I've pondered the fractal nature of the "faultine" between survivors and perishers – if one imagines a faultline that breaks apart under humanity, half (most) "falling into the ocean," so to speak. Then I look at all the people I know and imagine what the professional psychotherapists back in the day were advising their clients in Dresden in the weeks and months leading up to the firebombing in WWII. I look for parallels and I look for possible uses of these ideas in the now.