Managing Climate Risks in Coastal Communities: Strategies for Engagement, Readiness and Adaptation - Brossura

Susskind, Lawrence; Rumore, Danya; Hulet, Carri; Field, Patrick

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1783084898 ISBN 13: 9781783084890

Casa editrice: Anthem Pr, 2015

Riassunto

Drawing on research from the New England Climate Adaptation Project, “Managing Climate Risks for Coastal Communities” introduces a framework for building local capacity to respond to climate change. The authors maintain that local climate adaptation efforts require collective commitments to risk management, but that many communities are not ready to take on the challenge and urgently need enhanced capacity to support climate adaptation planning. To this end, the book offers statistical assessments of one readiness enhancement strategy, using tailored role-play simulations as part of a broader engagement approach. It also introduces methods for forecasting local climate change risks, as well as for evaluating the social and political context in which collective action must take place. With extensive illustration and example engagement materials, this volume is tailored for use by researchers, policy makers and practitioners.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Lawrence Susskind is Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Founder and Chief Knowledge Officer of the Consensus Building Institute (CBI).

Danya Rumore is the Associate Director of the Environmental Dispute Resolution Program and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Utah.

Carri Hulet is a Senior Associate with CBI.

Patrick Field is Managing Director of CBI and Associate Director of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

Managing Climate Risks in Coastal Communities

Strategies for Engagement, Readiness and Adaptation

By Lawrence Susskind, Danya Rumore, Carri Hulet, Patrick Field

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2015 Lawrence Susskind, Danya Rumore, Carri Hulet and Patrick Field
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78308-489-0

Contents

Figures and Tables, 
Acknowledgments, 
Abbreviations, 
PART I, 
1. Helping Coastal Communities Prepare for and Respond to Climate Change-Related Risks, 
2. Assessing the Social Landscape, Understanding the Readiness Challenge, 
3. Why Public Engagement is Necessary to Enhance Local Readiness for Climate Adaptation, 
4. NECAP Summary Risk Assessments: Creating Usable Knowledge to Help Communities Manage Climate Change Risks, 
5. Enhancing Readiness to Adapt through Role-Play Simulations, 
6. Reflecting on the New England Climate Adaptation Project — Lessons Learned, 
7. Toward a Theory of Collective Risk Management, 
Appendices, 
Appendix 1: Climate Change Projections: Barnstable, 
Appendix 2: Climate Change Projections: Cranston, 
Appendix 3: Climate Change Projections: Dover, 
Appendix 4: Climate Change Projections: Wells, 
Appendix 5: Workshop Pre-Questionnaire, 
Appendix 6: Workshop Post-Questionnaire, 
Appendix 7: Data Appendix: Workshop Survey and Public Poll Tables, 
PART II, 
Introduction, 
Stakeholder Assessment: Dover, New Hampshire, 
Summary Risk Assessment: Barnstable, Massachusetts, 
Role-Play Simulation: Wells, Maine, 
Case Study: Cranston, Rhode Island, 
Public Poll Report: Wells, Maine, 
About the Authors, 
New England Climate Adaptation Project Partners, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

HELPING COASTAL COMMUNITIES PREPARE FOR AND RESPOND TO CLIMATE CHANGE-RELATED RISKS

Lawrence Susskind and Danya Rumore

Bay Point is a midsized coastal New England town. Two years ago, a major flood destroyed the town's sewage treatment plant, which was located near the harbor. Estimates suggest that it will cost the town $18 million to rebuild the treatment plant. Since Bay Point does not have this kind of money on hand (and it was self-insuring the plant), the town will have to finance the project through a 30-year bond issue. The resulting revenues will pay for the plant, but the accompanying debt service will increase the town's annual operating budget for the next three decades.

As the town considered various rebuilding options, some officials and residents argued that the plant should be moved to a different site, farther from the harbor. This would require purchasing a new property, which in turn would add about 10 percent to the total cost of rebuilding. Moving the plant inland, moreover, would require reworking the network of underground feeder pipes. This would involve tearing up streets and seriously disrupting summer tourism — a major industry for the town — which would likely result in economic losses. Given all of the costs associated with moving the plant inland, local public officials decide to rebuild at the old location. Their reasoning: a major flood like this only happens once every 100 years, right?

This scenario reflects the circumstances faced by coastal communities throughout New England, the United States and much of the rest of the world. Like Bay Point, few communities are giving serious consideration to the fact that the climate is changing as they make everyday planning decisions. For a coastal New England town, this means the need to prepare for a future with an increasing number of severe storms, increased chances of flooding, serious coastal erosion and — perhaps most ominous for communities directly on the water — ongoing sea level rise. In the case of Bay Point, this means that the "100-year flooding window" that helped determine the outcome of the planning process is, simply, wishful thinking. In fact, there is a very high likelihood that the new sewage treatment plant will be damaged or destroyed, and perhaps even submerged permanently, before the 30-year bond has been paid off. Unfortunately, the infrastructure planning team in a community like Bay Point seldom has the advantage of climate change projections or professional vulnerability analyses to inform its rebuilding efforts. No one is there to tell them the bad news: that the likely costs of rebuilding at the old location could far exceed the costs of moving the plant inland.

Like public officials in Bay Point, decisions-makers in most communities — coastal and otherwise — continue to plan for the past climate rather than the likely future one. They simply don't understand that the severe storms that used to occur about once every 100 years may soon happen once every 20 to 30 years. Even if public officials in communities think climate change is real — and not all do — they often choose the politically easier path — for example, rebuilding the sewage treatment plant at the old site in order to avoid additional upfront costs. While this may make short-term political sense, it ignores longer-term risks and vulnerabilities and thereby adds to their communities' liabilities. Of course, some public officials understand climate change risks and are ready to take them seriously, but even in this group, many feel they don't have the public support they need to make the necessary investments, particularly in light of other, seemingly more pressing problems. If the choice becomes framed as providing a quality education to our children today, or guaranteeing public safety, versus worrying about a hypothetical storm that may be years or decades off, today's school children and police forces naturally tend to prevail.

In this book, we argue that preparing for climate change should begin immediately. The everyday choices that individuals and communities make — such as whether to build a sewer system large enough to manage storm overflows in Dover, New Hampshire, or to impose low impact development regulations in Cranston, Rhode Island — will have long-term financial and public health consequences. Those consequences will come back to haunt these communities if climate change-related risks are ignored. Failing to prepare for and take account of climate change-related risks today will only make those communities and regions more vulnerable and increase the costs they have to pay in the long run — infrastructure damage, degraded or devastated ecosystems, adverse public health impacts and even the loss of human life.

We also argue that preparing for climate change — which is typically referred to as climate change adaptation — is primarily, although by no means entirely, a local issue. State, federal and international initiatives can support adaptation, but the impacts of climate change risks are largely local, as are the efforts needed to respond to them.

To help clarify what these local efforts will likely entail, we reframe "adaptation" in terms of local preparedness and collective risk management. Preparing for and managing climate change-related risks will require whole communities to act to increase their resilience, regardless of what the future brings. For this to happen, cities and towns must prepare their citizenry to plan for a range of possible futures. They should not assume that past climatic conditions are an adequate predictor of what the future holds. Local decision-makers and their communities must make the changing climate a key factor in their everyday decisions about infrastructure investment, issuing of development permits, administration of zoning and building codes and judgments about land conservation.

Communities must come to terms with the possibility that sea levels will rise, temperatures will increase and precipitation levels and storm intensity will change. As a consequence of these climatic changes, coastal erosion may be exacerbated and whole ecological systems may be put at risk. When investing tax dollars and making development decisions, therefore, municipalities have to consider making long-term resilience a priority, even though building in such resilience requires additional costs in the near term. All of this needs to happen in a context of finite resources, irreducible uncertainty about what future climate conditions will be and differing perspectives and interests within each community.

Collectively managing climate change-related risks is no easy task. Few, if any, communities are ready to proceed. It was this recognition that spurred the creation of the New England Climate Adaptation Project (NECAP). As explained below and in subsequent chapters, NECAP represented an attempt — a successful one, we believe — to develop and test a new approach for enhancing local readiness to engage in collective risk management. The project proceeded in collaboration with four partner coastal New England communities: Barnstable, Massachusetts; Cranston, Rhode Island; Dover, New Hampshire; and Wells, Maine.

In this chapter, we set the scene by explaining why climate adaptation is increasingly urgent and why, despite the fact we think reducing carbon emissions — or climate mitigation, as it is called — is important, preparing for and managing climate change-related risks is perhaps even more important. We make the argument that adaptation is primarily a local issue. We describe the challenges inherent in collectively managing climate change risks and introduce our theory of what it will take to enhance the readiness of cities and towns to engage in such efforts at the local level. We conclude the chapter by exploring how these insights informed our approach to NECAP, and introducing the remainder of the book.

Climate Change Risks: Why Mitigation Is Critical, but Adaptation Must Be a Priority

Most of the climate change debate over the past several decades has focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to "mitigate" or stave off climate change. More than 160 countries, including the United States, met in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to hammer out and sign a treaty that spotlighted global warming as a serious worldwide risk. Since then, the nations that signed the 1992 Rio Framework Convention on Climate Change have met every few years. This included a successful effort in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, to set timetables and targets for greenhouse gas emission reduction (Susskind and Ali 2014).

Eighteen years later, however, most countries have still not met their mitigation targets. Indeed, efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have had a hard time gaining traction. Recent international meetings in Copenhagen and New York City have become mired in acrimony. Developed nations demand that the developing world take action now, since they are burning fossil fuels at a rapid and increasing rate. The global South demands that the North bear the brunt of emissions reduction, since it was the North's industrial development over previous decades and centuries that caused the problem in the first place.

The lack of effective climate mitigation is not surprising. Nations have strong incentives to maintain the status quo, as their economic well-being and future development are directly tied to (although not inseparable from) the continued emission of greenhouse gases. Further, climate change mitigation is a "common pool resource" problem: no single country can realize the direct fruits of its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions unless all countries act together. Related to this, each country has to worry about others "free riding," i.e., some countries taking advantage of everyone else's hard work to combat the problem while continuing to emit greenhouse gases covertly. Many nations use concern about free riding as an excuse for their own inaction. Without serious incentives and some method of enforcement, nations and the individuals within them are unlikely to make serious progress on climate mitigation any time soon (Moomaw and Papa 2012). While this should not be a reason to give up on mitigation all together, it does suggest that we will have to learn to deal with climate change impacts for decades to come.

The conclusion is inescapable: even if all the countries of the world were able to dramatically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, we would still be facing significant climate change (IPCC 2014; Solomon et al. 2009; Wigley 2005). Indeed, it would take decades for the greenhouse gases in the global system to dissipate, even if we entirely stopped our emissions. This means that communities throughout the globe will feel the effects of climate change over the next 30 to 50 years, regardless of whether we reduce the drivers of climate change in the next decade. Some climate change impacts are unavoidable, and we need to act accordingly (Moser and Boykoff 2013; Susskind 2010).

Climate change poses serious risks for all regions of the world, although impacts and risks will vary considerably by region and over time. As our colleague Adil Najam aptly notes, climate adaptation is largely about dealing with too little or too much water in the wrong place at the wrong time. Coastal New England will have to grapple with sea level rise and more severe storms, while much of the southwestern United States will face more frequent wildfires and drought. Some regions may experience few effects over the next decade; other may literally be underwater in the not-too-distant future (USGCRP 2014).

Given that some amount of climate change is unavoidable, efforts to plan and prepare for — or adapt to — climate change risks will be increasingly important. Again, even if global emissions of greenhouse gases were reduced immediately, a failure to begin adapting to climate change would impose significant and unnecessary costs on a great many coastal communities. Increased flooding alone may require many cities and towns to rebuild their sewage treatment plants, water pumping stations, power plants, roads, schools and other public buildings as they are destroyed or seriously damaged by flood waters — in some cases, repeatedly.

In the not too distant future, decision-makers and their constituents are sure to ask, "Is there any way we can reduce or avoid these repeated costs?" The answer will be, "Of course: make sure global mitigation efforts are underway." This is the only way to attack the source of the problem, rather than just the symptoms. In the meantime, increased preparedness and strategies for reducing vulnerability are the only alternatives. This means, among other things, halting development in flood-prone areas, bolstering infrastructure so that it can withstand increasingly intense storms, and protecting ecosystems so they can better respond to climatic changes. In sharp contrast to the common pool resource problem of climate mitigation, moreover, all investments in climate preparedness will yield direct local benefits, regardless of what others do.

There are some hopeful longer-term scenarios. For example: Perhaps as communities and decision-makers at multiple levels of government begin to realize the full and repeated costs of climate change, they are likely to look for ways to reduce the scale of the impacts they face. When that happens, they will be more likely take climate mitigation seriously, and some of the obstacles to change described above may diminish. In the meantime, though, communities need to protect themselves. Yes, climate mitigation is critical; meanwhile, climate change adaptation is a crucial short-term priority.

Reframing Adaptation as Local Climate Preparedness and Collective Risk Management

Not only should climate change adaptation be a priority; it should be a priority for all levels of government. State and federal agencies have important roles to play in supporting and enabling climate change adaptation, including the provision of technical support and funding (Moser and Boykoff 2013). Yet as we've seen, cities, towns, counties and metropolitan and regional entities will bear the brunt of coastal and inland flooding, storm surge impacts, drought, heat waves and related effects (Rosenzweig et al. 2010; Wilbanks and Kates 1999). Additionally, past, current and future decisions at the local level — such as choosing to build or rebuild sewage treatment plants on the oceanfront, as in the case of Bay Point — will determine local and regional resilience and vulnerability as the climate changes. Whether they like it or not, local and regional entities will be on the frontline of adaptation efforts (Susskind 2010).

Since climate change impacts will vary by location, there is no single blueprint that all cities, towns, and resource managers can follow (Barnett et al. 2013). Adaptation strategies need to take account of local resources, geography and context-specific risks. Local cultural and political factors, too, will influence which adaptation approaches are most likely to succeed in a given place (Schipper and Burton 2008).

To help localities get traction in responding to climate change risks, we suggest thinking in terms of preparedness and risk management — terms that are much more compelling than the vague concept of "adaptation." For example: Rather than preparing a separate, stand-alone Climate Adaptation Plan focused on what might happen in 25 years, cities and towns should focus on doing everything they can to build climate change-related risk management into their everyday decision-making. Climate change-related risk management needs to "mainstreamed" — in other words, factored into all agency and community decision-making (Moser and Boykoff 2013). If Cranston is going to build a new school now, for example, it should consider whether the chosen site might become increasingly flood prone as the sea level rises or storm intensity increases. Even if the site is currently outside the 100-year flood zone, within ten years it could be in that zone. Additionally, the city may want to consider designing the school to include central air conditioning to account for the projected increase in the number of days of extreme heat.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Managing Climate Risks in Coastal Communities by Lawrence Susskind, Danya Rumore, Carri Hulet, Patrick Field. Copyright © 2015 Lawrence Susskind, Danya Rumore, Carri Hulet and Patrick Field. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Anthem Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1783084898
• ISBN 13: 9781783084890
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 451
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile