Increasing resilience has long been a reaction to natural disasters such as earthquakes. Building codes are updated; procedures for the aftermath are put in place (though never adequate for a worse-than-the-previous event). They tend, though, to lose out to complacency. In some of the areas devastated by the tsunami that hit Japan, there were century-old stone markers<\/a> placed after a previous tsunami warning people not to build closer to the shore. But when no tsunamis occurred for a while, the stones were ignored and forgotten. Resilience itself may not be resilient, at least not to the effects of time.<\/p>\n “High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants,” the stone slab reads. “Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.” Source: Huffington Post<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sandy-type disasters are not likely to fade with time. Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanos and the like generally don\u2019t have patterns to their frequency or scale. And it used to be that climate disasters like drought or flooding didn\u2019t either. But where the former are truly natural \u2013 \u201cacts of God\u201d \u2013 we can no longer say the same is true of the latter.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t get me wrong. I\u2019m not claiming that Sandy or the Midwest drought wouldn\u2019t have occurred were it not for our environmental \u201csins.\u201d (Hmm, there must be a religion somewhere that believes these events were indeed acts of God in response to those sins.) But without several anthropocenic multipliers, their effects would certainly have been less. And as there is no foreseeable diminishment of those influences (CO2 levels are not falling, marshes and mangroves are not being re-established, shore development is not abating), it\u2019s apparent that, unlike truly natural disasters, the frequency and scale of climate-related disasters will only escalate.<\/p>\n Which brings us back to resilience and the question of how we deal with the prospect of future disasters. The EcoOptimist in me has somewhat mixed feelings about emphasizing resilience. My\u00a0 reservations derive from two related issues. The first is that the pursuit of resilience can be seen as the equivalent of throwing in the towel and conceding defeat to the inevitability of climate disruption. The second is that, in our binary either-or thought process, an emphasis on resilience is all too likely to occur at the expense of actions and investments that might diminish the causes of climate disruption (thus in fact leading to that same defeat). The costs of adapting cities will surely divert funds from programs to curtail CO2 emissions.<\/p>\n In a recent talk<\/a>, I divided climate actions into three categories: prevention, mitigation and adaptation. Prevention is the primary path we\u2019ve been pursuing. Though there\u2019ve been some successes (for example, acid rain), there have been far more failures, mostly in the form of opportunities not taken. This is highly unfortunate because, aside from the obvious reasons, virtually every study has shown that prevention is the least costly approach. It\u2019s going to cost a fortune to build seawalls to protect NYC. If we (or had we) spent that kind of money on cutting greenhouse gases, we\u2019d be far ahead of the game \u2013 especially since that investment would provide future returns that seawalls don\u2019t.<\/p>\n Storm surge barrier locations proposed for NYC starting in 2004 after a study<\/a> predicting the flooding from a \u201csuperstorm.\u201d Image is from New York Sea Grant<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Unfortunately, there\u2019s a fundamental question now of whether it\u2019s too late for prevention. If we somehow found the political resolve, could we actually obviate the need for remedial steps? In other words, could the train of global warming be stopped in time? There is a built in lag factor, a delay between the time greenhouse gases are released and its impacts are felt. So the warming of the next bunch of years or decades is preordained.<\/p>\n Hence the need to turn to the next steps: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is finding ways to diminish the impact (versus preventing it). In the case of flooding events like Sandy and Katrina, mitigation would involve efforts such as preservation or recreation of wetlands that can absorb the water. Even oysters, it turns out, can have a role. In addition to their ability to cleanse polluted waters, oyster beds can also slow tidal surges.<\/p>\n \u201cOyster-tecture\u201d reefs proposed by Scape\/Landscape Architecture<\/a> for storm surge protection in NY harbor. Part of the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s exhibition \u201cRising Currents\u201d in 2010.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Mitigation can also involve less natural methods ranging from porous pavement to the further extreme of storm-surge barriers or seawalls. Here in NY, the stage is being set for a classic environmental battle, with a group led by Governor Cuomo promoting construction of a many-billion dollar barrier and opposition led by Mayor Bloomberg questioning the feasibility of a seawall. (The third camp, deniers, holds little sway here.) The Bloomberg camp points out that, even if the barrier worked when needed, it would have very large environmental impacts of its own and would also merely deflect the water elsewhere, perhaps increasing the damage in neighboring areas. Stalemate.<\/p>\n Hierarchically, mitigation is the path necessitated by the failure of prevention. Adaptation, then, is required when both prevention and mitigation fail. Focusing again on Sandy and NYC, adaptation responses range from elevating buildings (or at least their necessary services) to abandonment of low-lying areas. It would include making our electricity supply better able to endure partial interruptions and our transit systems able to stop flooding or at least recover faster (and cheaper) from it. In larger terms, we\u2019d make our food supply less dependent on transport over long distances.\u00a0 It\u2019s making our human support system more resilient, in short.<\/p>\n It also is pretty much writing off the idea of returning our planet \u2013 and us \u2013 to some semblance of sustainability. Andrew Zolli, often called a futurist, wrote recently<\/a> \u201cWhere sustainability aims to put the world back into balance, resilience looks for ways to manage in an imbalanced world.\u201d The problem with resorting to resilience is that, if the world is still imbalanced, you have to keep moving the goal posts. If we don\u2019t stop global warming, how high will sea levels rise and will the barriers we construct in this part of the century be adequate for the future? Similar questions arise concerning food supplies (or food security, as it\u2019s coming to be known) or, say, infectious diseases spread by climate-driven insect migrations. And those are only some of the impacts that we can try to foresee; how many other side effects might we not have the smarts to anticipate?<\/p>\n EcoOptimism, with its implicit assumption that solutions are available, would have us focus on prevention. It\u2019s much smarter to spend money on \u2018front of tailpipe\u2019 solutions — actions that nip the problem before it occurs — than on much more expensive and likely less predictable end of tailpipe reactions. But at this stage in our non-committal response to climate disruption, we\u2019ve almost certainly committed ourselves, by default, to a mix of both positive actions, ideally taken by choice, and necessary involuntary reactions: an all of the above combination of prevention, mitigation and adaptation.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a key point; resilience is undertaken when we realize we have no options left. The seas are going to rise. Crops are going to be disrupted. Storms are going to get stronger. We will have to take responsive measures. (We may call them precautionary, but there\u2019s no \u201cpre\u201d involved. We\u2019re past that.)<\/p>\n Not that resilience is bad. It\u2019s just unfortunate that we\u2019ve come to the point in terms of climate disruption where there\u2019s a strong case to be made for it: for adaptation rather than prevention. We\u2019re talking about building the bomb shelters instead of defusing the bombs. And those bunkers were never going to help much in a post-nuclear war world.<\/p>\n EcoOptimistic solutions are ones that deliver benefits both ecologically and economically, and leave us in a better place than we started. Carbon fees<\/a> are a perfect example. Assuming the fees are revenue-neutral, we end up with a productive reallocation in which we tax and disincentivize the \u201cbads\u201d while promoting the goods.<\/p>\n Multi-billion dollar seawalls that play catch up with ever-rising oceans are not optimistic endeavors in any sense. Nor is diverting Missouri River<\/a> waters to the west. These are last ditch efforts that only provide temporary fixes. Zolli writes \u201cCombating those kinds of disruptions isn\u2019t just about building higher walls \u2014 it\u2019s about accommodating the waves.\u201d Resilience, by this description, incorporates both mitigation and adaptation. But it assumes the waves and ignores prevention. I despise metaphors (it always seems there\u2019s a metaphor to prove any point), but it\u2019s the equivalent of adding life preservers rather than making the boat more seaworthy. Or, better yet, altering course to avoid the storm. More life preservers might make sense if you\u2019re already in the storm. We\u2019re probably encountering the outer rings of the storm, and it may or may not be too late to change course. The smart thing to do is choose a new heading, while there are still some choices available, and while holding drills and battening down the hatches just in case.<\/p>\n![\""High](\"http:\/\/ecooptimism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/tsunami-marker.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Storm](\"http:\/\/ecooptimism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Surge-barriers-map.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"\u201cOyster-tecture\u201d](\"http:\/\/ecooptimism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/oyster-tecture.jpg\")
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