We’ve failed our test of adaptation – Ben Vivian

December 2nd, 2010

The current cold snap shows us what climate change adaptation might require. The BBC article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11897825 comparing UK’s reaction to sudden cold weather spells shows us that we aren’t especially poor at our ability to keep things moving, when compared to others including the Scandinavians.

The lack of an immediate response by the powers-that-be to sudden unseasonal weather leads commentators and the tabloid press into paroxysms of loud moaning and anger at the authorities’ failure to address what is in their minds a simple problem. If we look back at our past responses to extreme weather such as the winter in which I was born – 1963 – we see that things collapsed, well maybe not collapsed but slowed.

So what is the issue here? I think there are several levels or angles we can approach this from. First, we now have more that can go wrong – more roads and airports that are used regularly and which are vital to continued economic activity, in 1963 we didn’t have a motorway network, in fact we barely had a motorway (the first section of the M1 opened in 1959). Few houses had central heating piping to fail, leak and cause damage to walls and floors. People worked close to their homes. Bread baked locally not centrally. The list of differences goes on and on.

Secondly as consequence of having more stuff, we rely on it more. We rely on things for our existence, power failures become almost completely disabling. One reason why I recently installed a log burner at home is the realisation that if we had an extended winter power cut or power transmission failure, we would be very cold and unable to cook. By reverting to older technologies we can start becoming less reliant to power hungry and dependent technology. As a consequence of this reliance on stuff, we come to the third element, psychologically we now take less and less notice of our surroundings, we are less prepared for change and as a consequence we are less adaptable. Bosses that insist on workers struggling into work to do tasks that can wait or that can be done from home are a symptom of this disease. Carry on regardless is not going to help when it comes to adaptation.

Adapting means changing. We seem to persist in trying to carry on regardless. At its extreme some people might even consider adaptation as a sign of weakness. A sign that we can’t control natural forces. Well, HELLO, we can’t control them, we can constrain them sometimes but when the events become extreme – earthquakes, tsunamis and storms – we can’t really control them. The best we can expect is to be able to predict them with some degree of accuracy, then we can be a bit more reassured and start to expect the authorities to take the necessary action when given appropriate warning.

And here’s the final kicker, with climate change we are rapidly learning that prediction is poor. It might be improving but it is still not good at predicting either the place or scale of the change or extreme event. So with this in mind we must become more adaptable. This means adaptable to a wide range of circumstances over a longer period of time. Terms like ‘unseasonal’ or ‘extreme’ become less relevant to normal experience as seasons and scale of events change.

So to be more adaptable we need resilience and for resilience we need to be more independent. Large scale structures are likely fail, we need a backup. So enjoy the snow, watch the skies and wrap up warm, it won’t last for ever – unlike climate change.




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