How Communities Can Adapt to a Changing Climate

Sami Grover
Published: January 13,2017

Young Indian schoolchildren participate in a tree planting programme on the occasion of Earth Day in Kolkata.
(DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP/Getty Images)

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now,” says an old Chinese proverb.

I’ve been thinking about this proverb a lot recently. About 20 years ago (actually, 18, but near enough…) I was up on a steep, denuded hillside near Hebden Bridge in Northern England, helping a group of villagers plant up a small woodland. The surrounding communities had been hit hard by recent flooding, and citizens were beginning to grapple with the realization that such events were likely to become ever more common under a future of climate change.
The plan, which has been underway ever since, was to use the power of grassroots community groups to plant 10,000 trees a year over a 25-year period, reforesting key parts of the steep Calder Valley and protecting the villages beneath from the ravages of flash flooding, while creating crucial wildlife corridors. The group, which called itself Treesponsibility, was also aiming to slow climate change itself by sequestering more carbon in trees and the soil and by educating tree planting participants on steps they could personally take to reduce their carbon emissions.
Since then, there has been progress in the fight against climate change. We’ve seen rapid advances of renewable energy, electric vehicles and energy efficient technologies. And we’ve seen world leaders come to an unprecedented consensus on the need to move toward a low carbon future (albeit at a pace that doesn’t match the urgency of the problem). Yet the news for those communities on the front lines has gotten worse, not better.
In 2016, the Arctic saw its hottest year on record, triggering massive ice melt that has raised fears that sea level rise will be faster and more extreme than previously thought. Meanwhile, a Yale study found that the world’s soils are moving from a carbon sink to a carbon source, potentially releasing greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the entire U.S. economy by the middle of this century. And a U.K. government advisor has just warned that the kinds of major flooding that Hebden Bridge was struggling with at the turn of the millennium is now likely to become an annual event, yet ministers still have no long-term plan for dealing with it.

Nicaraguan coffee grower Isacio Lopez, 40, shows one of the new coffee plants he will use to replace the rust blighted ones at a plantation near Somoto, 200km from Managua.
(Inti Ocon/AFP/Getty Images)

There’s good reason to assume that many more of us will need to start thinking about climate change not just as a distant concern, or as a vague motivation to lower our carbon footprint, but as a very real and immediate threat to our way of life. In the same way that Hebden Bridge residents stepped up and began planning for a future they saw coming decades down the pipeline, villages, towns, regions and countries will need to start taking concrete steps to sure up their resilience in the face of rising sea levels, increased flash flooding and other extreme weather events.
The good news is, there are many inspiring examples for us to follow and learn from. Struck by the threat that climate change poses to coffee farming, for example, U.S. coffee company Counter Culture has been partnering with farming coops in South and Central America to assess and improve the climate resilience of farming communities. From seeking to diversify income to embracing solar coffee dryers, the focus has not been on any one silver bullet, but rather a broad range of interconnected solutions that can help reduce vulnerability to climate-related disruptions. Because Counter Culture has also been focused on reducing its own carbon footprint, the company looked at purchasing tree planting offsets that directly benefit the farming communities it works with — creating biodiversity hotspots (which are good for coffee!) and providing an additional source of income for farmers in the form of carbon credits too. By recognizing the interconnectedness of our economic system, projects like this are able to boost resilience both on a local and international level — protecting our much-loved coffee supply in the United States, while helping the communities responsible for supplying it.
Meanwhile, climate resilience projects are underway on the municipal level too. London’s storm water barriers are being upgraded to withstand floods not expected until one hundred years from now. Hamburg, Germany is elevating parts of the city to withstand 25-foot storm surges. As detailed in an in-depth and fascinating Rolling Stone article by Jeff Goodell back in the summer, the city of New York is spending somewhere in the region of $3 billion to construct a gigantic and controversial storm barrier around most of Manhattan. The trouble is, with any of these efforts, that measures designed for a future based on one set of estimates may not be adequate if worst-case scenarios play out. As Goodell notes, until recently, conventional wisdom pegged end-of-the-century sea level rise at somewhere around six feet. Now, with signs that climate change is picking up pace, we could be looking at an eventual rise of over 70 feet,rendering any of today’s proposed defenses largely obsolete.

Melting ice stands in a river of glacier water at the Pasterze glacier near Heiligenblut am Grossglockner, Austria. The Pasterze glacier is Austria's largest and is shrinking rapidly, having receded in length by at least three kilometers since the 19th century.
(Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

In some areas, instead of holding back the tide, communities and government officials are talking instead of managed retreat — taking a cold hard look at what parts of our current infrastructure are worth defending in the long term, and where we may need to give up land to the ocean. Goodell’s article notes that New York City has already started buying out residents in some vulnerable neighborhoods, figuring it’s cheaper to pay them now than to keep rebuilding after every single storm. The land will be used to create a natural buffer between the ocean and more readily defensible neighborhoods.
Similarly, in the U.K., the Environment Agency spent £20 million creating a salt marsh on the Streat peninsula in Somerset, land that it previously tried to protect from sea level rise. While critics argued that the government should instead be defending homes from flooding using traditional walls, advocates make the case that managed retreat can provide more robust, natural defenses while bolstering wildlife and creating new assets for tourism and recreation.
Experts say that whatever we now do to cut emissions and slow climate change, climate change has progressed beyond the point where we can simply return to normal, whatever ‘normal’ may have been. Even if we magically ended all emissions tomorrow, seas would continue to rise and storms would continue to rage for decades and even centuries to come. Predicting exactly what will happen is impossible, so designing the specific defenses we need is always going to be an imprecise art. But a few things are certain: The sooner we start, the broader range of measures we take, and the more willing we are to think outside of our existing assumptions about what our cities and communities should look like, the better placed we will be to deal with a future in which the fundamental rules of engagement have changed.

Sami Grover is a writer, and creative director at The Change Creation, a brand creation agency that works with entities who make the world better, fairer or truer. Clients include Larry’s Beans, Burt's Bees, Canaan Fair Trade and Jada Pinkett Smith/Overbrook Entertainment.