Lessons from The 3 Little Pigs: Climate Resilience
I like the story of the Three Little Pigs as an allegory for climate resilience because of the key lessons it highlights:
Shortcuts can be costly
Planning strategically is essential to sustainable outcomes
There is value in perseverance
On its own, the story may oversimplify some of the deeper, more complex issues associated with climate change and resilience, but the overall message is clear: mitigating a Real-World Threat requires preparation, commitment, and access to quality resources. If the Wolf is a symbol of climate change, the brick house is a symbol of climate resilience.
It is well-documented that the primary driver of climate change is the Greenhouse Effect, which has occurred as a result of heat from the Sun being trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere by naturally-occurring “greenhouse” gases (or “GHGs”, such as carbon dioxide and methane). The higher the concentration of gases in the atmosphere, the more heat is trapped. This phenomenon is also referred to as Global Warming.
What has caused the concentrations of these gases to increase? Human activities, such as burning coal or oil or farming livestock produces additional gas, causing gas emissions to rise at higher rates than they otherwise would naturally.
What are the consequences? Greenhouse gas emissions affect our atmosphere and impact our climate, which cause rising sea levels and extreme weather events that can subsequently lead to heat waves, flooding, drought, or wildfires.
The effects of climate change are irreversible, but climate resilience provides a framework for coping with its effects. Just as resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from hard times, the concept of climate resilience is “the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to climate-related hazardous events, trends, or disturbances.”
The climate resilience framework establishes the interdependent systems——climate, ecosystems, and human societies——in which it is intended to function, and acknowledges how each of these systems interacts with and impacts the other through 3 concepts:
Risk: What are (or have been) the impacts of climate change?
Vulnerability: Who and what are (or have been/could be) affected by climate impacts?
Adaptation: How are we dealing with, and preparing for, climate impacts?
Risk and Vulnerability. The increase in average global temperatures is the source of many climate impacts, such as the rising sea levels and increasing frequency of extreme weather events, which subsequently threaten human health and security. Rising sea levels lead to receding coastlines that expose coastal communities to flooding dangers. Extreme weather events, which have become more common, continue to affect daily life activities, civil infrastructures, resources, and supply chains. For example, extreme heat events present an increased risk for wildfires and droughts, which can destroy land, property and agriculture; extreme heat events can also lead to disease and death in heat-intolerant communities. Climate impacts expose our many vulnerabilities in a number of ways: marginalized populations are more likely to experience harm and direct threats to health and safety; extreme weather events such as prolonged heat waves place a significant strain on energy infrastructures, which limit the amount of relief they can provide; extreme weather events impact the production, availability and quality of agriculture and water; climate-related events negatively impact our biodiversity and ecosystems.
Adaptation. Climate resilience requires an intersectional approach to addressing climate impacts at all levels and identifies how we adapt to change. It focuses on preparedness and response, with special attention on “preventative” approaches in order to curb more adverse climate impacts, such as education and information-sharing, investing in and enhancing public and private infrastructures, reinforcing energy infrastructures, and modifying individual behaviors and business and industrial operations. It challenges us to reexamine strategies that rely on social capital (or “people power”) to effect change, such as policy development and political action, stakeholder integration at all levels (community, local, state, federal, and global), and climate equity models that evaluate resilience through a social justice lens. In addition, as human societies attempt to adapt to the effects of climate change, climate resilience initiative challenge us to understand the extent to which the impact on ecosystems and biodiversity will change and affect our global environment, and what these changes mean for our future.
In the next post, I will review the components of hurricane planning initiatives. Stay tuned!
-T