#1 Welcome to Sink or Swim
About me, a few notes on COP26 and reading Building A Resilient Tomorrow
Hi,
I’m glad you’re here. This is the first edition of my first newsletter! Generally you can expect reflection on what’s going on at the moment on climate adaptation and resilience, any interesting things I have seen or heard, and some notes from what I am reading with a handy summary. Think Blinkist Plus for climate adaptation.
Adapting to climate change means planning for the impacts of climate change such as increasing floods, droughts, heatwaves, storms and sea level rise. I wrote an explainer here if you want more background.
If you don’t know me IRL, hi! I am Dr Susannah Fisher and I have been working on climate adaptation for over a decade now wearing many different hats. I have worked with national governments, research organisations and universities, climate finance institutions, an innovation agency, and NGOs and civil society to help communities adapt to climate change. Right now I am teaching at UCL and working on some large research and writing projects. If you want to know more about what I have done so far my academic work is here and my teaching here. I also work on many applied projects actually doing adaptation not just thinking about it. Some of this work is shown here and here.
A few notes on COP26
COP26 in Glasgow has galvanised attention on to climate adaptation and the losses and damages from climate change that many countries are already experiencing. The slow start to raising the promised $100 billion of adaptation finance agreed twelve years ago and lack of commitment for the Loss and Damage Facility were disappointing for many.
But I also take hope and optimism from the huge amount of attention these issues received, the commitment to doubling adaptation finance, and the Scottish commitment to the Loss and Damage Fund which is the start of something new. There is a good summary here for those who want to catch up.
Suddenly it feels like the world is talking seriously about climate vulnerability and real steps have been made, which can be built on in Egypt and beyond. It is not enough, but it is progress. I attended some fascinating side events on issues at the limits of what has been considered adaptation so far such as migration, transboundary risks and adaptation in conflict. This brilliant song brings home many of the issues around loss, damage and retreat from the rising seas.
Cartoon credit to the work of the Red Cross Climate Centre and Rebeka Ryvola.
I have the luxury of reading lots of books and papers at the moment as I get stuck into my own writing project (more on that another time). My aim is to share and summarise a few on the newsletter and point out where they fit in the wider conversation.
This week I have been reading: Building a Resilient Tomorrow by Alice Hill and Leonardo Martinez-Diaz
Who should read it: People working on adaptation especially those wanting to get a US perspective
TLDR: Outlines many of the concrete actions that need to be taken to adapt to climate change in the USA (and to a lesser extent elsewhere). This gives useful insights into how a country with significant resources and capacity is (or could be) tackling adaptation. For me this raises questions about how we move from the wish list to actually doing these actions and addressing who is vulnerable and why. This will need a change in incentives and power structures something adaptation practitioners have not yet focused enough on.
This book has been sitting on my shelf for a while but I was inspired to actually read it after hearing one of the authors, Alice Hill, on the America Adapts podcast. She was talking about her latest book (that I am yet to read) but I liked her take on the USA adaptation context so thought I would start with the one I already own.
Building a Resilient Tomorrow is a book for policymakers and practitioners on how to adapt. It draws mainly on the experience of the USA with a few global examples to expand the argument. Hill and Martinez-Diaz were officials in the Obama Administration and so offer insight into how these political decisions are being made, and what are the key issues facing the USA in how to adapt.
The book is in three sections. Firstly, Hill and Martinez-Diaz look at the systems that could drive resilience. They explore the built environment, the legal system and markets. Next they look more specifically at tools for decision-makers grouping them around money, climate data and information, and behaviour change insights. Lastly, they look at what they call “the toughest lessons” where climate change will radically disrupt our ways of life. These issues are human health, inequality, migration and geopolitics and national security. Each chapter ends with some bullet points of what different actors need to do to build a more resilient future. These range from how insurers should incentivise risk reduction measures in homeowners, to establishing climate data centres useful for resilience planning, to how national security policymakers should use climate science to inform their risk assessments. The lessons feel very specific to the USA context in most cases.
This book is an interesting insight into how a country with extensive resources, data and capacity is seeking to adapt to climate risks and how different groups such as building professionals, the insurance and reinsurance industry, federal government and the military are responding (or not) to different risks. Hill and Martinez-Diaz conclude that we need to connect siloed communities working on resilience and adaptation and invest in tools and knowledge needed to make better decisions. They emphasise the importance of great communication and compelling stories building constituencies of people ready and willing to act. They end on the important note of identifying the most vulnerable first and making sure their interests are heard. They might not live in the areas with the highest economic damage or have the loudest political voices.
This book is really useful in identifying the “to do list”. It goes much further into the detail than many reports on adaptation identifying what needs to be done, where and by who. The next step is to work through the politics of those choices and why they are not being made. Research shows us that adaptation choices are very rarely purely technical responses to a piece of evidence or emerging evidence base.
Some prominent thinkers on climate policy have argued that in climate mitigation we need to move from incremental research and the focus on climate science on impacts to focusing on why climate policy is not being implemented, how the fossil fuel companies and others are blocking progress, and how we work past these political barriers. There is a similar case to be made for adaptation. Using the blueprint of what needs to be done covered so comprehensively by the book, we now need to move on to ask why are these measures not being implemented?
Thanks for reading,
Susannah