How climate change is hurting Americans now
Instead of ignoring risks of climate change, listen to communities – conservative and progressive, rural and urban, rich and poor – that have been hurt.
It has become a freakish ritual: Each January, NASA and NOAA scientists announce that the previous year ranks among the hottest ever recorded. This year is no exception. Not only was 2019 the Earth’s second-hottest year on record, it was the fifth consecutive year the United States experienced more than 10 disasters costing $1 billion or more.
Underneath those figures are stories of individual suffering.
In Hudson, Iowa, last March, Zach Van Stanley watched as rapidly warming snowmelt on frozen soils turned his backyard cornfield into a river. The flooding from the heavy rains that followed affected more than 14 million people across the Midwest and northern Great Plains, causing more than $12.5 billion in damage to levees, bridges, roads and other infrastructure.
A four-day heat wave in July made living with disability near unbearable for Kathleen Wolf in Madison, Wisc. A heat dome sat over two-thirds of the United States, creating dangerous conditions for communities unaccustomed to prolonged heat — the most lethal of all natural disaster exposures.
In October, Lauren McNulty’s eyes burned and itched from the wildfire smoke rolling across San Francisco Bay. Adjacent neighborhoods plunged into darkness after her power company resorted to rolling blackouts to stop its transmission lines from sparking wildfires.
We must adapt to our new reality
This is not normal, and it’s not a “new” normal, either. It’s the end of normal, and we need new infrastructure to help us adapt.
Yet our federal administration is quietly removing regulations that ensure our infrastructure can withstand increasing climate change risks. The Trump administration this month signed an executive order proposing changes to the National Environmental Policy Act, a 50-year-old landmark law that requires agencies to evaluate how new infrastructure will affect the environment. The changes include a roll back of federal flood risk management standards and dropping requirements that federal agencies consider climate change risks in infrastructure projects.
The changes will provide short-term benefits; it will be cheaper and easier to build in the floodplains of my home state of Louisiana, for example. But those projects won’t be built to last. It will cost taxpayers more in the long run when we’re forced to replace infrastructure that washes away.
There’s a better way. Instead of ignoring the risks of climate change, listen to communities — conservative and progressive, rural and urban, rich and poor — that are not only paying for federal infrastructure with their tax dollars, but also living with the legacy of that infrastructure for decades.
That’s why I founded I See Change in 2012. A digital platform with participants in 118 countries, I See Change enables people to share stories of how climate change is affecting them via phone or computer. When those stories are synced to local weather and sensor data, we co-create community climate records, with block-by-block information that has proven to be more accurate than the hypothetical models used to design multimillion-dollar infrastructure projects.
Changes outpace response
And the need for those insights is increasing. Engineered infrastructure investments last decades, and yet risk estimates have never been more uncertain.
With each year’s weather growing more aberrant, we cannot afford to ignore climate data or community voices. It is up to us to hear each other’s stories and use them to formulate our adaptation goals, plans and designs: What can we not live without? What can we let go? When we pay attention to our changing environment, can we see how we are working with it or against it?
Each one of our experiences with climate change provides powerful tools to connect to each other, across divides and equitably plan for our future: designing more effective and climate-resilient infrastructure from the bottom up.
Julia Kumari Drapkin is CEO and founder of I See Change, a digital platform that mobilizes communities to share stories and data about climate impacts to improve climate adaptation and infrastructure design.
Not only was 2019 the Earth’s second-hottest year on record, it was the fifth consecutive year the United States experienced more than 10 disasters costing $1 billion or more.