Vicki Arroyo: Let's prepare for our new climate

Translator: Thu-Huong Ha Reviewer: Morton Bast

This is the skyline of my hometown, New Orleans.

It was a great place to grow up,

but it's one of the most vulnerable spots in the world.

Half the city is already below sea level.

In 2005, the world watched as New Orleans

and the Gulf Coast were devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

One thousand, eight hundred and thirty-six people died. Nearly 300,000 homes were lost.

These are my mother's, at the top --

although that's not her car,

it was carried there by floodwaters up to the roof --

and that's my sister's, below.

Fortunately, they and other family members got out in time,

but they lost their homes, and as you can see,

just about everything in them.

Other parts of the world have been hit by storms

in even more devastating ways.

In 2008, Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath

killed 138,000 in Myanmar.

Climate change is affecting our homes, our communities,

our way of life. We should be preparing

at every scale and at every opportunity.

This talk is about being prepared for, and resilient to

the changes that are coming and that will affect our homes

and our collective home, the Earth.

The changes in these times won't affect us all equally.

There are important distributional consequences,

and they're not what you always might think.

In New Orleans, the elderly and female-headed households

were among the most vulnerable.

For those in vulnerable, low-lying nations,

how do you put a dollar value on losing your country

where you ancestors are buried? And where will your people go?

And how will they cope in a foreign land?

Will there be tensions over immigration,

or conflicts over competition for limited resources?

It's already fueled conflicts in Chad and Darfur.

Like it or not, ready or not, this is our future.

Sure, some are looking for opportunities in this new world.

That's the Russians planting a flag on the ocean bottom

to stake a claim for minerals under the receding Arctic sea ice.

But while there might be some short-term individual winners,

our collective losses will far outweigh them.

Look no further than the insurance industry as they struggle

to cope with mounting catastrophic losses

from extreme weather events.

The military gets it. They call climate change

a threat multiplier that could harm stability and security,

while governments around the world are evaluating

how to respond.

So what can we do? How can we prepare and adapt?

I'd like to share three sets of examples, starting with

adapting to violent storms and floods.

In New Orleans, the I-10 Twin Spans,

with sections knocked out in Katrina, have been rebuilt

21 feet higher to allow for greater storm surge.

And these raised and energy-efficient homes

were developed by Brad Pitt and Make It Right

for the hard-hit Ninth Ward.

The devastated church my mom attends has been

not only rebuilt higher, it's poised to become

the first Energy Star church in the country.

They're selling electricity back to the grid

thanks to solar panels, reflective paint and more.

Their March electricity bill was only 48 dollars.

Now these are examples of New Orleans rebuilding in this way,

but better if others act proactively with these changes in mind.

For example, in Galveston, here's a resilient home

that survived Hurricane Ike,

when others on neighboring lots clearly did not.

And around the world, satellites and warning systems

are saving lives in flood-prone areas such as Bangladesh.

But as important as technology and infrastructure are,

perhaps the human element is even more critical.

We need better planning and systems for evacuation.

We need to better understand how people make decisions

in times of crisis, and why.

While it's true that many who died in Katrina did not have access to transportation,

others who did refused to leave as the storm approached,

often because available transportation and shelters

refused to allow them to take their pets.

Imagine leaving behind your own pet in an evacuation or a rescue.

Fortunately in 2006, Congress passed

the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act (Laughter)

— it spells "PETS" — to change that.

Second, preparing for heat and drought.

Farmers are facing challenges of drought from Asia

to Africa, from Australia to Oklahoma,

while heat waves linked with climate change

have killed tens of thousands of people

in Western Europe in 2003, and again in Russia in 2010.

In Ethiopia, 70 percent, that's 7-0 percent of the population,

depends on rainfall for its livelihood.

Oxfam and Swiss Re, together with Rockefeller Foundation,

are helping farmers like this one build hillside terraces

and find other ways to conserve water,

but they're also providing for insurance when the droughts do come.

The stability this provides is giving the farmers

the confidence to invest.

It's giving them access to affordable credit.

It's allowing them to become more productive so that

they can afford their own insurance over time, without assistance.

It's a virtuous cycle, and one that could be replicated

throughout the developing world.

After a lethal 1995 heat wave

turned refrigerator trucks from the popular

Taste of Chicago festival into makeshift morgues,

Chicago became a recognized leader,

tamping down on the urban heat island impact

through opening cooling centers,

outreach to vulnerable neighborhoods, planting trees,

creating cool white or vegetated green roofs.

This is City Hall's green roof, next to Cook County's [portion of the] roof,

which is 77 degrees Fahrenheit hotter at the surface.

Washington, D.C., last year, actually led the nation

in new green roofs installed, and they're funding this in part

thanks to a five-cent tax on plastic bags.

They're splitting the cost of installing these green roofs

with home and building owners.

The roofs not only temper urban heat island impact

but they save energy, and therefore money,

the emissions that cause climate change,

and they also reduce stormwater runoff.

So some solutions to heat can provide for win-win-wins.

Third, adapting to rising seas.

Sea level rise threatens coastal ecosystems, agriculture,

even major cities. This is what one to two meters

of sea level rise looks like in the Mekong Delta.

That's where half of Vietnam's rice is grown.

Infrastructure is going to be affected.

Airports around the world are located on the coast.

It makes sense, right? There's open space,

the planes can take off and land without worrying about

creating noise or avoiding tall buildings.

Here's just one example, San Francisco Airport,

with 16 inches or more of flooding.

Imagine the staggering cost of protecting

this vital infrastructure with levees.

But there might be some changes in store

that you might not imagine. For example,

planes require more runway for takeoff

because the heated, less dense air, provides for less lift.

San Francisco is also spending 40 million dollars

to rethink and redesign its water and sewage treatment,

as water outfall pipes like this one can be flooded with seawater,

causing backups at the plant, harming the bacteria

that are needed to treat the waste.

So these outfall pipes have been retrofitted

to shut seawater off from entering the system.

Beyond these technical solutions, our work

at the Georgetown Climate Center with communities

encourages them to look at what existing legal and policy tools are available

and to consider how they can accommodate change.

For example, in land use, which areas do you want

to protect, through adding a seawall, for example,

alter, by raising buildings, or retreat from,

to allow the migration of important natural systems,

such as wetlands or beaches?

Other examples to consider. In the U.K.,

the Thames Barrier protects London from storm surge.

The Asian Cities Climate [Change] Resilience Network

is restoring vital ecosystems like forest mangroves.

These are not only important ecosystems in their own right,

but they also serve as a buffer to protect inland communities.

New York City is incredibly vulnerable to storms,

as you can see from this clever sign, and to sea level rise,

and to storm surge, as you can see from the subway flooding.

But back above ground, these raised ventilation grates

for the subway system show that solutions can be both

functional and attractive. In fact, in New York,

San Francisco and London, designers have envisioned

ways to better integrate the natural and built environments

with climate change in mind.

I think these are inspiring examples of what's possible

when we feel empowered to plan for a world that will be different.

But now, a word of caution.

Adaptation's too important to be left to the experts.

Why? Well, there are no experts.

We're entering uncharted territory, and yet

our expertise and our systems are based on the past.

"Stationarity" is the notion that we can anticipate the future

based on the past, and plan accordingly,

and this principle governs much of our engineering,

our design of critical infrastructure, city water systems,

building codes, even water rights and other legal precedents.

But we can simply no longer rely on established norms.

We're operating outside the bounds of CO2 concentrations

that the planet has seen for hundreds of thousands of years.

The larger point I'm trying to make is this.

It's up to us to look at our homes and our communities,

our vulnerabilities and our exposures to risk,

and to find ways to not just survive, but to thrive,

and it's up to us to plan and to prepare

and to call on our government leaders and require them

to do the same, even while they address

the underlying causes of climate change.

There are no quick fixes.

There are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

We're all learning by doing.

But the operative word is doing.

Thank you.

(Applause)