Sometime back, Bloomberg Green posted an article about Singapore spending $170 million to build climate defenses for a luxury store mall. Located in “a natural depression,” the area was once home to nutmeg plantations and pepper farms, and like all the Elm Streets in America where elm trees no longer reside, it is dystopicly named “Orchard Road.” As it is low-lying, it’s subject to flooding, and considering its economic value, the Singaporean government built a huge underground concrete storage tank and diversion canal to prevent flooding (which being a valley on a low-lying island will only become more of an issue).
On the same day, The Wall Street Journal published an article about how ‘climate cash’ is pivoting to adaptation “as mitigation efforts fall short.”1 The article argues that more resources are being spent on adaptation, citing a report on climate adaptation finance, though digging deeper, relatively speaking, while adaptation finance is growing, it is growing significantly more slowly than climate mitigation finance.
But attention to adaptation and resilience is definitely growing. A new taxonomy for investors defines what a resilience investment is to help investors put money into resilience investments. And another new report assesses the profitability of investing in climate hazard mitigation for real estate portfolios—finding that there is a growing demand for adaptation solutions ($29 billion/year through 2050) and that resilience measures could reduce risks by $45 billion total by 2050.2
In other words, the shift to adaptation is coming. And when it comes it will be Earth-shaking—where collectively, those with resources start to give up the struggle to stop climate change, and instead focus primarily on protecting their own proverbial asses. Fortunately, we’re not quite there yet. In fact, returning to the report The Wall Street Journal mischaracterized, mitigation finance is growing far faster than adaptation finance, reaching $1.3 trillion annually in 2021-2022, double the $653 billion averaged in 2019-2020. Adaptation finance, on the other hand, grew to $63 billion, a 28% increase year-on-year, but because mitigation finance grew much more, adaptation finance dropped from 7% to 5% of the total.
Which looks more resilient to you, Orchard Road in 1900 or 2012? (Images from G. R. Lambert & Company and from Erwin Soo via Wikipedia)
As the world turns… away from mitigation
But there could be a point when that shift comes, when financiers and companies (and even governments, cities, and individuals) recognize that systems they’re trying to prop up aren’t salvageable and shift focus to preserving their interests. A good way to describe this comes from a chintzy sci-fi TV series I’ve been watching with my son. The show, The 100, follows the last human survivors after a global nuclear war. These last survivors are the descendants of those who were inhabiting humanity’s 12 space stations at the time of the war. Instead of fighting (which seems improbable) they all banded together, literally to convert their stations, Voltron-style, into the “Ark” (a not so subtle reference at that).
But as the Ark starts to break down (faster than projected), one faction hijacks the last remaining “exodus ship” and launches their group to Earth (heavily damaging the Ark in the process and in a twist, all dying in the landing). Anyway, no need to recap all the other silliness of the show, the bigger point is that shifting from mitigation to adaptation is kind of like stealing the last exodus ship. You feel good about it as you’re flying away, but ultimately, if you don’t work together, the odds of survival drop dramatically (whether that’s because of reduced capacity and resources or aggression of those deemed expendable).
Too harsh? We’re rapidly approaching the end game. We’re still burning massive amounts of fossil fuels, forests are failing to absorb carbon, global plastic production is increasing, and increasing numbers of climate tipping points are already locked in. The obvious course of action is to enact emergency procedures, actually kind of like in the first episodes of The 100, where resources are carefully guarded and doled out. But instead, here on Earth, those with resources do what they deem best, whether that’s developing rockets to colonize Mars or creating flood protections for a luxury mall in a low-lying area on a low-lying island.
The ark, a tiny closed system where every decision factors into a life or death calculus (and thus is treated as such). (Image from The 100 Wiki)
The irony, as the article on Singapore’s adaptation investments describes, is that this financially and ecologically expensive flood control system, built in 2018, has never been fully used since it was completed. That doesn’t mean it won’t be one day (possibly saving millions of dollars’ worth of high-end luxury goods from being ruined), but that’s $170 million dollars that could have been used elsewhere—like planting forests, or covering roofs with gardens, or even better, a coordinated marketing campaign to get Singaporeans to consume less (in an ideal rather than capitalistic world perhaps).
That said, investment in climate resilience and disaster preparedness can save a lot of money. One study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that these investments save $13 in economic impact, damage and clean up costs for every $1 spent. This seems like a good deal, especially if that money is being drawn not from mitigation efforts but from grey growth or, say, taxes drawn from excessive wealth or social ills.
The What and How of Resilience
Ultimately, the question is two-fold: 1) What are we trying to make more resilient? Luxury shopping malls or local hospitals? And 2) How we go about it? Building networks of neighborhood parks that serve a dual role as flood control or giant underground concrete storage tanks that offer no benefits except every 5-50 years when there’s a flood?
We’re going to have to start making more and more difficult choices with the limited resources we have. When cathedrals like Notre Dame burn down, do we spend $760 million to rebuild them, or do we accept that these will become beautiful ruins, like the Roman Colosseum, and use those millions instead to mitigate climate change—particularly in ways that slow down growth and consumption (shifting to car-free city centers, reducing workweeks, encouraging smaller families, facilitating production of local food and backyard gardens, and a thousand other ways).3
Sadly, we’ll probably fail to do that until we get a warning that our Ark has only a few days of air left and then we’ll try to rally heroically, like the space station dwellers in The 100 did. They unhitched the space stations and launched them all to Earth, hoping against hope that at least one or two survived impact. And yes, some might make it (depending how badly we disrupt the Gaian systems we know and depend on) but the living is certainly not going to be luxurious after that.4
Ruins can be beautiful, soulful reminders of paths not taken. (Notre Dame ruin in a green urban future created by Microsoft’s Image Creator)
Endnotes
1) Also coming out the next day, The Wall Street Journal shared a video on how the efforts to build a new capital in Indonesia, Nusantara, is failing (the government is moving it in part because the current one, Jakarta, is sinking, which climate change is accelerating). That’s $33 billion partly driven by a need to adapt to changing ecological realities.
2) Which honestly isn’t all that impressive when aggregated costs of adaptation solutions total $726 billion. I imagine a further refinement of when/where to invest in these solutions is essential to making the math work.
3) If you want more ideas, here are 530 different policy proposals to facilitate degrowth!
4) In a bit of irony, the space station dwellers turned out not to be the only remaining humans so their survival ultimately is moot (other than to them, of course). (And yes, for the sci-fi realists, in the real world, their musculoskeletal systems could have never handled return to Earth’s gravity, having been born in orbit, but once again this is solved using the fantastical sci-fi device of “artificial gravity.”)
