Four Out of Ten. Hey, That's Still Less Than Half.

We know that as climate change steadily closes in around us, our resilience as communities, societies even as a civilization will be tested. Droughts, floods, severe storm events of increasing frequency, duration and intensity are already setting in.

Then there's the environmental threat Maude Barlow warns is almost equally threatening as global warming, the global freshwater crisis. We're running out of clean, fresh water. We're consuming more than there is to hand and in many places that's not very much to begin with. Then there's our now broken and still deteriorating hydrologic cycle that has shifted precipitation patterns into a "feast or famine" mode. Normally wet regions appear to be getting wetter whilst dry regions are getting ever more arid and hotter.

Where people have the means they may choose to make good shortages of surface water, precipitation, by turning to ground water. In some cases that means wells. In others it means tapping into ancient aquifers. The problem is that when we go after groundwater, we become dependent on it even as we tend to draw down the resource many times faster than its recharge rate. In places like California's San Joaquin valley it's resulted in subsidence in excess of 30-feet over the past decade.

The latest research suggests that,  by 2030, just 14-years down the road, forty per cent of humanity will not have access to safe, clean water. There are several technologies becoming available that will make filtration viable and others that will free up groundwater. They're all needed and very important but, for all of the good, they're still bandaid solutions. They don't build sustainability. They don't repair the broken hydrologic cycle.

At times it seems as though we're in some environmental lab experiment. We're being subjected to changing impacts, new "normals". As I sit here watching yet another deluge outside my window I'm reminded that we may be getting a lot of rain but we're not getting the winter snowpacks that the local ecosystem hinges on. Without that snowpack there may be insufficient fresh, cold water in our rivers and streams to encourage the salmon to come upstream to spawn in the summer months. Without salmon spawning, bears, wolves, eagles and other creatures are deprived of the fatty flesh they need to survive. Without salmon-stuffed predators the forests lose out on essential fertilizer. The forests also become prone to drying out during the hot summer months, inviting more fires. It really is the circle of life.

And you folks back East have your own water problems. This summer's drought was pretty nasty. What's often overlooked is how your warming temperatures play into the hydrologic cycle. The greatest change is not in daytime temperatures or heatwaves. It's in night time temperatures that aren't dropping as they once did. Hotter night times mean more overnight evaporation, surface moisture lost to the atmosphere.

While Canada's water situation, due mainly to our northern latitude, may seem insignificant compared to what's facing the populations of tropical and equatorial nations, we are far from being secure.

Hey, Think You're Resilient?

"Resilience."  It's the new climate change buzz word.  It applies to individuals, communities, institutions, and infrastructure.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from repeated climate change impacts. It's the ability to withstand repeated floods, for example.  That might require making your home resilient by having it mounted on stilts well above ground level.  It might entail constructing new floodways to channel flash floods away from communities.

Resilience planning was one topic of discussion at the 2014 World Climate Week summit in New York.

It's not just the Third World that is taking up the issue of resilience.  In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security is exploring ways of protecting the infrastructure of American cities from climate change impacts.

"Increasingly, we've moved ...from a security focus to a resiliency focus," said Caitlin Durkovich, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at Homeland Security, an agency better known for its fight to curb terrorist threats.

Durkovich spoke Thursday on a panel at the Rising Seas Summit, a three-day conference organized by the U.S.-based Association of Climate Change Officers to discuss tools and ideas on building resiliency, particularly against rising sea levels.

In the aftermath of 2012's Hurricane Sandy, which devastated large swathes of the Northeastern U.S and caused over $60 billion in damages, Durkovich said her department reviewed the task of rebuilding with a new focus on "how to think about baking in resilience from the get-go."

To that end, she said, she has assembled a team of specialists, including city planners, in conjunction with the National Academy of Science to develop better tools for planning.

...the Portland, Maine area is being looked at in terms of risks from rising sea level, how floods might be mitigated and how to deal with saltwater intrusion into what had been bodies of fresh water. The results will then be shared with other coastal communities, she said.

California, which has the country's second longest coastline after that of Alaska, also is looking increasingly at climate change adaptation and resilience, said fellow panelist Ken Alex, senior policy advisor and director of the California Governor's Office of Planning and Research. 

He said California derives about $1 billion annually from its emissions cap-and-trade program, which sells greenhouse gas emissions permits, and the state has decided that all that revenue must be spent in ways "linked to resilience."

You'll find no comparable effort underway in Canada.  Ottawa could care less.  It doesn't want to discuss climate change impacts or resilience planning.   That costs money, potentially up to a trillion dollars or more, and the Harper regime, having defunded the federal government, now quests for a balanced budget.  

Which means the problem devolves to the provinces.  At least that's what I had expected when I contacted my own town's municipal engineer.  We're a seaside resort town.  We depend on summer tourism revenue.  We have these amazing, shallow beaches where kids can frolic safely in the salt water.  Parents love it.  It brings them here in droves.  

So what, I asked, is being done to prepare for sea level rise?  I fully expected to hear of some provincial task force underway to guide all the coastal communities, including Vancouver and Victoria, on what to expect and preparations for meeting the impacts - resilience.  No, sorry, nothing of the sort.

Our provincial government is standing idle, leaving it to our municipalities to do their own studies and planning.  Apparently the none-too-liberal Liberal government doesn't want to find itself in a spot where it's asked to help fund resilience initiatives for coastal communities.  

It's this "head in the sand" approach that is going to backfire on us and it's not just a coastal problem.  Across the country, long-neglected infrastructure is failing.  Much of it is old and in poor upkeep and now it has to withstand climate change impacts for which it was never designed.  It's a looming, trillion dollar nightmare.

We're not a society that remains capable of raising that kind of money.  We won't accept the tax burden.  The idea that infrastructure spending is an investment in our communities, our safety and our prosperity into the future is too ethereal for us, an affront to our need for instant gratification.  Let someone else do it, at some other time.  Kick it down the road.  

Unless we manage to kick this selfish mentality, we have already become part of a dying society.  Go to the Third World.  See what happens when infrastructure collapses.  Watch torrents of freshwater erupt from the streets while there's nothing to be had from the taps.  Encounter washed out bridges that don't get repaired.  Experience rotating power outages, streets plunged into darkness.  

We're left to repair an overpass or to fix a broken water main when one fails but that does nothing to overhaul an entire system that is in decay.  That is merely putting out fires, not preparing for the future.