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Climate Adaptation Can Backfire If We Aren't Careful
The choices we make in how we adapt to climate change can sometimes come back to bite us
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November 27, 2023
Climate Adaptation Can Backfire If We Aren't Careful
The choices we make in how we adapt to climate change can sometimes come back to bite us
By Andrea Thompson edited by Carin Leong
[wave crashes into a sea wall]
[Illustration of a Bohr atom model spinning around the words Science Quickly with various science and medicine related icons around the text]
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Andrea Thompson: Humans have been adapting to our environment as long as we’ve been around—it’s how we’ve settled everywhere from the bitter cold Arctic to the scorching desert heat. But with the heat waves, storms and other extreme events fueled by our rapidly changing climate, we’re having to adapt on a scale we’ve never experienced before.
And the choices we make in how we adapt can sometimes come back to bite us—as in the case of embankments built in Bangladesh that were supposed to stop floods but have made them worse. Or they can lull us into a false sense of safety—as in the case of sea walls in Japan that were no match for the 2011 tsunami.
This is Science, Quickly. I'm Andrea Thompson, Scientific American's news editor for earth and environment.
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Even our best intentions have unintended consequences, and when looking at past mistakes—as journalist Stephen Robert Miller does in his new book, Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought and the Delusion of Controlling Nature—it’s clear that the more we try to hold nature in our grip, the more damage we ultimately do.
Miller joins us to talk about what he learned in his reporting about these maladaptations and what they can tell us about the potential pitfalls of adapting to climate change.
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Hi, Stephen, thank you for speaking with us.
Stephen Robert Miller: Thanks for having me on, I appreciate it.
Thompson: To start, can you briefly tell us about one or two of the maladaptations that you write about in your book and how they may have yielded some short-term success but came with long-term consequences?
Miller: Sure I'll kind of book it I think with—I have three case studies—I'll talk about the first and the last. The first one takes place in Japan. And it has to do with the tsunami that hit in 2011 that killed something like 20,000 people.
The coast of Japan had been protected by sea walls for years already. It's just that none of the walls and breakers and everything that was in place to protect the people along the coast at the time, was up to what came that day. And that's largely because nobody at the time expected that that kind of wave could come. There had been warnings, there had actually been warnings, but they hadn't really been listened to. And so the walls that were there were totally inadequate for this wave that came, which was just enormous.
And it might seem kind of cut and dry. But one of the bits of research that I came across early in my reporting for this book, talked about the impact the walls had had on the people who live behind them. And what it found was that in towns along the coast, where there had been a recent investment in this infrastructure—sea walls and levees—and where people did not have a close memory of, a recent memory, of a tsunami, which at this time was a lot most people, the walls had actually, they cause there to be a higher death toll. And they attribute it largely to the kind of false sense of security that the walls provided. They also found that evacuation times behind the walls were slightly longer than in towns that did not have these walls. And again, they attributed it to a false sense of security.
And so what really struck me, of course, was just this issue of the false sense of security this infrastructure could provide and how you might kind of parlay that into climate change about all the sea walls. We're building in Miami, in New York City and along the coast in Oregon and California, and how this infrastructure maybe might make us feel like we're safer than we actually are.
So flash forward to the last section of the book, is all about Arizona, where I grew up. And there the issue, obviously, is not too much water, there's too little water.
I talk about the Central Arizona Project, which is a canal that brings Colorado River water hundreds of miles across the desert into Phoenix and Tucson. Most of the book focuses on the farmers there who because they're the ones who are feeling the impacts of the water shortages in the Colorado River. They're finding themselves--some of these cases, some of my sources and characters in the book, are people who are being cut off from their water supplies. One of them's a young farmer, he's in his 30s, he just had his first kid, he's a fifth-generation grower, and he's now realizing that he doesn't, he's not going to have any water, at least not the way he thought he was going to. And this is all after years of depending on at the time, it was a largest piece of infrastructure that the country had built – the Central Arizona Project canal. And so I can make this connection there that I think what's happening in Arizona, the reason so many people are moving to this place that's struggling with basics like water, is because there's a false sense of security that's been provided for by this infrastructure that we built there.
Thompson: So one thing I was curious about that that struck me that you also mentioned in the book is that maladaptation isn't necessarily just the physical infrastructure rebuild like sea walls or the pipeline bringing water but can include things like laws – and I know that that was particularly a part of the situation in Arizona.
And so can you talk a little bit about, given what you've learned in your reporting, what some of the pitfalls that you're worried about as we try to adapt to climate change are particularly outside of the physical infrastructure?
Miller: Especially when it comes to laws and policies and things, I think one of the biggest pitfalls is our kind of need to write things in stone. Maybe this, you know, this is an aspect of our legal system? Where lawyers want to have everything battened down, you want to make sure that there's no confusion about who has rights to what, or you know, who's responsible for what, and so we write laws and policies that are, they are as hard as concrete.
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