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Adapting to Extreme Events Related to Natural Variability and Climate Change: The Imperative of Coupling Technology with Strong Regulation and Governance A. P. Kythreotis,*,† T. G. Mercer,‡ and L. E. Frostick§ †
Cardiff School of Planning and Geography and Sustainable Places Research Institute, Cardiff University, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, Wales CF10 3WA, United Kingdom ‡ Department of Environmental Science and Technology, School Of Applied Sciences, Cranfield University, Cranfield, Bedfordshire MK43 0AL, United Kingdom § Department of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, East Yorkshire HU6 7RX, United Kingdom increased.3 Added to this, variability in natural climate phenomena can result in more extreme events, especially when activity is above normal (for example, the increase in intensity and number of hurricanes during hurricane season in the Atlantic since 1995).4,5 The scale and impact of damage costs in relation to some recent extreme events related to climate are identified in Table 1. Table 1. Financial and Human Costs of Extreme Events Related to Climate
≥$50 billion6
∼0.33% 7
147 6
≥US $4−6 billion8
∼0.04% 7
≥7 8
≥AU $5 billion9
∼0.35% 10
36 11
US $10 billion12
∼4.78% 13
1985 14
GBP £3 billion15 US $41.1 billion17
∼0.19% 16 ∼0.27% 7
13 15 1833 17
The extent of the damage costs illustrates how national governments need to reassess the role of various factors in the formulation of climate adaptation policy, such as human decisionmaking processes. Lack of resilient infrastructure has important implications for governments with respect to how future climate adaptation policy is considered, formulated and implemented. It also leaves communities exposed to rising levels of risk and exposure to damage with severe economic and human consequences.
1. INTRODUCTION Extreme events related to natural climate variability and climate change are having serious, adverse effects upon infrastructure that was designed to withstand only smaller events.1,2 The human and financial costs of such events are both very high, largely due to the fact that critical infrastructure does not deal well with current weather extremes, let alone future extremes. Resultant costs are also associated with the increased exposure of populations and capital that has been witnessed in recent years. Changes to population size and shifts in demographic characteristics can increase the vulnerability of a particular population to extreme events, particularly if exposure is © 2013 American Chemical Society
human cost (fatalities)
financial cost
event Superstorm Sandy (2012) Upper Midwest and Mississippi floods (2011) Australian floods (2010/2011) Pakistan floods (2010) UK floods (2007) Hurricane Katrina (2005)
In recent years there has been an increase in extreme events related to natural variability (such as earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes) and climate change (such as flooding and more extreme weather).1 Developing innovative technologies is crucial in making society more resilient to such events. However, little emphasis has been placed on the role of human decision-making in maximizing the positive impacts of technological developments. This is exacerbated by the lack of appropriate adaptation options and the privatization of existing infrastructure, which can leave people exposed to increasing risk. This work examines the need for more robust government regulation and legislation to complement developments and innovations in technology in order to protect communities against such extreme events.
magnitude of costs as percent of GDP (US $)
2. THE COLLECTIVE GOVERNANCE PROBLEM OF INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE POLICY There are two distinct policy strategies in which governments and policymakers address the existing vulnerability of populations due to natural occurrences of extreme events and damage, growing human exposure to these events and the role of current and future climate change: mitigation and adaptation. Published: July 29, 2013 9560
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messages regarding climate change. This typifies a fragmented ad hoc governance approach among developed nations based on economic and territorial self-interest.29 Yet these same nations are central in driving market-based climate policies and developing the technologies needed for effective climate mitigation if it is to be successful worldwide. The experience of political inertia and slow introduction of mitigation policy may inevitably be repeated for adaptation, as it is ramped up as a policy imperative through the Cancun Adaptation Framework30 and especially the development of the new Green Climate Fund,31 which should fund both mitigation and adaptation initiatives. Governments are collectively scrutinizing the funding levels and types of adaptation responses that are needed to work effectively in conjunction with relevant mitigation strategies.32,33 Adapting to extreme events resulting from changes in climate will involve the further development of expensive engineering projects, such as sea-walls, flood defenses, and drought resistant crop technology, if the current overall market-based mitigation policy remains ineffective in the manner suggested by some academics34−36 and society is met with a 2 °C or greater warming scenario by 2100. Furthermore, the Kyoto Flexibility Mechanisms were designed to create funding for mitigation and adaptation projects (e.g., Emission Trading Systems, The Clean Development Mechanism, Joint Implementation). However, the prices of carbon under ETS’s have performed inconsistently. For example, the largest ETS in the world, the EU ETS, has gradually trended downward since its introduction (and actually collapsed in the Spring of 2006 because of the release of too many allowances), illustrating how ineffective market-based solutions can be37 in generating enough income to fund increasing adaptation costs. Yet in addition to abridging international political dissensus and market-based problems regarding what mix of adaptation and mitigation policy strategies may be appropriate for specific countries, we are still faced with an urgent need to integrate more robust and contingent human decision-making within the governance of our critical systems and infrastructure. This will ensure the full utilization of the potential that technological innovation can offer in maximizing adaptive capacity and making climate adaptation policy more responsive and fit for purpose at national and international levels.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides the latest scientific knowledge on climate change and so is interrelated to how policymakers, through the institutions of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), construct policy. Working Group (WG) II of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report18 refers to mitigation as “an anthropogenic intervention to reduce the anthropogenic forcing of the climate system; it includes strategies to reduce greenhouse gas sources and emissions and enhancing greenhouse gas sinks.” Adaptation is referred to as “adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities.” Therefore, systems have to become less vulnerable in order to increase resilience.19 Resilience refers to “the ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self-organisation, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change”.18 Increasing the resilience of our critical systems through increasing adaptive capacity, defined as “the ability of a system to adjust to climate change (including climate variability and extremes) to moderate potential damages, to take advantage of opportunities, or to cope with the consequences”,20 on the face of it, seems logical and timely. Logical because technological developmentboth in its “soft” and “hard” forms21can and should play an integral role in adaptive capacity options. However, more often than not, technological development has been prioritized at the expense of human decision-making processes within adaptation policy.22 Furthermore, adaptation policy responses need to be broadened to take into account not just human-induced climate change, but also natural and extreme events23 as well as growing human exposure. We have an ever-increasing population coupled with the building of more infrastructure, which increases the overall risk to a given system. The need to focus on adaptive capacity in policy is timely because until very recently, international climate change political negotiations and wider society have tended to focus less on policies and processes that promote adaptation in favor of market-based approaches to mitigation, despite calls for greater synergy between them at different scales of governance and policy.24 However, with this overplaced faith in technological and scientific developments to solve future adaptation needs, have we paused to consider whether this approach is adequate? The present international climate policy precedent of prioritising mitigation over adaptation25 is part of an international governance system where political acceptance and subsequent policy development lag very far behind scientific understanding and technological innovation.26 This is exemplified in the ways that some countries have responded to international climate change policy by favoring mitigation through market mechanisms. For example, the Australian government has only in the past few years implemented a carbon tax on the largest Australian polluters after publically acknowledging scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change,27 whereas in the U.S., the science supporting anthropogenic climate change is still deemed a moot political point at the Federal level. In early 2011, the Republicans went so far as to introduce bills that ban the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from measuring and regulating emissions of greenhouse gases from chimney flues and vehicles, a ruling that had been in place since 2007.28 Just examining the Australian and the United States climate policy and governance experience from the first commitment period of Kyoto up to the current process of establishing the second commitment period reveals sporadic and inconsistent policy
3. MALADAPTATION AND HUMAN DECISION-MAKING Notwithstanding the international (and national) climate policy governance issues(s) explained in the previous section, the inherent uncertainty in predicting extreme events related to natural variability and climate change highlights an ‘elephant in the room’ with respect to successful implementation of adaptation technologiesnamely, that they can prove ineffective or even fail; success is often only retrospectively evident. System fail-safes are more likely to be ineffective, especially with the uncertainty surrounding the magnitude and frequency of future events, coupled with increasing exposure to risk. In order to reduce this, models need to provide a reasonable and useful range of future changes that can be tested against current and recent past event patterns. Many of the so-called adaptation technologies we once applied to our infrastructure have now resulted in maladaptation because human decision-making processes have been subordinated and too much faith has been placed in a technological zeitgeist. Maladaptation, which is not explicitly defined in the glossary of terms section by WG II in the current 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, was previously defined in the glossary of terms by WGII in the Third Assessment Report as “any changes in natural or human 9561
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systems that inadvertently increase vulnerability to climatic stimuli; an adaptation that does not succeed in reducing vulnerability but increases it instead.”38 It is interesting how maladaptation is no longer explicitly defined in the Fourth Assessment Report, even though our technologies are still marred by maladaptive occurrences. The potential implication of this is that maladaptation practices will continue to occur. We offer examples of this below. The Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in 2011 saw the 6 m high sea defense at the nuclear plant inundated by a 14 m high tsunami, which was supposed to have triggered all fail-safe mechanisms.39 Yet in relation to how governments and policymakers have become overly reliant on technology as a policy fix for extreme events, there has been limited media attention regarding how some of the water cooling pipes at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant actually broke immediately after the earthquake and caused the meltdown before the tsunami hit the power plant, contrary to government reports.40 This shows how a human decision not to update key infrastructure, i.e., the cooling pipes, can lead to disaster and demonstrates the overconfidence of some governments and policymakers in existing technology and adaptation plans. Furthermore, damages to key infrastructure from extreme events can only be confirmed retrospectively because the effects/impacts of the damage occur and are only measurable af ter the event. We acknowledge the difficulties in predicting unanticipated consequences, but it is still this uncertainty that perpetuates the problem of maladaptation or least adaptive capacity. The Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan (FEPC) have redundancy measures in place for what they describe as abnormal incidents. In an abnormal event, the following steps should be taken:41 (1) Shut down the operating reactors, (2) Cool down the reactors so as to remove heat from nuclear fuel, and (3) contain the radioactive materials. However, as the cooling pipes were (retrospectively) found to be at fault, the redundancy measures would not have worked effectively, and this is what was witnessed during the March 2011 event. This illustrates how adaptation measures with the best of intentions to limit total risk can actually turn out to be maladaptive in practice. A more robust human decision-making process with more adequate checks and balances, coupled with technological innovation, could have rectified infrastructural weaknesses. Effective human decision-making is integral to the maximization of existing technologies. Maladaptation will become an ever-increasing reality if there continues to be a lack of convergence between effective decision-making processes and technological innovation. Immediately after the Fukushima Daiichi event, other countries, such as the U.S., Germany, and even France, became reticent in adopting nuclear power as a major constituent of their future low-carbon energy mix.42 It is unfortunate that the Japanese earthquake triggered broader climate policy decisions that will curtail nuclear power, when pre-Fukushima, there had been widespread political acceptance of the technology surrounding nuclear energy as integral to the lowcarbon global energy mix. In the U.S., flooding of the Fort Calhoun and Cooper nuclear power plants in Nebraska in 2011 resulted in increasing public anxiety over the vulnerability of other nuclear power plants to events related to natural phenomena and climate change, although the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission has claimed that a Fukushima-like event was “highly unlikely” to happen in the U.S.43 The events at Fort Calhoun and at Cooper exemplify the temporal problems associated with formulating and implementing adaptation strategies within climate policy. As these events followed on from Fukushima, the atrophy
of vigilance and social amplification of risk among the general public worldwide was high. However, some media reports in the U.S. suggested that the general public was not made fully aware of the reality of the situation at these plants.44 This could be because the relevant U.S. government agencies felt that they needed to show the public, post-Fukushima, that contingencies were in place that could completely control any potential meltdowns at Fort Calhoun and Cooper. Step-changes in (adaptation) policy, as a reaction of governments after natural disasters or crises, occur after increased public pressure. Only then is the political climate ripe for policy change.45 When it comes to human confidence in our critical systems and infrastructure designed to cope with extreme events, such as hurricanes, tsunamis, increased flooding, and earthquakes, it appears that events such as Fukushima, Calhoun, and Cooper are not explicitly taken into account within climate adaptation policy circles. In contrast, there are recent examples of where, in hindsight, human decisions proved decisive in limiting the catastrophic consequences of extreme climate events where improving technology was considered to be a safer option. The recent Queensland floods in Australia in 2010/2011 occurred because two unconnected weather eventsLa Niña and the annual monsoonal low pressure troughcombined unexpectedly to cause widespread devastation. Yet it has been reported that it would have been far worse for Brisbane had the Wivenhoe dam risen a mere 60 cm higher and overtopped.46 A recent hydrology report conducted by WMA Water and submitted to the Queensland Flood Commission of Inquiry (QFCI) examined the role of the Somerset and Wivenhoe dams and the degree to which human decision-making contributed to the Brisbane flooding. It highlighted how the majority of water (around 59%) was released from the dams after the flood waters had peaked, although it was also suggested that the timing of the release of water could have been better optimized. More importantly, the report also suggested that the actions and decisions of the engineers, which can be broadly conceived as a planned adaptation strategy, provided flood mitigation benefits to the city of Brisbane. The recently published QFCI final report on the Queensland floods also recommended that the Wivenhoe dam should never reach more than 75% capacity in the summer months.47 These types of planned adaptation strategies exemplify how critical systems and infrastructure cannot rely solely on technology as a suitable adaptation policy fix (even though the legal and policy implications from the floods and the associated inquiry are yet to be fully played out at State and Federal government level in Australia). Attention paid to decision-making processes within the operation of the Wivenhoe dam helped the engineers reduce the severity of the floods; however, the subsequent Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry and Crime and Misconduct Commission did emphasize that inconsistent decisions between engineers at Seqwater resulted in the flooding of the urban areas along the catchment.47,48 This reveals how decision-making processes need to be embedded more thoroughly into adaptation governance, policy, and plans, especially when the resilience of infrastructure is reliant on multiagency and multiactor planning.
4. PRIVATIZATION AND THE LACK OF REGULATION IN CRITICAL SYSTEMS A successful adaptation policy will involve not only an understanding of who owns what critical infrastructure but also the multitude of stakeholders (private and public) involved in ensuring that the aforesaid infrastructure or critical system is 9562
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After the 2007 U.K. floods, the government commissioned the independent Pitt Review, published in 2008, which outlined the key lessons learned from the floods of 2007 from across the U.K.15 One of these lessons reflects the issues that arose from the Hull floods: the need for a more coordinated approach to the management of urban drainage systems. Some of the recommendations have been acted on through the recently introduced Flood and Water Management Act (2010), including the responsibility for managing all types of flooding falling to the Environment Agency. Hard and soft engineering adaptation solutions for flooding, such as sea walls, river embankments, and managed retreat, are well established. However, in the instance of the Hull floods, the human decisions taken for their management (or lack thereof) and conflicting priorities of the individual organizations involved contributed to the maladaptation witnessed in this situation. This could have been rectified through the integration of more transparent networked governance mechanisms among stakeholders. Furthermore, the introduction of legislation, while being a big step in the right direction, has largely lagged behind the science and technological innovations that could have prevented or at least moderated the flooding in the first place. Extreme rainfall events similar to those experienced in the summer of 2007 are predicted to increase in the U.K. due to climate change.53 The year 2012 represented another year characterized by a series of pluvial flooding events. Flooding began in April 2012 as a result of low pressure systems over the U.K. caused by the jet stream.54 This continued through to June, with both April and June being the wettest months in 50 and 150 years, respectively.55 In July, further heavy rainfall resulting from two weather fronts that culminated in flash floods.56 Intense lows in September and November caused further widespread flooding.57 It seems that the lessons from the previous flooding episodes of 2007 are yet to be learned in some areas. In fact, the U.K. government has come under increased scrutiny over supposed massive cuts to flood defenses and protection schemes.58 The recent flooding has now forced the current U.K. Prime Minister to re-evaluate and release £120 million to address some of the shortfalls in defense.59 However, the need to generate local “matched funding” for approved flood defense schemes is likely to slow down implementation and increase the likelihood of continued maladaptation. One of the only ways to ensure that private companies take responsibility for critical infrastructure and systems under their jurisdiction is through increased and timely regulation, although this will interfere with the ideology behind privatization. Greater regulation with respect to adaptive capacity will clarify the responsibilities of the various agenciesthe development, investment, monitoring and managementthat will need to take place to protect the general public. We suggest a stepchange from primarily soft policy-making to legally binding regulations that incorporate effective human decision frameworks in much the same way in which the Environment Agency has now been promoted to manage all types of flooding. Decision-making frameworks should also be integral in these processes to protect critical infrastructure. In the U.K., a National Adaptation Program is currently being formulated by DEFRA (Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and is due to be released later this year to make businesses, local authorities and civil society more resilient to climate change impacts“Climate Ready”. As part of this, a Climate Change Risk Assessment was conducted by DEFRA to prioritize adaptation under six key themes.60 The areas that
able to withstand the impact of extreme events. In the context of developed market economies, privatization is an issue that can potentially obfuscate the promotion of effective climate adaptation governance across political scales. Privatization places decisions concerning public protection in the hands of an array of private companies working within a discrete geographical area. These companies may be reluctant to divulge and share information with external (public and other private) stakeholders for commercially sensitive reasons. For example, it has been argued that the Fukushima incident could have been completely avoided if the privately owned plant, Tohoku Electric, had not been built on the east coast of Japan where earthquakes and tsunamis (and typhoons) are most likely to occur, compounded by the fact that the sea defenses were inadequate. Private companies are driven by profitability, and this can hamper adaptive strategies that would increase resilience in the wider community.49 To date, the private sector has largely concentrated on mitigation efforts that are more closely aligned to an ecological modernization rationale that reduces greenhouse gas emissions while also giving tangible market/economic benefits. While in an ideal business world private companies would like to finance the incorporation of greater adaptive capacity into their emergency contingency policies and infrastructure, this does involve assessing high levels of uncertainty and risk, which could be deemed more expensive to implement.49 The U.K. has a history of privatization stemming from the Thatcher administration of the late 1970s.50 The 1989 privatization of water utilities resulted in a structure in which local authorities, the Environment Agency, and privatized water utility companies all had governance of different parts of the same water system.51 This fragmented system of governance, control, and responsibility over the management of water systems and, in particular, urban drainage systems was a contributing factor to the flooding experienced across the U.K. in 2007.15 The flooding in June and July 2007 was reported as the most serious inland flood since 1947. The city of Hull, East Yorkshire experienced two episodes of flooding resulting from intense rainfall (pluvial) over a short period of time, reported as resulting in the “biggest rescue effort in peacetime Britain”, highlighting the impact to humans living in developed floodplain areas. In one flooding episode, there was a 1 in 150 year rainfall event. The urban drainage system has a recommended industry standard for design of being able to cope with a 1 in 30 year magnitude event.52 The low-lying nature of Hull requires pumped drainage, and during the flooding, there were issues with the pumping stations (insufficient capacity and old) and lack of a warning system for rainfall related (pluvial) flood events.51 Since the privatization of the U.K. water utilities and authorities, the governing bodies for the city of Hull became Hull City Council (responsible for road and gulley drainage), Yorkshire Water (responsible for sewerage, water supply, and water treatment), and the Environment Agency (responsible for river management).51 As a result, each agency focused on that part of the system for which they were responsible and, as such, implemented different maintenance and management regimes. This confusion of responsibility resulted in limited flow of information among the agencies and a lack of coordination for dealing with such events.51,52 In addition, both the absence of a statutory requirement for the standard of public protection from pluvial events and the lack of a single agency identified as responsible for issuing warnings contributed to the severity of the flooding. 9563
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Notes
require the most immediate action according to the report include the following: (1) Flooding and coastal erosion, (2) natural ecosystems (e.g., managing soils, water, and biodiversity), (3) management of water resources, (4) overheating of buildings and other infrastructure in the urban environment, (5) risks to health and impacts on public health and social care services, and (6) economic opportunities, especially to develop adaptation products and services.60 While this offers private sector companies an advisory set of priorities for promoting greater resilience to the risks posed by events related to natural phenomena and climate change, it is not in itself an effective solution to the internal infrastructure problems experienced by private sector companies when such events occur. This is largely due to the failure of companies to self-regulate to the consistent and higher standards needed to make infrastructure (and, therefore, the general public which they serve) more resilient to extreme events related to natural phenomena and climate change.
The authors declare no competing financial interest. Biographies Andrew Kythreotis, Ph.D., M.Sc., B.Sc., B.A., P.G.Dip, F.R.G.S. is a Lecturer and Research Fellow under Cardiff University’s Serious Brain Power initiative. He is an interdisciplinary environmental scientist with international research experience and training in the physical and social sciences. His current research interests include governance and policy related to climate change and sustainable development, the political economy of the state, and the scale debate in human geography. Theresa Mercer, Ph.D., M.Sc., B.Sc., P.G.Dip, M.I.E.S. is a NERC Research Fellow at Cranfield University, U.K. She has trained as an environmental scientist with research interests in environmental geochemistry, soil science, waste management, and environmental pollution. Her current research project examines the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem services in urban ecosystems.
5. CONCLUSIONS There is an urgent need to further scrutinize how technical fixes for flooding and extreme events such as seawalls, river levees, and dams converge with adaptation policy and strategies. On the face of it, dams and seawalls are heralded as mitigation fixes, yet the human decisions we employ in relation to them gives them hybrid adaptation status, as exemplified in the decisions made by the Seqwater engineers with respect to the release of waters from the Wivenhoe dam. While the benefits of employing adaptation strategies based on technical progress have been well-documented in the drive to combat the effects of climate change, ad hoc decisions on adaptation strategies can also come into conflict with longer-term carbon reduction strategies such as switching from fossil fuel-based to nuclear energy. The main problems in adapting to climate change are human overconfidence in the effectiveness of the technologies being used, overlain by an inadequate political and governance system that places profitability over public protection in the way privatization does. We have illustrated these problems using recent examples from countries including Japan, Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. Future adaptation policies will need to be more responsive to science and technology breakthroughs and more fully incorporate the robust human decision-making processes required to effectively utilize such technologies. However, as a cautionary note, not in all instances is a person a better decision maker than a computer, and as humans, we need to be smart about the decision of when and where to include decision-making processes that are more effective than technological fixes. Furthermore, adaptation policies need to be implemented through effective and timely legislative frameworks that fully scrutinize how private sector companies invest in their critical infrastructure, primarily to ensure the public is protected to acceptable standards. The track record of the response of mitigation policies to scientific advances does not bode well for the implementation of successful technology-based adaptation strategies. This is exacerbated by the notion that adaptation can never overcome the one established certainty of extreme events related to natural variability and climate change: that they are and will remain uncertain.
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Lynne Frostick, Ph.D., B.Sc., F.R.G.S., F.G.S., C. Geol. is a Research Professor at the University of Hull, U.K. and an ex-president of the Geological Society of London. Her recent research interests include flooding and ecohydraulics.
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*Phone: +44 (0)29 208 76063 (A.P.K.). E-mail: KythreotisA@ cardiff.ac.uk (A.P.K.). 9564
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