Plan and Prepare
Plan and rebuild our homes, cities and infrastructure NOW to meet the climate challenges.
What Must Be Done
- Plan how we will live in rural and urban areas with 2-5m sea-level rise (e.g., managed retreat).
- Set building regulations to meet severe weather events – floods, tornadoes, dangerous heatwaves.
- Transport – plan now for how we will move people and stuff when fossil fuels are no longer available. Plan for localisation of work, food production and many other activities.
- Waste & waste water – set up safe recycling and management systems able to withstand climate disasters.
- Develop appropriate technology for these transitions, e.g., human-powered and low-powered transport, moveable modular housing, and low-energy polyculture food growing.
Why
Building and rebuilding homes, cities and infrastructure takes time and forward planning. All the evidence shows we have far less time than we are currently working to.
We need to put our planners, engineers and physical and social scientists to work to envisage and solve the practical problems we may well be facing within the decade, such as an influx of climate refugees, broken supply chains leading to a fuel and building materials shortages.
In a civil emergency, governments have to requisition resources, materials and labour to make sure that essential services are covered and safety maintained. We will have to choose what is essential and what isn’t, and how to decide that. It can be done. In 1990 another small island nation, Cuba, was faced with a sudden loss of fuel, fertiliser and other essential imports when the USSR collapsed. Cuba dealt with this by decentralising many activities and services, so that people didn’t have to travel far for work, school, healthcare etc. Cuba now has state-of-the-art disaster preparation, despite being one of the poorest countries in GDP terms.
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Here’s a great analysis of the climate catastrophe in stages of severity and the desperate need for governments to prepare on a scale and with as much urgency as if preparing for war (an analogy of urgency and importance rather than quality) https://johnmenadue.com/breaking-the-suicidal-impasse/