Practically speaking, what does climate change look like?
In many cases, natural catastrophes.
However, good planning can reduce the expensive and dangerous effects of large floods, high stormwater, increased tornados, rockfalls, avalanches, mudslides, and treefall across roadways.
The Swiss Federal Office of Spatial Planning has responded to increasingly frequent natural hazards with planning: Switzerland mandated that each of its 3,000 municipalities draft a comprehensive natural hazard map.
The maps identify where potential risks like rockslides, or floods might occur. The data comes from both professional hydrologists, engineers, and through historical news accounts of past disasters. Even elderly residents were solicited for their memories about past avalanches or floods. With this data, decision makers and planners can employ a risk assessment matrix, which charts the intensity of the effect vs. probability of the risk within given zones in a community.
The cost to develop a natural hazard map is shared 40-40-20, with the Swiss federal government and Cantons (Swiss states) each paying 40%, and towns covering the last 20% of the costs to prepare the hazard maps. The timeline for researching and drafting the natural hazard maps runs from 2009-2011. So far more than 60% of communities have finished. Towns who fail to complete the maps may face fines.
What does a natural hazard map look like? Color-coded zones indicate where mudslides, rockfall, avalanches or floods are likely within the community. Identifying the zones forms the rationale behind discouraging development in sensitive areas (though property owners still have final say), or even authorizing municipal planners to deny building permits in areas of high risk to human life.
The maps start a town conversation about emergency response. Bern, Switzerland experienced deadly floods in 2004 when the Rhine River overflowed its banks. Now Bern has an emergency system in place to alert citizens living at the banks, via text message, that a flash flood is impending.
The also Swiss launched PLANAT. This is a natural hazard working group and website resource that provides tactics to respond to the host of natural disasters induced by climate change. Available in English:
http://www.planat.ch/index.php?userhash=120494600&l=e&nav=1,1,1,1
Another natural hazards platform is operated by the Alpine Convention:
http://www.alpconv.org/theconvention/conv06_WG_c_en.htm
Global scale:
Because of the claims burden natural hazards pose to insurance companies is so large, unstable climatic conditions are expensive. Munich RE opened a “NatCat” or Natural Catastrophe division in 1979, and penned a report warning the industry of the risk exposure posed by climate change.
In 2009, the total number of destructive natural hazards recorded was above the long term average: 850 natural catastophies occured, whereas 770 events reflect the ten year average. Approximately 75,000 deaths per year are attributed to weather-related natural hazards. “In particular, the trend towards an increase in weather-related catastrophes continues, whilst there has fundamentally been no change in the risk of geophysical events such as earthquakes", said Prof. Peter Höppe, Head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research department.
http://www.munichre.com/en/media_relations/press_releases/2009/2009_12_29_press_release.aspx
Gareth Thomas, the British International Development Minister backed by a recent Oxfam study, said that by 2015 the number of people who will need to be rescued from natural catastrophes “will rise by more than 100 million as more hurricanes, typhoons, floods and mudslides triggered by climate change add to the toll caused by earthquakes and manmade disasters.” (“Un Will Struggle To Cope with Tide of Natural Disasters, Warns Minister” Guardian, March 29th 2010.)
Specific mitigation measures could include:
· Physical protection directly on individual buildings
· Avalanche Control
· Building rockfall protection nets, mountain flood locks or protective shelters
· Disseminating instructions to the public: how to secure an oil tank and prevent explosions, evacuating the home or office promptly
· Developing a hydrogeological basis for land-use planning and watershed management
· Improving the financing of flood warning systems, and therefore broaden their implementation
· Altering the town building code for heightened electrical security in case of floods
· Ensuring that sloped driveways or access roads can be passed by emergency response vehicles
· Increasing the setback from a ridgeline for new homes or buildings
· Physical protection directly on individual buildings
· Avalanche Control
· Building rockfall protection nets, mountain flood locks or protective shelters
· Disseminating instructions to the public: how to secure an oil tank and prevent explosions, evacuating the home or office promptly
· Developing a hydrogeological basis for land-use planning and watershed management
· Improving the financing of flood warning systems, and therefore broaden their implementation
· Altering the town building code for heightened electrical security in case of floods
· Ensuring that sloped driveways or access roads can be passed by emergency response vehicles
· Increasing the setback from a ridgeline for new homes or buildings
In our natural hazard mitigation planning work, we often take an approach a lot like you describe in this blog post. The general model: pull the experts together to identify the hazards (much like your map), and then engage the community in crafting a hazard mitigation plan based on the science. One ongoing example is a multi-jurisdictional hazard mitigation project in South Carolina. While we had a solid grasp on the location of community assets, we had trouble securing the biological data we needed to assess vulnerability to at-risk species and habitats. Our initial approach of direct contact with key sources turned out to be very inefficient and ultimately unsuccessful. We then changed gears, convening all of the relevant experts and having them hash out their collective knowledge. This ended up being much more effective, and the researchers themselves consequently had access to all of the accumulated and vetted data. The result was a very complete dataset about biodiversity values and vulnerabilities that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
ReplyDeleteThe community engagement elements can also be challenging but are critical to ultimately securing adoption and implementation of a plan. The transition to the community participation phase of the process is on hold - government funding problems which we think may get resolved over the next few months - but everything is queued up to essentially take the hazard map to the impacted communities and begin crafting a mitigation plan.