I’ve worked, written and invested to mitigate climate risk all my adult life. Despite cheerleading for action, my thinking long ago shifted from cautious optimism to a deep, thudding pessimism. From mitigation to resilience. Asked publicly, “Can we solve this problem?” my answer was always “Yes, if we try hard enough.” Privately, I’d say, “The climate genie’s out of the bottle. It’s about resilience now.”
The recent onslaught of scary climate news triggered concern in the Washington Post about “climate doomers” – “a group of people [who] believe that the climate problem cannot, or will not, be solved in time to prevent all-out societal collapse.” Anticipating bad warming doesn’t imply climate doom-ism. Far from it. In being clear-eyed about what’s ahead we might decouple societal collapse from warming itself. Just because the climate horse left the barn doesn’t mean it will run us over.
Nothing of this view alleviates responsibility to massively reduce emissions. The opposite holds: every incremental tonne of reduction is more important, not less. Its marginal benefit isn’t couched in carbon budgets and missed targets, but in reduced probabilities of passed tipping points, nasty feedback loops and catastrophic outcomes. The benefits of mitigation are higher now.
When my son Henri was born six years ago, we moved to a farm in the Quebec countryside, driven by vague ideas of resilience. Seems like a good place to weather the storm. We benefit from a self-supportive society in a wealthy well-endowed country. But this lifestyle choice in the guise of climate sensitivity, while personally defensible and natural to a climate-savvy dad, is a dead end. Much as we may want to use our resources to retreat and build walls around our kids, we can’t. Real independence isn’t possible, save some self-imposed primitivism.
No place is immune, but geography works in Canada’s favour. There’s no other place I’d want to raise Henri. We have a lot of what others will want: food, water and good governance. Our agricultural lot may marginally improve relative to others. We won’t turn to desert nearly as fast as the United States. We need be wary of our neighbour and anticipate thirst for water. As theirs disappears, they’ll come looking for ours. Best to negotiate that transaction in advance.
But global food insecurity looms. Food exporters will cut exports to protect domestic supply in extreme drought. Russia cut wheat exports in 2016, as did India for rice this year. Food importers will use what military force they possess before seeing their population starve. Canada might set a precedent whereby a portion of essential crops are put aside each year in anticipation of multiple, simultaneous crop failures. Food as diplomatic tool, not military threat, feels very Canadian. The next generation will be more open to rethinking how, and why, crops are diverted to feed animals – a wasteful method of protein production. But we, like others, will feed ourselves first.
A renewed commitment to protect and enhance natural systems is our best bet for resilience.
The insurance industry is an early canary in our climate coal mine. Costs spiked with modest climate effects. In some areas, insurance providers are now pulling out or denying coverage altogether. The insurance industry will adjust, as will we. First, insurance will be more targeted. Already artificial intelligence can better distinguish flood and fire risk across multiple properties in the same neighbourhood. Then, it’s the public purse that will be insurer of last resort – as it is today in places like Florida and California. As we support each other to recover from crises, we’ll find limits to burden sharing and rationalize what assets can be rebuilt or hardened. That means we’ll abandon (or self-insure) areas prone to repeated catastrophes like flood zones.
We normally invest in infrastructure to be wealthier, healthier, more productive. Highways increase intercity traffic. Rail makes it efficient. Transmission lines bring more power. The same narrative held for centuries. That will change. Returns on investment will flatten to zero or go negative as we constantly rebuild damaged infrastructure, harden existing systems and abandon assets we can’t adequately protect, like coastlines, flood zones, dried-out cities and parched agricultural land. Productivity will plummet. Like Alice in Wonderland’s Red Queen, we’ll run to stay in the same place.
And yet there’s a better way.
We don’t think of natural systems as infrastructure, but we soon might. Bad warming disrupts all ecosystem services we now effectively get for free: rainfall, erosion and flood control, pollination, air and water filtration, oceanic food chains. Once broken, they’re effectively unfixable. You can’t replace Ontario’s Greenbelt with urban greenhouses. Nature’s services fall outside economic frameworks, but they’ve been valued between US$125 and $145 trillion annually. Losing a portion of these services is worse than running in place.
A renewed commitment to protect and enhance natural systems is our best bet for resilience. Not only to protect these ecosystem services but to lower pressure on global temperatures. We need to suck carbon back out of the air. Direct air capture (DAC) is no silver bullet. Industrial infrastructure to recapture excess carbon needs a nuclear fleet five times existing global capacity, running full tilt for a century, at a cost of $1.5 to $6 trillion per year.
That relative difference is the basis of an intuitively elegant geo-engineering solution. There’s a better way to remove atmospheric carbon. If DAC is brute force, akin to karate or boxing, nature-based solutions are subtle, more like tai chi or jiu-jitsu. Nature itself is a massive solar-powered carbon-sucking system, tweaked for efficiency over billions of years.
The earth breathes. As the biosystem inhales – forests and fields, oceans and plankton – carbon dioxide breaks into the carbon that’s the backbone of all biomass. As it exhales – leaves fall, trees rot and cellular life dies – that same carbon recombines with oxygen and returns to the atmosphere. Compared with our annual emissions, these earthly lungs are like a beachball next to tennis balls. The earth breathes a volume of CO2 more than 10 times current emissions.
If we can tweak those giant lungs – trigger forests, fields or oceans to retain a small percentage of their carbon – we’d alter the carbon cycle on a scale relevant to the problem. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that we need to remove about 10 gigatonnes of CO2 annually by 2050. That’s just 3% of the natural cycle.
In theory, we could plant tens of billions of trees and be done with it. But we don’t have enough land to grow trees in sufficient quantity since we use most of it for farming. Permanence is also an issue since those trees can burn, or die. But it’s a start.
Biochar is my favourite intervention in natural carbon flows. Intercept a small amount of annual biomass production – crop residue, forestry waste or just fallen trees that would rot on forest floors – chop it up, and expose the residue to high temperatures with no oxygen (pyrolysis). This transforms biomass, which rots, to mineralized carbon, which doesn’t. Done right, that carbon is stable for decades or centuries.
To be clear: this is no substitute for reducing emissions – it’s a Hail Mary insurance play to lower atmospheric carbon.
Our reaction to climate constraints and conflict will define global security. The love for our kids has to be built on a foundation of empathy for others. Henri won’t grow to adulthood sitting happily under an apple tree in isolation but will face risks we can barely imagine. He and his peers will form a new social contract for their age. The suggestions above are just a start. They’ll define resilience, not us.
The best we can do – while mitigating emissions – is give them tools to negotiate their own futures. And prepare them for what’s coming.
Tom Rand is an author, investor and co-founding partner at ArcTern Ventures.
