Turning to say goodbye, I find that the mayor is holding a baby--his
18-month-old daughter. She is a pretty if solemn-faced girl and,
yes, he definitely wants her to go to school one day. But it won't
be in Antarpara. "By the time she is old enough," he says, "this
village won't be here."
Halfway around the world, Beverly Wright
is wondering how long her hometown of New Orleans will still be
here, at least in a recognizable form. Wright, who can trace her
family line back through eight generations of free blacks, used to
live in New Orleans East, one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by
the flooding from Hurricane Katrina. Her house took on eight feet of
water; only now, twenty months later, is it almost ready for her to
live in again.
Elsewhere in New Orleans East, one can still drive past block
after block after block of empty, wrecked buildings. The same is
true in the Lower Ninth Ward and other parts of the city. While
Katrina also devastated mainly white areas such as Lakeview, it is
the city's former black majority, and its poor, who are having the
hardest time returning home. "Most people want to come back to New
Orleans, but they can't," Wright tells me. "They don't have jobs or
a place to live, and there is no money coming from the federal
government." Only 2 percent of those eligible for federal
resettlement payments have received checks, according to a study by
the Brookings Institution.
Beyond the city's changing complexion, Wright also fears its
vulnerability to hurricanes. As the director of the Deep South
Center for Environmental Justice, at Dillard University, she knows
that scientists expect hurricanes to become stronger as global
warming intensifies in the years ahead. Will New Orleans be better
prepared next time?
The Army Corps of Engineers has reworked some of the levees that
failed after Katrina, but the job remains flawed and marred by
scandal: The Corps admits having knowingly installed defective pumps
manufactured by Moving Water Industries, a company headed by J.
David Eller, a former business partner and major campaign
contributor to George W. Bush's brother Jeb. Meanwhile, Louisiana's
wetlands, which play a crucial role in hurricane
protection--wetlands act like speed bumps to weaken a storm surge
before it reaches inland--remain in tatters, thanks to Katrina's
wrath and decades of imprudent development and oil drilling.
It doesn't have to be this way, Wright insists. "If we are
vigilant, we could make New Orleans into the safest coastal city in
the world and use it as a model to help the rest of the country
prepare for global warming."
But is that true? Is it really possible to protect New Orleans,
much of which lies below sea level, from the one- to three-foot rise
in sea level that, according to scientists, global warming will
likely cause? And what about Bangladesh? How does one climate-proof
a low-lying country that, like New Orleans, is threatened not only
by sea level rise but also by flooding from two directions--from
rivers behind it and a tropical ocean before it? Even if such
protection is technically achievable, how much will it cost? And who
will pay for it?
ew Orleans, like Bangladesh, will be looked back on as one of the
first great casualties of climate change. Not because global warming
can definitively be blamed for Katrina or the Bangladesh floods; the
earth's weather system is too complex to attribute any one event to
a single cause. But these events fit a larger pattern: Extra-strong
hurricanes and floods are exactly what scientists expect to
see--along with fiercer heat waves, harsher droughts, heavier rains
and inexorable sea level rise--as global warming intensifies in the
years to come.
Bangladesh and New Orleans thus offer a glimpse of the global
warming future all humanity is entering. They also illustrate the
terrible injustice at the heart of the crisis: Global warming was
caused by the rich world's greenhouse gas emissions over the past
two centuries, but it tends to punish the poor of today first and
worst. This historical reality has given rise to calls for what
amount to climate change reparations.
"Poor countries and poor communities in all countries are bearing
the brunt of a problem that was caused by the rich, so the rich must
pay to help them adapt," says Saleemul Huq, a Bangladeshi who
directs the climate change group at the International Institute for
Environment and Development in London.
ew Orleans and Bangladesh also illuminate another, less
recognized truth about global warming: As the scientific report
released April 6 in Brussels by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) makes clear, global warming is going to get
worse, perhaps a lot worse, before it gets better. The momentum of
the climate system--the fact that carbon dioxide remains in the
atmosphere for decades, while oceans store heat for
centuries--insures that no matter how much humanity cuts future
emissions, our previous emissions will keep warming the planet for
decades to come.
We have thus entered a new era of global warming, and our
paradigm for confronting it must change accordingly. What scientists
call mitigation--reducing the greenhouse emissions that cause
the warming--must intensify; the longer we wait to make the 80
percent cuts that are required, the hotter and stormier our future
will be. But we must also mount a new effort at adaptation--preparing
people, institutions and ecosystems against the more violent climate
our past emissions have set in motion.
Few countries have yet taken this lesson to heart. Topping a
short list are Britain and the Netherlands, which are each spending
about $1 billion a year to upgrade their defenses against flooding.
The Dutch have even devised a slogan for their efforts--"We Are Here
to Stay"--to reassure foreign tourists and investors they should
keep on coming.
Bangladesh, though poor, has also taken some steps. "Bangladesh
has a very effective notification and evacuation system against
floods," says Huq. "In the big flood of 2004, 30 to 40 percent of
the country was inundated and millions of people were displaced, but
only 200 to 300 died. That's because people knew about the
flood--from the government, the media, NGOs--and they moved. Compare
that with Haiti, which was hit by a hurricane that same year. Haiti
lost more than 2,000 people, from a much smaller population."
But Bangladesh's poverty precludes it from making the kind of
large-scale investments necessary. Madeleen Helmer, a Dutch
environmentalist, has convinced the Red Cross to include climate
change on its agenda, for the simple reason that climate change
promises to increase the severity of the disasters the Red Cross
responds to. Helmer sees a gross injustice in the fact that "my own
country is spending over a billion dollars a year to protect itself,
but Bangladesh, which faces threats at least as great but had no
role in creating this problem, has nowhere near this kind of money."
The principle of climate change reparations is already part of
international law, at least in theory. Rich countries that have
ratified the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change--a group
that includes the United States, though it shuns the convention's
1997 Kyoto Protocol--are legally obliged to fund adaptation efforts
in vulnerable developing countries. However, notes Huq, "the few
hundred million dollars pledged so far is a tiny fraction of the
tens of billions of dollars needed." That shortfall must be
corrected if we are to avoid massive human suffering and perhaps
social collapse as global warming intensifies.
In the United States, the government has the money but not the
will to pursue adaptation. "You can't adapt to a problem you don't
admit exists," says Richard Klein of the Stockholm Environment
Institute, a co-author of the April IPCC report who speaks here only
for himself. The Bush Administration killed the number-one tool for
pursuing adaptation: The National Assessment of Climate Change, an
analysis begun in 1990 of the vulnerabilities of various regions of
the country and strategies for coping with them.
The real proof of Washington's indifference is on the ground in
New Orleans. Rhetorically, both the White House and Congress support
Category 5 hurricane protection for New Orleans. But not a dime has
actually been authorized, much less spent, to implement that goal,
says Mark Davis, professor of environmental law at Tulane
University. "It's a bit like declaring that we're committed to
victory in Iraq but then not following through with the funds needed
to do the job," Davis says.
Combine inadequate hurricane protection with incompetent at best
recovery policies and the conclusion seems clear: America is leaving
one of its great cities wounded on the battlefield. Foreigners
recognize this truth, even if many Americans don't.
Hassan Mashriqui, who was born in Bangladesh, is a scholar at the
LSU Hurricane Center. Since Katrina, when friends and family from
Bangladesh visit him, Mashriqui always gives them a tour of the
city. Afterward, he recalls, "they would say to me, 'Even
Bangladesh, as poor as we are, would have rebuilt by now if one of
our crown jewel cities had been hit. This is the United States of
America! You sent a man to the moon, you're spending a trillion
dollars on the Iraq War, yet you won't rebuild one of your most
important cities?' They don't understand it."
There is, of course, no guarantee that New Orleans or anywhere
else can successfully adapt to all that global warming throws at us.
If the earth undergoes what scientists call nonlinear climate
change--for example, if ice sheets melt so fast that sea levels rise
twenty feet in 100 years--all bets are off; it's hard to see that
much of today's population could survive such cataclysmic
transformations. That is why the essential new focus on adaptation
must not diminish the pre-existing--and now growing--focus on
mitigation.
At this point we must accept that the battle to prevent global
warming is over; now, the race to survive it has begun. This race
will continue for the rest of our lives, testing human ingenuity,
institutions and values as never before. Losses are inevitable, but
the situation is not hopeless. We know much of what needs to be
done, and we have considerable resources at our disposal. There is
rough weather ahead, but if we keep our heads and stick together, we
may find ways of living through the storm.
