10/03/2021

(NZ) When Climate Change And Other Emergencies Threaten Where We Live, How Will We Manage Our Retreat?

The Conversation -  |  | 

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Authors
  •  is Lecturer, Environmental Planning, University of Waikato
  •  is Professor, Massey University
  •  is Professor of Environmental Planning, University of Waikato     
Despite living in dynamic environments and facing an uncertain future due to climate change, New Zealanders generally expect their land and property rights will endure indefinitely. But little stays the same.

As last week’s offshore earthquakes and tsunami alerts reminded us, our coasts and the people who live near them are vulnerable to a range of hazards. Such risks will only increase as sea level rises due to climate change.

The government has announced that the Resource Management Act will be replaced by three new laws, including a Managed Retreat and Climate Change Adaptation Act. The writing is on the wall: planners and communities need to prepare for change.

For those living in highly exposed places, managed retreat may be necessary to save lives and secure public safety.

These “managed retreats” — from low-lying shorelines vulnerable to rising sea level, areas that flood regularly and unstable or exposed land — may be a bitter pill to swallow. Especially so in the midst of a national housing crisis and a global pandemic.

But the impacts of climate change are already being felt, and will compound natural hazard risks well into the future. Some existing developments are already proving untenable, exposing people and the things they cherish to severe harm.

So it’s imperative to include the option of managed retreat in adaptation planning for the most at-risk communities.

Once a suburban hinterland, Christchurch’s earthquake ‘red zone’ now lies empty and abandoned. Author provided

What are managed retreats?

 Basically, managed retreats involve the strategic relocation of people, assets and activities to reduce risk.

For obvious reasons, retreats require difficult sacrifices for individuals, families and communities. The process can involve a range of mechanisms, including providing risk maps, official notices on land information memorandums (LIMs), development restrictions and financial incentives to relocate.

Planners and academics have been calling for a national managed retreat strategy, and the law change provides a unique opportunity.

Aside from compulsory acquisition powers used to deliver public works, Aotearoa New Zealand may be the first country to develop specific legislation for managed retreats. The world will be watching with interest.

Managing retreats that are sensitive to the dislocation of people from their homes, livelihoods, landscapes and culture is challenging. Developing the new legislation will involve difficult decisions about why, when, how and where retreats take place — and at whose cost. Putting people first

Just how these retreats will be managed, however, is yet to be determined. Our latest research examines who manages retreats and how. It’s a timely cue to examine the broad policy options and planning implications.

The proposed legislation presents an opportunity to transform land use patterns in Aotearoa New Zealand. But as we have seen in Canterbury, Matatā and elsewhere, the way managed retreats are handled matters greatly to the people affected.

At present, local managed retreat interventions are risky – professionally, politically, financially, culturally and socially. The necessary planning frameworks and resources are seldom available to support effective and equitable outcomes.

Some communities exposed to hazards and climate perils also face the risk of maladaptation — paradoxically, their vulnerability is increased by inaction or misguided efforts.

Who manages retreats and how?

Our research distinguishes three approaches to making policy for a spectrum of possible retreats. Broadly speaking, these are:
  1. government control: using legislation, standards, policies and regulations, central or local government may restrict certain developments or compulsorily acquire property to enforce retreat

  2. co-operative managed retreats: collaborative decision-making and negotiation between government agencies and affected parties, using instruments such as opt-in buyouts, relocation subsidies or land swaps

  3. unmanaged retreats: individual choices influenced by factors such as loss of insurance cover and other market changes, decisions not to invest more in a property or to sell it (potentially at a loss), or to remain in place and face the risk.
Using our framework, we consider the risks and implications of each form of retreat. We draw on decades of lessons from international practice in disaster resettlement and planned relocation.

Getting the law right

Fundamentally, we argue that facilitating co-operative managed retreats is preferable. This means people and communities are embedded in the retreat strategy design, decision-making and delivery.

Necessarily then, flexible, collaborative and fit-for-purpose policies and practices are important. To manage expectations around at-risk, transient and marginal land, regulation of new development or land use is also required (such as placing time limits on consents).

Managed, co-operative and unmanaged retreats each have a role to play. But their associated practices and policy interventions must be strategically planned. To promote public safety, justice and equity, co-operation must be a central focus when managing the relocation of people.

Aotearoa New Zealand has an opportunity to foster long-term resilience in the face of climate change and many other land use challenges. Determining who manages retreats, how, and who pays is important work.

The shape of the new legislation — the processes and outcomes it encourages — will influence the lives and well-being of current and future generations.

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(USA) Climate Change Will Reshape Silicon Valley As We Know It

Wired - Tim O’Reilly

The next entrepreneurial revolution will arise to combat the crisis of our lifetime.

Photograph: Wei Fang/Getty Images

Author
Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media and the author of WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us.
High-profile entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, venture capitalists like Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, and big companies like Oracle and HP Enterprise are all leaving California. 

During Covid-19, Zoom-enabled tech workers are discovering the benefits of remote work from cheaper, less congested communities elsewhere. 

Though working from home was intended to be a temporary measure for millions of workers in the early days of the pandemic, there is now no clear end in sight. Almost a year later, workers continue to untether themselves from city centers as companies permanently go remote and rethink how they conduct business.

Is this the end of Silicon Valley as we know it? It is my belief that it is—but the reasons why the Silicon Valley party may soon be over run far deeper than the flight of talent. One of the most compelling is that the greatest opportunities will no longer be found in the overbuilt sector of consumer and business internet applications. Instead, they’ll be found in climate tech.

Climate change is the defining crisis of our time, and as it becomes more imminent, our efforts to address it will become the epicenter of the next entrepreneurial revolution. The recent news that Elon Musk is dueling with Jeff Bezos for the title of world’s richest person is a harbinger of what will be the biggest VC opportunity of the 21st century.

Electric vehicles are only the tip of the iceberg. A recent PwC report found that climate tech investment increased from $418 million per year in 2013 to $16.3 billion in 2019, growing at five times the venture capital market rate over the last seven years. Heating and cooling systems, agriculture, raw materials, and manufacturing are all overdue for reinvention as we strive for a greener future, creating the promise of even more innovation on the horizon. 

The climate will also reshape residential and office construction, insurance, finance, and agriculture, in regard to where and how food is produced. Massive climate migrations have only just begun; tens or hundreds of millions of people will need to be resettled. Will we offer them shantytowns, or will we help them become settlers building a new, better world? Experience teaches us that the best opportunities come when businesses solve urgent problems for their customers. What could be more urgent than this?

With the innovation that is needed to transform entire businesses and economies to net zero emissions, there will be more billionaires created over the next two decades than during the internet boom. 

Apart from Musk, many of the already-minted climate billionaires are outside the US. Bloomberg recently named a few: China’s Zeng Yuqun, Huang Shilin, Pei Zhenhua, and Li Ping (electric vehicle batteries), Li Zhenguo, Li Chunan, Li Xiyan, and Lin Jianhua (solar panels and films), and Wang Chuanfu (electric vehicles); Germany’s Aloys Wobben (wind turbines); and Spain’s Jose Manuel Entrecanales (renewable power generation). Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors are not leaders in these sectors, but there are great fortunes yet to be made.

Venture capital will be key to commercializing the technologies needed to address the climate crisis. Capital follows opportunity; it is not the birthright of a particular industry. 

Take a look at Chris Sacca, the former Google special projects lead turned investor who built one of the best-performing venture funds of all time by investing in companies such as Twitter, Twilio, Uber, Instagram, and Stripe. His new fund, LowerCarbon Capital, is focused squarely on the climate opportunity. A minority of its investments so far have been in San Francisco or Silicon Valley.

Of course, who gets rich by helping society transition to a new energy economy is unimportant compared to the question of whether we will summon the political will to do so in time to avoid the most disastrous consequences of climate change—which could, at their worst, bring an end to civilization as we know it. So far, advocates have tried to motivate that political will through fear, but pitching the huge economic opportunity is far more likely to be successful.

Leadership is essential, though—and not just from industry, but from government as well. Tackling climate change is a complicated undertaking, and only a crash mobilization of the economy to electrify everything can get us there in time—an argument that Saul Griffith, Alex Laskey, and Sam Calisch of the nonprofit Rewiring America have made. 

Without a World War II–style mobilization of private industry, markets won’t move fast enough to replace technologies that are still powered by combustion, like gasoline vehicles and natural gas heating and cooling. Waiting for the natural replacement rate on infrastructure will take decades that we don’t have. We will need a heroic four- to five-year effort to complete a 100 percent transformation of our energy infrastructure.

One of the gifts—if you can call it that—of crises like the pandemic and climate change is that they may teach us that we no longer have time for frivolity. Climate change requires large amounts of real investment capital. 

Unlike the money invested in internet companies that’s been used to buy unprofitable growth, money invested in Tesla was used to build factories, manufacture cars and electric batteries, and roll out national charging networks. The path to high returns may take longer, but the need is real, and so is the value created.

For investors and entrepreneurs, there is a clear call to action: Work on stuff that matters, invest in solving problems, and make a real difference in people’s lives. There’s no doubt that climate tech is the new frontier in venture investing, and solving a global crisis will require the best of what we have to offer.

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(AU) Climate Change To Force Farmers To Become More Efficient

Farm Online - Gregor Heard

Australian croppers are doing a great job growing more grain on less rain but will need to continue to improve to help manage climate change according to ABARES.

FARMERS will need to make further efficiency gains just to stand still in terms of overall productivity as climate change continues to impact Australian farming systems.

This was the sobering take-home message from Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences senior economist Neal Hughes speaking at last week's ABARES Outlook conference.

In spite of some commentators talking up increased carbon dioxide levels as positive for plant growth, Mr Hughes said in Australia, the increase in temperatures and likely decrease in rainfall, particularly in southern regions, would more than offset any gains.

"The latest modelling and projections show a range of scenarios, varying from 3 per cent drop in rainfall out to 2050 right out to a 21pc drop," Mr Hughes said.

"It is a similar story in terms of temperature, with temperature rises forecast to nearly double under a high emissions scenario compared to if there were lower emissions."

"The majority of the runs, however, show considerable negative effects and that is going to make it tougher, especially relative to conditions prior to 2000."

He said while models regarding rainfall drops varied in parts of Australia in others they were in more agreement.

"For instance, in the WA cropping zone in the south of the state there is reasonably good consensus there will be further declines in winter rainfall which is really important in WA farmers' systems."

"These projected decreases go even further from what we've seen in the past 20 years, so there will need to be further changes to manage that."

Mr Hughes acknowledged there had been significant production gains made, especially in regards to water use efficiency, in the west, but said eventually the law of diminishing returns would hit.

"There has been a lot of improvement, you only have to look at this year's crop and see how much grain was produced from a relatively low rainfall season."

"The adaptations have allowed them to produce quite a good crop despite tough conditions, but ultimately you will hit diminishing returns, especially as you get closer to that frontier of nature and where crops can be viably grown."

However, he said the industry needed to continue to push for new techniques.

"Technology is potentially part of that, we've already seen the role it has had through things like controlled traffic in maintaining yield in the dry."

Other possibilities include a less risky approach to farming, such as returning to mixed farming systems.

"Mixed farming makes sense in the drier part of the cropping zone in allowing farmers to manage their risk."

He also said consolidation within the industry helped farmers manage climate risk.

"The larger farms usually, not always, can manage climate risk better, the smaller farmers with lower baseline profits are more exposed to negative events."

Mr Hughes said the industry was also looking out for some form of transformative change.

"It could be things like carbon farming, or getting paid to increase biodiversity, it could be plantation forestry, it could be renewable energy, it is a space that is by nature difficult to predict and it will depend on outside factors as to what takes off." 

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09/03/2021

(USA) How Nature Can Help Solve Our Infrastructure Crisis Amid Extreme Weather, Climate Change

Washington Post - Brian Bledsoe | Justin Ehrenwerth

Workers repair a power line in Austin on Thursday. (Thomas Ryan Allison/Bloomberg News)

The recent horrors in Texas, as millions went without electricity and water during a historic winter storm and cold snap, remind us of the ticking time bomb that is our nation’s aging infrastructure.

In the early 20th century, we made bold investments in our infrastructure that powered our success, and our continued prosperity depends upon our ability to innovate and adapt. Yet we have failed to invest for decades, leading to the American Society of Civil Engineers consistently giving America’s infrastructure C-minus to D-plus marks.

As climate change brings more frequent and intense weather events, our infrastructure will continue to face challenges it was not built to withstand. The most vulnerable among us will suffer disproportionately. If this is to be a time of equitable renewal amid a global pandemic, then we must meet this once-in-a-generation opportunity to address our crumbling infrastructure, climate change and social equity with a natural solution.

The case for engineering with nature

A 21st-century infrastructure system should incorporate conventional approaches using rock, concrete and steel that are strategically designed to work with natural infrastructure. Imagine a concrete flood wall with an expansive reef and marsh in front of it. The wall provides flood protection benefits during storms but does little on a sunny day.

In contrast, the reef and marsh system not only reduces the power of waves but also self-adjusts to rising seas, captures carbon, improves water quality, and provides places for us to hunt, fish and recreate.

John Flood works on making a living shoreline in front of a home on the Severn River to protect it from damage caused by cliff erosion. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Further inland, river floodplains, parks and greenspaces can serve as pressure relief valves to help protect downstream communities from flooding and pollution. When conventional engineering and Mother Nature join forces, our communities are protected by multiple lines of defense that generate a wide range of economic, environmental and social benefits.

Importantly, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will soon release new guidelines outlining how natural infrastructure can best support resilience and flood-risk reduction. This four-year effort, involving scientists and engineers from around the world, will, for the first time, outline in a comprehensive fashion how to best conceptualize, plan, design, engineer, construct and maintain natural infrastructure.

A price on the environment, and life itself

One of the primary barriers to implementing this approach are benefit-cost analysis requirements for federal projects. BCA requirements are rooted in an intuitive approach that most of us use every day. When faced with a decision, we consider our alternatives, weigh the pros and cons, and pick the solution that provides the greatest benefit for the lowest cost.

This approach makes sense for a fiscally responsible government but falls on its face when we don’t consider some of the most important benefits. What if the greatest benefit of the project is a more equitable and resilient future?

Current practice focuses on monetizing the economic benefits of concrete flood walls and levees based on the property values they protect. For decades, many of the engineers and economists who design and evaluate federal infrastructure projects have not fully considered the benefits and costs related to the environment, human health and social equity. As a result, the deck is stacked against progress.

The science of monetizing environmental and social benefits has dramatically advanced, and it is time for federal policy and practice to catch up. Tools like social return on investment employ well-established economic, accounting and social science research to measure what we know to be true — our communities and our environment are worth far more to us than their property values alone.

An opportunity at the intersection of infrastructure, environment and social equity
Trucks line up in February by the Port of Oakland on the San Francisco Bay. Disadvantaged communities in America are disproportionately affected by pollution from industry or waste disposal, but their complaints have few outlets and often reach a dead end. (Jeff Chiu/AP)

When we limit ourselves to old ways of thinking about costs and benefits, we tend to invest in protecting wealthier communities. This approach perpetuates climate injustice: Multimillion-dollar condos on Miami Beach are deemed worthy of protection while less wealthy neighborhoods, disproportionately communities of color that have been underserved or actively harmed by past infrastructure investments, are neglected.

But there’s reason to be optimistic. President Biden has rightly made environmental justice a core priority and called for modernizing the regulatory process to account for environmental and social factors. Tucked away in last year’s coronavirus relief bill was a provision that, for the first time, clearly permits the Army Corps of Engineers to consider environmental and social factors when developing infrastructure projects.

In its 2021 “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” released Wednesday, for the first time, the American Society of Civil Engineers recognized natural infrastructure as a key solution for building resilience and raising the grade across all infrastructure sectors.

While these are encouraging developments, change of this magnitude is never easy. Consistent leadership from the White House and relevant federal agencies will be needed to break decades of federal practice in which exclusive reliance on outmoded economic calculations and conventional infrastructure has limited progress.

If we do not act today, it’s not a question of whether another extreme weather event will expose our growing vulnerabilities but when and at what cost. 

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Book Review: “The New Climate War”

Dispatches From Upstate NY - Mark Marchand

Author
Mark Marchand is a writer and adjunct professor in the Journalism Program at the University at Albany (SUNY), teaching courses in news and reporting, crisis communications, and public relations writing.
There is a new type of warrior emerging in the ongoing tussle between the evidence-based science of climate change and the diversionary tactics of fossil-fuel companies and political supporters.

This rare but growing cohort in the winnable battle against climate change denial are scientists who can effectively communicate about complex science.

They’re also willing to engage in pitched social media, news media, and other battles against the trolls, bots, and uber-conservative news outlets who are telling us to move along … nothing to see here.

Photo: Courtesy of NASA
One of the leaders of this new battle front is Dr. Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State. Working with two other scientists, he was the originator of the famed “hockey stick” graph that in 1999 showed us the sharp rise in atmospheric temperatures over the past 1,000 years. It is perhaps the most easily understood, most frequently used visual depiction of why we need to act against manmade climate change.

Dr. Mann has previously authored or co-authored four books on climate change, each time providing us with the empirical science behind relentlessly advancing temps and sounding the alarm we need to hear. He is constantly called on to speak around the world. And he has developed a reputation as a no-nonsense, often amusing, and blunt combatant against the social media misinformation campaigns waged by fossil fuel supporters, oil-producing nations, conservative Republicans, and news media outlets such as Fox News.

I have been following Dr. Mann on Twitter for some time. His tweets are entertaining, informative … and prolific. As I write this, he has tweeted or re-tweeted over 35 times in the last 24 hours. He touched on topics ranging from the bizarre Republican “green new deal/alternate energy source” blame game in the wake of the tragic Texas storm to his ongoing news media interviews on climate change and his new book.

***

With his fifth and latest book, “The New Climate Wars,” (released Jan. 12) Dr. Mann is taking his efforts to a new level. The new book represents his sharpest blow yet against climate change denial. While it contains the accepted and proven science to support the reality of climate change, it also raises the stakes in several new areas.

Dr. Mann draws the curtain back on the well-funded communication and public relations campaigns designed to shed doubt on climate change and to attack leading public and scientific figures, including him. As someone who has spent a career working in journalism, communications, and public relations I found this part of his new book fascinating.


 
Some elements of Dr. Mann’s discussion of PR and communications are not new but are bolstered with revelations sure to shock even the most ardent of environmental activists. You might not know, for example, that Exxon’s own researchers as far back as the 1970s knew continued burning of fossil fuels would elevate atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide dramatically and could raise average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees centigrade—and this warming could happen within 5 to 10 years.

Exxon not only didn’t act on the conclusions of its own scientists and others in the field, but the company also launched a long-term PR effort to cause confusion about climate change and the role of fossil fuels.

Think of tobacco companies and their legendary (and now admitted) PR efforts to bolster cigarette sales—despite well-known connections of the habit to lung cancer. The fossil fuel companies employed the same game plan.

For me, the most startling revelation involved the famous anti-littering “crying Indian” public service TV ad in the early 1970s. Those of us who saw the ad were so moved by it we stopped littering. What I didn’t know—and I wasn’t alone—was that the ad was a clever creation of beverage and packaging companies.

They launched the effort to deflect attention from early efforts to pass bills to require deposits on cans and bottles, removing that trash from waste and garbage streams. The strategy worked. There is still no national bottle bill law today. Only 10 states have these laws.

To add insult to injury, the actor in the commercial was not even Native American. His name was Espera de Corti, an Italian American well-known for playing Native Americans.

In his book, Dr. Mann uses this example to draw our attention to today’s diversionary tactics. Fossil-fuel companies and their fervent conservative supporters want us to focus on individual actions we should be taking to help slow or reverse the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere.

Through direct or indirect PR efforts, they encourage us to drive cars with better mileage, take fewer airline flights, use alternative energy sources, and generally reduce our carbon footprint. And when we do take those airline flights, they say, we should buy carbon offsets.

Those same groups are quick to shame people who don’t take these and other personal greenhouse gas-limiting actions. There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking these steps. But by themselves these measures will not save us from the potential catastrophic damage of climate change.

What’s needed, Dr. Mann and other scientists and activist argue, are widespread systemic changes, such as better government regulation and policies, significant industry steps such as electric or higher-mileage cars, an array of proven alternate energy sources, and carbon pricing. All of these and other major changes are challenged by fossil fuel providers and their supporters.

Who can blame them? They have a massive revenue stream based on selling oil, coal, and natural gas. Dr. Mann asks the question: Why not do both? Take individual action and become an activist for the wider-reaching changes we need.

It’s pretty simple when you step back and examine the big picture. The confusion we see (and the shame we experience when we don’t take personal action) is exactly what climate change opponents and deniers want.

Like the crying Indian ad, our attention is diverted from what really should be happening.

***

While Dr. Mann’s new book is rich with points like these, I’ll share just two more.

Those who deny the reality of climate change want us to give up because they want us to believe we’re already past the point of no return. There’s nothing we can do now, they say, so the focus should be on adapting to this new world. Build higher sea walls and dikes. Use water more efficiently. Change building codes to harden them for the stronger storms.

Perhaps, as Dr. Mann says humorously, we’ll develop gills and fins, maybe even fireproof skin. The point is if we believe the result is inevitable, we won’t do anything to stem carbon dioxide emissions now. Dr. Mann and other scientists argue that we still have time to slow down, flatten out, and eventually reverse carbon dioxide emissions that result from burning fossil fuels. Don’t fall for the deniers’ claims.

Finally, I’ll call it the coal mining point. As our former president and others have stated on many occasions, we must do everything we can to save the livelihoods of coal miners and the companies they work for.

As a reminder, not only does burning coal emit carbon dioxide but it also produces the sulfur dioxide behind acid rain, the particulate pollution behind smog and other forms of air pollution, and nitrogen oxides, which also contribute to air pollution and respiratory illnesses. And there is no such thing as “clean coal.”

Whether we like it or not the constant state of our world is change. Horse and buggies were replaced by cars and trains. Candles gave way to electric lights. One of my favorites stories in this vein was my own experience working as a senior manager in public relations at Verizon and its predecessor companies.

Up until late in the 20th century pay phones were an important part of our business. From street corners to airline terminals, they were a staple in our lives and the way we communicated when we were away from home or the office.

Enter the handheld cell phone. Within a short time, the pay phone business within Verizon—a multimillion-dollar revenue source—withered away. No one tried to save them. Customers wanted more portability. We gave it to them, even if it meant killing off another part of our business. We closed the large centers where we used to count coins from pay phones, and we migrated those and other pay phone-related employees to new jobs.

***

My conclusion? This newest book from noted climate scientist Michael Mann is essential reading. In a world beset by problems caused by the non-stop burning of fossil fuels since the 19th century, this book should rest beside our computers as we live our lives each day.

It is, in my opinion, an indispensable aid not only in understanding climate change but also in mapping out how to take individual action and engage in activism to spur the significant systemic change needed to arrest the warming of our globe. And it’s well written.

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(USA) The Civilian Climate Corps Is A Big-Government Plan That All Americans Can Embrace

The New Yorker - Jim Lardner

The Civilian Conservation Corps, created at the behest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, gave jobs to an eventual three million young men. Photograph from Library of Congress / Corbis / Getty

It was a rare case of Presidential understatement in the unveiling of a program: the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior, according to a paragraph buried in Joe Biden’s long executive order on climate change, had been directed to make plans for a Civilian Climate Corps, modelled on the Civilian Conservation Corps—the C.C.C.—of the nineteen-thirties.

It would put underemployed Americans to work on projects intended “to conserve and restore public lands and waters, bolster community resilience, increase reforestation, increase carbon sequestration in the agricultural sector, protect biodiversity, improve access to recreation, and address the changing climate.”

That is plenty of justification for such an initiative in the country’s current circumstances. But the potential of this idea, if the record of the original C.C.C. is any guide, goes far beyond the advertised purposes. A modern-day C.C.C. could be an attention-getting reminder of something that a great many Americans seem to have forgotten: the capacity of government to be an instrument of the common good.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, created in the spring of 1933 at the behest of the new President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, gave jobs to an eventual three million young men, before the Second World War took over the task of fighting unemployment. (Roughly eighty-five hundred women participated in a “She-She-She” program, belatedly established at Eleanor Roosevelt’s insistence.)

The C.C.C. left a legacy of trees, trails, shelters, footbridges, picnic areas, and campgrounds in local, state, and national parks across the country. It had equally notable effects on the health and outlook of the men who served. Most were undernourished as well as unemployed when they signed up. They came home with muscles, tans, and, according to a letter sent to corps headquarters, in Washington, by a resident of Romeo, Colorado, an “erect carriage” that made them easy to pick out from the rest of the young male population.

Joseph Kaptur, of Toledo, Ohio, treasured the memory of his corps service, spent reforesting the shores of the Miami and Erie Canal. His gratitude stuck in the mind of his daughter Marcy Kaptur, now an Ohio congresswoman and the sponsor of one of seven C.C.C. bills introduced in Congress last year. “I don’t know anybody who wasn’t changed and uplifted by that experience,” she says.

Although Roosevelt sold the C.C.C. as a jobs program first and foremost, it was shaped by his strong interest in timber and soil management, acquired over the course of efforts to revitalize hundreds of acres of badly tended farmland attached to his family estate in Hyde Park, New York. The C.C.C., in turn, raised the conservation consciousness of many of its participants, according to “Nature’s New Deal,” a book from 2009 about the program, by the historian Neil Maher. C.C.C. camps had lectures and night classes, as well as libraries.

A corpsman named Robert Ross, assigned to a camp near Crystal Springs, Arkansas, used his off-hours to investigate matters that he “had been totally ignorant of—soil erosion, restoration, protection of the forests, the uses of land, the damage of forest fires.” Less than ten per cent of the enrollees had graduated from high school.

Many of them learned to read and write during their time in the corps, however, and hundreds went on to jobs with the National Park Service, the forestry-service unit of the Department of Agriculture, and other federal, state, and local conservation programs.

The C.C.C. had educational value for the people living alongside its camps, too. Many communities, Maher writes, objected mightily to the anticipated arrival of “street-slum foreigners,” “corner holders,” and “bums.” The hostility tended to evaporate once corpsmen came to town in person, proved unthreatening, and began spending their wages at local diners, shops, and movie theatres.

The program was hugely popular everywhere, and Roosevelt promoted it as a morale booster in a time of extreme hardship—and as a vote-getter in election years. Among his Administration’s many groundbreaking policies, only this one escaped the anti-New Deal fulminations of Alf Landon, the Republican governor of Kansas, when he ran for President, in 1936.

Landon, like other Republicans, praised the corps; he even tried to take credit for getting Congress to extend its operations to state parks. Despite his claim, the presence of C.C.C. camps flipped several Kansas counties blue and helped F.D.R. win the state in his landslide reëlection victory.

The revival of interest in the idea can be traced to two loose groups of C.C.C. champions. One, whose ranks include the retired General Stanley McChrystal and the Starbucks founder Howard Schultz—who are among the backers of an initiative called Serve America Together—sees a way to overcome the “political, social, economic and religious barriers causing such divisiveness in our country,” as McChrystal and Schultz put it in a joint op-ed last summer.

The other group, composed mainly of academic economists, is more concerned about the job-replacing effects of robots and computers, and the marketplace’s chronic failure to meet important social needs. Those two streams of thinking converged and gained force last spring, after the pandemic abruptly terminated the employment of some twenty million Americans.

In addition to the White House plan and Representative Kaptur’s measure, bills have been introduced by Colorado’s Joe Neguse and Illinois’s Bobby Rush, in the House, and by Delaware’s Chris Coons, Illinois’s Dick Durbin, and Oregon’s Ron Wyden, in the Senate. Thinking separately, they have come to common conclusions about what a new C.C.C. should be like—and what it shouldn’t be like.

The original corps, besides excluding women, was racially segregated, with camps for African-Americans often placed in remote areas, according to Maher, “because of local protests in every region of the country, including the North.” A twenty-first-century C.C.C. would correct those fundamental defects. Most of the idea’s backers agree that it should also pay a living wage, in contrast to Roosevelt’s program, which offered room and board and thirty dollars a month (about six hundred dollars in today’s money), with most of it earmarked for families back home.

Another difference: cities and suburbs could be major work sites this time around. Openlands, a Chicago-based nonprofit that collaborated with Durbin on his plan, has drawn up a list of project categories, including brownfield remediation, the greening of schoolyards, the repair of biking and walking trails, and the planting of urban vegetable gardens and orchards.

Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat of Pennsylvania with his own C.C.C. proposal in the works, imagines a corps that would build and improve parks in green-starved inner-city neighborhoods and reverse the loss of tree canopy that has made cities especially vulnerable to global warming.

Casey has allied himself with the coalition of more than a hundred organizations behind an economic-policy package called “Reimagining Appalachia.” It proposes a C.C.C. that would restore wetlands and areas scarred by coal-mining while making room for ex-prisoners, victims of opioid addiction, and others unlikely to be hired by private employers.

Along the way, Casey says, such a program could have the salutary effect of reminding rural and urban Americans that “they have very similar and overlapping problems,” including cycles of community decay set off by the exodus of well-paid jobs, whether in mining or manufacturing.

The White House effort is focussed, for now, on developing an administrative structure (it is likely to build on AmeriCorps, a Clinton-era national-service program) and finding funds in the existing budgets of the Agriculture Department, the Interior Department, and other federal agencies to get a fledgling corps up and running. Putting more serious money into such a program would require Congress’s coöperation and, perhaps, a degree of bipartisanship.

That might not be outside the bounds of possibility. Although Democrats have been the principal instigators of legislation so far, there are signs of Republican enthusiasm for the idea, aligning as it does with the party’s preference for work over cash relief.

Seven G.O.P. senators—including Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina; Roger Wicker, of Mississippi; and Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana—signed on as co-sponsors of the Coons bill, which was comparatively modest in scale and tailored to Republican tastes (omitting all mention of climate change, for example). With that show of bipartisan support, it came close to being included in the pandemic-relief package passed in December.

The prospects for some version of a revived C.C.C. are favorable. To realize an ambitious version of the idea, the Biden Administration would have to bring a sense of urgency to the effort. It should. The Administration, with its $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan,” hopes to accelerate the pace of vaccinations, expedite the reopening of schools, give tens of millions of stressed-out Americans the wherewithal to pay their bills, and get a frozen economy moving.

There is little in this measure, however, to lift a vast number of Americans—including roughly four million who have been unemployed for more than six months, and more than fifty million low-wage workers whose annual median income, according to the Brookings Institution, is eighteen thousand dollars—who were already feeling disheartened and undervalued when the pandemic came along.

Trumpist Republicans, fixated for the moment on settling intra-party scores, will turn their attention back to Biden and the Democrats before long. The backward elements of corporate America and Wall Street have been quiet lately, perhaps out of a sense of pandemic-induced propriety, but they, too, can be counted on to get back to obstruction mode.

The best things that the new Administration has said and done—its commitments to racial and gender equity, its welcoming attitude toward immigrants, its seriousness about climate change—guarantee blowback.

Biden and his party can take comfort in opinion surveys that show overwhelming support for many of their proposals. To go by the polls, however, wide majorities of Americans have come down on the side of progressive policies for years. Meanwhile, mounting distrust of government has led many of those same people to consistently not vote for candidates committed to putting progressive policies into effect.

That dynamic will probably be with us until Americans without wealth or privilege see convincing evidence (more convincing than checks in the mail, however badly they are needed) of the government working zealously and effectively on their behalf. The old C.C.C. told that story in Roosevelt’s time. A new one could tell it in ours.

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08/03/2021

Living With The Legacy Of A Climate Emergency: The Women And Girls Determined To Build A Brighter Future

Metro.co.uk - Claie Wilson 
Makara lives in a floating village in Pursat.

Each morning the 14-year-old helps her father fishing.

Her job is to cast the net, which she does for a couple of hours before heading off to school.

Later in the day, her father takes their haul of fish off to sell, making sure he keeps some behind for them to eat at home.

However, Makara, who says she wants to be a teacher when she grows up, has noticed that the family seems to be catching less, which means less for them to eat – and less money coming in.

‘I’m very happy that I help with fishing, because this means that I have given a hand to help my family,’ explains the schoolgirl.

‘But I am worried about climate change,’ she adds.

‘Because it reduces the fish-catch amount and also reduces income.’ It’s hard to imagine what it must feel like to have the effects of climate change make such a noticeable impact on day to day life.

Especially when your country has done little to contribute to the crisis – in 2018, Cambodia’s CO2 emissions represented just 0.06% of the world’s total.

However, that’s not to say that wealthier nations aren’t immune.

In the last 12 months we’ve seen the brutal damage caused by wildfires that have devastated parts of Australia and the US.

Meanwhile the Atlantic has experienced unprecedented tropical storms, which have created untold damage and ‘historic flood events’.

Even here in the UK, flooding has left many homes and families devastated.

Such events demonstrate only a fraction of the huge and destructive changes the climate emergency is bringing to poorer countries that have limited resources with which to combat it.
  
Each morning 14-year-old Makara helps her father fishing. (Picture: Cindy Liu/ActionAid)

Makara with her mother Keo So Phana and her younger sister. (Picture: Cindy Liu/ ActionAid)


But there’s further casualties in such devastation – although climate change affects entire nations and regions, it’s women and girls who tend to be disproportionately affected.

Least responsible for the climate crisis, they are left suffering some of the worst consequences, desperately trying to hold onto their livelihoods and make their way out of poverty.

In Cambodia, women and girls tend to work in industries like fishing and farming, which are being threatened by extreme weather such as storms, flooding and droughts.

Typically, after the dry season, farmland is replenished with freshwater brought in by tropical storms and monsoon rains.

Increasingly, though, these areas are instead becoming inundated with floods of seawater, which have a devastating effect on entire regions.

The growing unstable climate, which causes floods, storms and rising sea temperatures, is taking a heavy toll on fish stocks in Cambodia, resulting in huge losses of income to those whose livelihoods depend on fishing.

She Is The Answer - what your donation could buy
  • UK£3.60 AU$6.48 could plant 20 trees to reforest land, enriching soil and preventing dangerous flooding
  • UK£7 AU$12.60 a month over a year could provide a solar-powered water pump, giving a family water for farming
  • UK£10 AU$18.00 a month over a year could provide seeds, tools and training to grow drought-resistant crops
  • UK£11 AU$19.80 could help protect one person in a village by paying towards the cost of building a flood defence system
  • UK£15 AU$26.99 could pay the travel costs of a Woman Champion, enabling her to represent her community in local government meetings on climate change
  • UK£23 AU$41.39 could plant 100 mangrove trees in a coastal area, protecting communities from future floods and soil erosion as well as supporting fishing livelihoods
  • UK£30 AU$53.99 is the cost of a solar-powered lamp which can provide night-time illumination following storm related power cuts, giving light in emergencies
  • UK£98 AU$176.36 could cover the cost of enabling a Woman Champion to travel to the capital city to meet and influence policymakers on vital climate issues related to the needs of women and girls
  • UK£100 AU$179.96 could cover the cost of an Alternative Livelihoods training programme, allowing one person to receive training in the 'green skills' needed to earn a living through sustainable farming, fishing and chicken rearing practices.

When families are desperate, they may have no choice but to take out loans they cannot afford to repay.

Then, they become trapped in a vicious cycle of debt and bonded labour – a form of modern slavery that compels people to work off their debts without pay – as they try to survive after climate extremes have ravaged their livelihoods.

Makara’s mother Keo So Phana says that there are lots of obstacles when the family goes fishing, like rain and storms and they can’t escape how changeable the weather is.

Sometimes it’s very dry, other times the water level is very high and there are no fish to be seen.

Several years ago, Keo So Phana took Makara fishing with her when suddenly a storm came.

It became very dark and the mother and daughter couldn’t see anything.

‘No one could help until the storm finally weakened and my husband came to pick us up in the middle of the river,’ she remembers.

‘No matter what, all I want is for my children to live on the land, because life is very hard for everyone living on the river.’ 
It’s a memory that has stuck with the family, but despite their trauma, there is hope that Makara will be able to thrive in a world altered by climate change, rather than succumb to it.

Floating schools are just one of the initiatives created in the wake of climate change in Cambodia (Picture: Cindy Liu/ActionAid)

Children now take a boat to get their education. (Picture: Cindy Liu/ActionAid)

Students at a lesson on a floating school. (Picture: Cindy Liu/ActionAid)

Gardening classes at a school in Kampot, Cambodia. (Picture: Cindy Liu/Action Aid)

Through a programme created by international charity ActionAid, school children are being taught new life skills, such as climate resilient farming techniques, gardening and tailoring.

Each provide alternative livelihoods – especially to girls – so they no longer have to rely on traditional farming and fishing jobs.

Ouk is 12 and goes to one of these schools.

At the moment she is learning to tailor, but, like Makara, she really wants to be a teacher.

‘Me, when I grow up, I want to be a teacher,’ she says.

‘I want to be a teacher because I can make money to help myself and also I can provide knowledge for other children.’ As well as life skills, the international charity is also encouraging schools to teach children disaster survival skills, including drills.

Ouk, 12, says she would like to be a teacher when she is older. (Picture: Cindy Liu/ActionAid)

Ouk is being taught to tailor at school. (Picture: Cindy Liu/ActionAid)

They’re also motivating educators to make changes such as replacing mud paths with concrete pavements and building classrooms on stilts and floating school so that they are more adaptable to disasters.

Given the immense disruption flooding can cause to children’s education, this is a powerful way of ensuring they can keep learning, no matter what the climate crisis may bring.

Also crucial in inspiring the next generation of girls to become self-sufficient, is a network of Women Champions, also created by the charity to help girls build brighter futures by supporting their communities.

Each ‘Champion’ represents and highlights the needs of women and girls when important decisions are being made at both community and government level.

One of them is a woman called Hok, who works as a farmer.

Her family’s crop has been destroyed by prolonged droughts and subsequent flash flooding.

Like most people in her village, Hok has taken out numerous loans to make ends meet.

Hok’s family’s crop has been destroyed by prolonged droughts. (Picture: Cindy Liu/ActionAid)

Working as a Woman Champion, Hok highlights the needs of women and girls when important decisions are being made. (Picture: Cindy Liu/ActionAid)

‘As a Woman Champion, I am able to improve my community’s knowledge about health, disasters and domestic violence,’ says Hok. (Picture: Cindy Liu/ActionAid)

Hok has inspired her daughter Siengelee. (Picture: Cindy Liu/ActionAid)


This year, she raised money alongside other Women Champions to rehabilitate an irrigation canal so that her community can continue growing rice during the dry season.

‘What motivates me to do the work I am doing is the common interest,’ explains Hok.

‘If we build irrigation canals, we can grow vegetables and raise animals – and it can feed us and the generation to come.

‘As a Woman Champion, I am able to improve my community’s knowledge about health, disasters and domestic violence,’ she continues.

‘I am actually quite tired, however, I would do whatever it takes to help improve my community’s living conditions as we are still struggling.’ Hok’s dedication has also inspired her daughter Siengelee, 10, to be a leader like her.

‘I wanted to become a Women’s Champion just like my mother because I have seen the ways that she has helped the community, for example, by rehabilitating the canal,’ says Siengelee.

‘The reason why I think my mother’s role is important is because it shows that women can also be leaders.’ With climate change still a battle yet to be won, thanks to women like Hok, the young women of Cambodia are being armed to safeguard their futures in the face of the climate crisis.

Which means they always have hope.

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