Ian is a wake-up call on costs of climate paralysis

After a sleepy start to the North Atlantic hurricane season, Ian jolted us all awake. The storm tore through the Carolinas and beyond. But all we can see at the moment is the devastation left behind in Florida. At least 15 people have been confirmed dead, some 2.6 million homes and businesses are without power and two bridges have collapsed. Photos show the extent of the destruction: trees flattened, streets littered with debris and homes soaked in sewage-tainted water.
As we clean up after Ian, it’s impossible to shake off a single, devastating fact: This won’t be the last time, and it won’t be the worst time. Ian is a reminder that we’ve got to start spending to adapt to and mitigate climate change. Estimates of Ian’s damage range in the tens of billions to as much as $100 billion. But even at the lower end of estimates, it would be one of the most expensive hurricanes in US history.
Storms have become increasingly more expensive over the past few decades, partly because climate change is altering the hurricanes themselves. Take Ian, for example, which demonstrated a worrying trend: rapid intensification. Its wind speed more than doubled in just 48 hours, from 75 miles per hour to 155mph, as warm water, moist air and low wind shear gave the storm more energy and destructive power. As the planet gets warmer and wetter, such conditions will become commonplace.
Increasing power isn’t the only thing that’s worrying about this. Over the years, improvements in hurricane forecasting have vastly decreased the number of people who die in such disasters. But if we’ve no idea how intense a storm might get, or if it surprises us, people will have less time to prepare or evacuate — actions that save lives. Another cause of rising storm costs may boil down to an innate human desire to live by the sea. As this FEMA map shows, coastal areas tend to be more at risk of natural hazards — including hurricanes, wildfires and flooding. Of course, FEMA chief Deanne Criswell has said climate change has already made this map outdated, particularly when it comes to flooding. First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research group, identified an extra 6 million homes that should be in severe flood-risk zones.
With this in mind, consider that, as Mark Gongloff notes, the fastest-growing US cities are also among those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Fort Myers, whose population has grown by 124% in the past 30 years, has just been laid to waste by Ian’s historic storm surge.
The allure of these locations is obvious — they’re beautiful, warm and economically booming. Miami and Tampa are vying to become America’s next tech and finance hubs. But Florida’s addiction to coastal development puts more people and buildings in harm’s way. It stands to reason that, if you keep building sea-view condos, you’ll also have to pay to repair them when the sea ends up in the living room. As Tim Chapin, professor of urban and regional planning at Florida State University told Politico: “From a long-range planning point of view, much of what we see today in southwest Florida should not be there.” Money would be more efficiently spent on adapting Florida’s coastline to a changing climate.
That doesn’t necessarily mean adding more concrete sea walls, nor does it mean sacrificing economic growth. But it might mean seeing growth in a new light. Mark Buchanan went to a lecture by Cambridge University economist Partha Dasgupta, in which a key question was raised: “How did economic theory get itself into a condition in which it doesn’t even count the natural world as an important part of our economic wealth?” It might have made sense in the early days of growth theory. But now that we understand more of the importance of biodiversity and ecosystems to society’s health, it’s plainly a huge oversight. Dasgupta’s revised theory still considers economic growth a positive, but sees it as something far more inclusive than GDP, something that must preserve the value of the natural world for prosperity to continue.
—Bloomberg