12 Vicki Arroyo

Vicki Arroyo: Let's prepare for our new climate | TED Talk | TED.
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VICKI ARROYO
14:36
English translation by Thu-Huong Ha.

Reviewed by Morton Bast.
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English
Translated by Thu-Huong Ha
Reviewed by Morton Bast
00:12
https://www.ted.com/talks/vicki_arroyo_let_s_prepare_for_our_new_climate/transcript 10/09/2017
Vicki Arroyo: Let's prepare for our new climate | TED Talk | TED.com Pgina 2 de 8
This is the skyline of my hometown, New Orleans. It was a great place to grow
up, but it's one of the most vulnerable spots in the world. Half the city is already
below sea level. In 2005, the world watched as New Orleans and the Gulf Coast
were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. One thousand, eight hundred and thirty-
six people died. Nearly 300,000 homes were lost. These are my mother's, at the
top -- although that's not her car, it was carried there by floodwaters up to the
roof -- and that's my sister's, below. Fortunately, they and other family members
got out in time, but they lost their homes, and as you can see, just about
everything in them.
00:57
Other parts of the world have been hit by storms in even more devastating ways.
In 2008, Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath killed 138,000 in Myanmar. Climate
change is affecting our homes, our communities, our way of life. We should be
preparing at every scale and at every opportunity. This talk is about being
prepared for, and resilient to the changes that are coming and that will affect our
homes and our collective home, the Earth.
01:26
The changes in these times won't affect us all equally. There are important
distributional consequences, and they're not what you always might think. In
New Orleans, the elderly and female-headed households were among the most
vulnerable. For those in vulnerable, low-lying nations, how do you put a dollar
value on losing your country where you ancestors are buried? And where will
your people go? And how will they cope in a foreign land? Will there be tensions
over immigration, or conflicts over competition for limited resources? It's already
fueled conflicts in Chad and Darfur. Like it or not, ready or not, this is our future.
02:07
Sure, some are looking for opportunities in this new world. That's the Russians
planting a flag on the ocean bottom to stake a claim for minerals under the
receding Arctic sea ice. But while there might be some short-term individual
winners, our collective losses will far outweigh them. Look no further than the
insurance industry as they struggle to cope with mounting catastrophic losses
from extreme weather events. The military gets it. They call climate change a
threat multiplier that could harm stability and security, while governments around
the world are evaluating how to respond.
02:42
So what can we do? How can we prepare and adapt? I'd like to share three sets
of examples, starting with adapting to violent storms and floods. In New Orleans,
the I-10 Twin Spans, with sections knocked out in Katrina, have been rebuilt 21
feet higher to allow for greater storm surge. And these raised and energy-efficient
homes were developed by Brad Pitt and Make It Right for the hard-hit Ninth
Ward. The devastated church my mom attends has been not only rebuilt higher,
it's poised to become the first Energy Star church in the country. They're selling
electricity back to the grid thanks to solar panels, reflective paint and more. Their
March electricity bill was only 48 dollars. Now these are examples of New
Orleans rebuilding in this way, but better if others act proactively with these
changes in mind. For example, in Galveston, here's a resilient home that survived
Hurricane Ike, when others on neighboring lots clearly did not. And around the
world, satellites and warning systems are saving lives in flood-prone areas such
as Bangladesh.
03:52
But as important as technology and infrastructure are, perhaps the human

element is even more critical. We need better planning and systems for
evacuation. We need to better understand how people make decisions in times
of crisis, and why. While it's true that many who died in Katrina did not have
access to transportation, others who did refused to leave as the storm
approached, often because available transportation and shelters refused to allow
them to take their pets. Imagine leaving behind your own pet in an evacuation or
a rescue. Fortunately in 2006, Congress passed the Pet Evacuation and
Transportation Standards Act (Laughter) it spells "PETS" to change that.
04:37
Second, preparing for heat and drought. Farmers are facing challenges of
drought from Asia to Africa, from Australia to Oklahoma, while heat waves linked
with climate change have killed tens of thousands of people in Western Europe in
2003, and again in Russia in 2010. In Ethiopia, 70 percent, that's 7-0 percent of
the population, depends on rainfall for its livelihood. Oxfam and Swiss Re,
together with Rockefeller Foundation, are helping farmers like this one build
hillside terraces and find other ways to conserve water, but they're also providing
for insurance when the droughts do come. The stability this provides is giving the
farmers the confidence to invest. It's giving them access to affordable credit. It's
allowing them to become more productive so that they can afford their own
insurance over time, without assistance. It's a virtuous cycle, and one that could
be replicated throughout the developing world. After a lethal 1995 heat wave
turned refrigerator trucks from the popular Taste of Chicago festival into
makeshift morgues, Chicago became a recognized leader, tamping down on the
urban heat island impact through opening cooling centers, outreach to vulnerable
neighborhoods, planting trees, creating cool white or vegetated green roofs. This
is City Hall's green roof, next to Cook County's [portion of the] roof, which is 77
degrees Fahrenheit hotter at the surface. Washington, D.C., last year, actually led
the nation in new green roofs installed, and they're funding this in part thanks to a
five-cent tax on plastic bags. They're splitting the cost of installing these green
roofs with home and building owners. The roofs not only temper urban heat
island impact but they save energy, and therefore money, the emissions that
cause climate change, and they also reduce stormwater runoff. So some
solutions to heat can provide for win-win-wins.
06:34
Third, adapting to rising seas. Sea level rise threatens coastal ecosystems,
agriculture, even major cities. This is what one to two meters of sea level rise
looks like in the Mekong Delta. That's where half of Vietnam's rice is grown.
Infrastructure is going to be affected. Airports around the world are located on
the coast. It makes sense, right? There's open space, the planes can take off and
land without worrying about creating noise or avoiding tall buildings. Here's just
one example, San Francisco Airport, with 16 inches or more of flooding. Imagine
the staggering cost of protecting this vital infrastructure with levees. But there
might be some changes in store that you might not imagine. For example, planes
require more runway for takeoff because the heated, less dense air, provides for
less lift. San Francisco is also spending 40 million dollars to rethink and redesign
its water and sewage treatment, as water outfall pipes like this one can be
flooded with seawater, causing backups at the plant, harming the bacteria that
are needed to treat the waste. So these outfall pipes have been retrofitted to shut
seawater off from entering the system.
07:46
Beyond these technical solutions, our work at the Georgetown Climate Center
with communities encourages them to look at what existing legal and policy tools
are available and to consider how they can accommodate change. For example,
in land use, which areas do you want to protect, through adding a seawall, for
example, alter, by raising buildings, or retreat from, to allow the migration of
important natural systems, such as wetlands or beaches? Other examples to
consider. In the U.K., the Thames Barrier protects London from storm surge. The
Asian Cities Climate [Change] Resilience Network is restoring vital ecosystems
like forest mangroves. These are not only important ecosystems in their own
right, but they also serve as a buffer to protect inland communities. New York
City is incredibly vulnerable to storms, as you can see from this clever sign, and
to sea level rise, and to storm surge, as you can see from the subway flooding.
But back above ground, these raised ventilation grates for the subway system
show that solutions can be both functional and attractive. In fact, in New York,
San Francisco and London, designers have envisioned ways to better integrate
the natural and built environments with climate change in mind. I think these are
inspiring examples of what's possible when we feel empowered to plan for a
world that will be different.
09:05
But now, a word of caution. Adaptation's too important to be left to the experts.
Why? Well, there are no experts. We're entering uncharted territory, and yet our
expertise and our systems are based on the past. "Stationarity" is the notion that
we can anticipate the future based on the past, and plan accordingly, and this
principle governs much of our engineering, our design of critical infrastructure,
city water systems, building codes, even water rights and other legal precedents.
But we can simply no longer rely on established norms. We're operating outside
the bounds of CO2 concentrations that the planet has seen for hundreds of
thousands of years.
09:49
The larger point I'm trying to make is this. It's up to us to look at our homes and
our communities, our vulnerabilities and our exposures to risk, and to find ways
to not just survive, but to thrive, and it's up to us to plan and to prepare and to
call on our government leaders and require them to do the same, even while they
address the underlying causes of climate change. There are no quick fixes. There
are no one-size-fits-all solutions. We're all learning by doing. But the operative
word is doing.
10:24
Thank you.
10:25
(Applause)
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Vicki Arroyo: Let's prepare for our new climate | TED Talk | TED.

English translation by Thu-Huong Ha.

Details Transcript Reading List Comments

But as important as technology and infrastructure are, perhaps the human

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