Manuel’s dream is simple yet profound: to live without the fear of floods; and it’s possible for him, alongside his communities, to achieve that. With support, communities can — and already are — coming together to build resilience to climate impacts. In Mexico, for example, alongside the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance, the Z Zurich Foundation, which I lead, supports local community brigades that help prepare villages in case of floods and aid recovery. Where these brigades are in place, flood impacts have significantly reduced. But today, deep in the Nicaraguan forest, Manuel’s dream is far from being achieved for most of those on the front lines. Investment in climate change adaptation and in resilience to increasingly frequent and more severe climate impacts — such as floods, wildfires and extreme heat — is currently unfulfilled.
Impacts from a rapidly heating world are a growing economic burden, projected to cost $38 trillion annually to 2050, even if we take bold steps to reduce future greenhouse gas emissions today. And the mental health toll on individuals and communities is often overlooked. Despair and depression following extreme events is real, long lasting and severe, hampering peoples’ capacities to respond proactively rather than reactively to a rapidly changing world.
It’s time to wake up to the fact that when it comes to climate change adaptation, prevention is the best form of protection. It’s also cost effective. According to one cost-benefit analysis, which evaluated multiple adaptation projects across the world, every $1 invested in flood prevention saves, on average, $5 in future losses.
We need far more financial resources in order to build our physical, natural, social and mental resilience so that Manuel and the billions like him who long for a better, safer future relating to climate impacts can succeed. But there remain huge challenges to convincing investors and governments to act — because you can’t easily measure the impacts that are avoided, making it a hard sell to decision takers and financial supporters.
In those Mexican villages with the local community brigades, the story we have seen — and need to tell more — is that communities were more resilient to cope with flooding, limiting its negative impacts. They were also better prepared to help other affected communities.
Materialization Mindset
At the political level however, elected officials deciding to invest in certain programs or policies are likely to pick short-term options with tangible, measurable, visible benefits. Investing in something so that “negative impacts are avoided” is unfortunately not the most convincing narrative for getting elected.
Research from the insurance industry tends to support this mindset: Income protection insurance is a game-changer for people, yet many only decide to purchase it after witnessing someone they know struggle without it, rather than through awareness of the need and value of such protection. The same logic applies to climate adaptation. People are often reluctant to invest in solutions until the problem directly materializes in their lives, and that’s unfortunately when it’s often too late.
Adaptation to climate change faces challenges in securing interest and investment due to this “materialization issue,” and also because it’s complex: There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.
In Manuel’s community, the early warning system, water filtration and education programs that are now helping protect people from floods work for his community. They won’t necessarily work the same everywhere else.
In Nepalese communities dependent on agriculture, flood resilience might mean training in new skills, like running a restaurant, to help families diversify their income during times when harvests fail because of floods.
Comprehensive Approach
Effective climate adaptation for the Anthropocene age also requires a comprehensive approach — from local to national to global, involving civil society, private sector and government partners.
In Peru, for example, when our program partners Practical Action together with the local communities designed and successfully implemented an early warning system for floods, the Peruvian National Meteorology and Hydrology Service saw the benefits and is now helping scale it out across the country appropriately so that many more Peruvians can benefit.
To help boost investment in this “first mile” of community customized adaptation and resilience, we’ve been harnessing skills from experts within the insurance industry. Alongside Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance members, we developed a resilience measurement framework derived from risk assessment strategies in insurance, assessing more than 50 ways to look for where solutions were most needed. This extensive data set is crucial in helping to tailor adaptation strategies for specific locations. For example, a community 200 meters up the river may need a completely different adaptation strategy to the one downstream.
Enabling Communities
Our goal now is to scale this customized, community led approach up with further support and new partners, and hence aim to positively impact at least 5.5 million people over the coming four years. Helping to enable the climate-change-affected communities and people to have the tools, resources and resilience to best face the challenges they face is important and an important defense against the deepening climate crisis.
We need three key things to make this work:
1) Finance. We have to invest in climate adaptation, despite the visibility challenges when “the disaster does not happen,” because we know it is economically sound and the right thing to do to strengthen resilience.
2) Expertise. The adaptation space is complex and requires, for example, sophisticated knowledge — it’s not as simple as “just” planting trees. It needs complementary actions to both adapt to the changes we have seen already, as well as working to mitigate further changes in the future.
3) Humility. Local communities are the best informed about what they need.
As we grow from the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance to the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance to help ensure climate change adaptation is drastically increased locally and globally, I hope to find these three things in abundance at New York Climate Week.
My dream is to help Manuel achieve his dream, so no one must live in fear of a flood. Or any other climate hazard like a heatwave, a wildfire or a storm. With finance, expertise and humility, we can help toadapt to the changes ahead and safeguard our futures and the futures of generations to come.
Gregory Renand is head of the Z Zurich Foundation, a Swiss-based charitable foundation established by members of the Zurich Insurance Group as the main vehicle to deliver on their global community investment strategy. The views expressed in this article are those of the author.
This article was originally published by Energy Intelligence on 23rd September 2024. You can view the original here.