How regions deal with water will define their success in managing climate change. As the residents of Jackson, Mississippi are now tragically experiencing, water management is a critical component of modern life and one we can ill-afford to neglect, particularly as our world warms. The Jackson water crisis, spurred by torrential rains and unpardonable neglect of vital infrastructure, is the type of quandary into which more cities will slip if a pragmatic approach to climate change is rejected in favor of either quixotic emissions-cutting plans or willful ignorance of new challenges.
While rain is foundational for flourishing life on earth, global warming’s changing of rainfall patterns presents problems to human beings who have built water management systems on certain expectations. The IPCC's technical summary for its Sixth Assessment Report warns that warmer temperatures will generally correspond with more rain falling on the year's wettest day in a given region. In a scenario in which the global mean temperature rises to 4 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline, some of world's most populous areas, like South and Southeast Asia, will see one-third more rain on their rainiest days. The summary expresses with high confidence that "compound flooding" (whereby heavy rains, storm surge, and/or river flow combine) has increased and will continue to increase due to both sea level rise and increases in heavy precipitation. This is the very phenomenon that overwhelmed Jackson’s water treatment facilities in August.
Sceptics of government-led efforts to mitigate climate change through energy policy should not let those concerns cloud their judgement when it comes to the probable effects of a warming planet. An increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the IPCC’s researchers tell us, is causing changes in the way we experience and must deal with water at the local level. To ignore that guidance on account of the IPCC’s tangential global and national level policy recommendations on energy is to invite more Jackson-like crises in the future.
A common response from sceptics when cases like the Jackson floods are brought forward as examples of climate costs is that it is impossible to disentangle the effects of global warming from natural variation. While this is true, it is an irrelevant to real world concerns. The data and the best models we have available to us indicate that a focus on smart, cost-conscious adaptation to a wetter reality is prudent, regardless of the culpability of human activities to warming.
On the other side of the globe from Jackson, another water crisis is playing out as a consequence of a stronger than usual South Asian monsoon. As The Economist observed in its Saturday, September 3, issue, Bangladesh — among the world’s most vulnerable countries to flooding — has made significant investments in water management and is benefiting as a result. Village-level alert systems, subsidies for raising homes, and the building of shelters have dampened the impact natural events have on the lives of Bangladeshis. In 1970, The Economist notes, as many as half a million Bangladeshis died in a devastating cyclone, whereas a storm of similar intensity killed only 30 people two years ago. Pakistan, on the other hand, has failed to keep pace and finds itself currently mired in the worst flooding it has experienced in decades, with 72 out of 160 national districts considered disaster zones amid this year’s monsoon rains and more than 1,100 people dead as of this writing. What Bangladesh displays, and what Pakistan must embrace, is a hawk-like focus on weathering a changing climate. The more we bicker over climate change’s ultimate cause, the less attention we pay to its effects, and the less prepared we are as a result, especially at the regional and municipal levels, where the costs of natural events come to bear.
What effect did anthropogenic global warming have on the rains that inundated Mississippi and overwhelmed Jackson’s water management system? Attribution science will never give us a perfect answer to that, but a lack of certainty on causation is no salve to Jackson residents who have been without drinking water for more than a week. For cities to handle the water challenges that climate change will make more likely, debates about human influence and grappling over energy policy ought to be cordoned while practical management plans are made a priority issue.
Jordan McGillis is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute.
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