Transition Towns - localized sustainability

One of the smartest things a community can do to prepare for the impacts of climate change is to strengthen its local systems for:

• disseminating current information
• dealing with emergency situations
• developing sustainable energy, food and water resources
• being as self sufficient as possible

This may sound radical today, when practically every community is reliant on food, goods, water, fuel and power brought in from long distances, but the onset of climate change puts these dependencies on a razor's edge. Extreme weather, rising seas and skyrocketing oil prices are likely to isolate your city, your town, your community and make all of the above abs0lutely necessary.

There's a budding movement afoot in England called Transition Towns. Its founder, an Irishman named Rob Hopkins, is now leading a process called Transition Town Totnes, which he describes as "the UK's first town exploring how to prepare for a carbon constrained, energy lean world."

Transition towns prepare themselves for the day when fuels for transportation become so expensive that imported goods will be unaffordable and local goods and services will have to take their place. A town that has gone through such a transition will grow most of its own food, produce its own essential goods, even use its own currency in order to retain local prosperity. It
will "power down," which is learning to live with less power, and generating power on a hyperlocal level. This adaptation is what Hopkins calls "resilience" - the ability to withstand the shocks that will come with climate change and unaffordable oil.

Transition towns will invest today in teaching their residents the skills required to grow their own food, compost their organic wastes, produce goods that require minimal energy to recycle, and build infrastructure such as greenhouses that will strengthen their sustainability. In Totnes, citizens are conducting "oil vulnerability audits," where business leaders examine the impact of rising oil prices on their as-usual practices. "How will you be impacted when oil is $80/barrel? $100/barrel? $120/barrel? Land is being allocated for planting "food forests" including nut and fruit trees that serve the double purposes of absorbing carbon and providing food.

The town of Willits, in Mendocino County, California, is embarking on a similar path to that of Totnes, UK. Willits Economic LocaLization (WELL) states its mission as:

To foster the creation of a local, sustainable economy in the Willits area by partnering with other organizations to watch for opportunities and vulnerabilities, incubate and coordinate projects and facilitate dialogue, action and education within our community.

Like Transition Towns, it is based on an alliance of community leaders who meet regularly and cover the various aspects required to attain local self-sufficiency and reduce dependency on oil. Here in Marin County, the citizens of West Marin ("over the hill" from the much more developed towns of east Marin) are on a simliar path, with the town of Fairfax providing the best example of a sustainable movement.

Good article on flood control

Inland flooding is a natural process in most areas of the world, but human settlement and construction along with attempts to out-engineer Nature have complicated the situation. This article was written about a location in India, but refers to the recent flooding experiences in England, France and Belgium as examples of the consequences of building along river banks.

Flood control requires an integrated understanding of hydrology and ecology of the Valvonti river basin. Controlling such floods in future needs joint monitoring and management of Valvonti’s inter-state catchments. There are natural and man-made reasons for the recent flash floods. Natural reasons may include higher rainfall intensity, bottlenecks in the silted streams feeding the tributaries and truncation of the normal flow channels. Man-made reasons could be several but the systematic destruction of the steep slopes of the Virdi hills by plantation owners in the catchment area of Valvonti is a major cause. The floods might have lasted for a few hours but the intensity and consequent damages were far greater this time than in the past. In Keri, Sattari such flash floods were experienced for the first time in 60 years, so the people were caught by surprise, especially as they took place in the night. The government thinks that longer, taller and stronger RCC embankments will control the floods. But these are of limited use if the flood water carries a heavy sediment load and acquires a higher momentum downstream. Embankments which fragment the natural flood plain could actually cause more havoc in the downstream areas.

More Questions About Insurance

Three years ago, a year before Katrina, Florida got the wake-up call that began a transformation in the way homes there are insured against catastrophe.

On the Insurance Journal site, Cecil Pearce, vice president of the Southeast region for the American Insurance Association, put it this way:

Hurricane Andrew, with $15 billion in insured losses -- threw Florida's property insurance market into chaos, many carriers discovered they had miscalculated their exposure to large weather-related losses.

Many homeowners faced higher rates and fewer options for coverage. Insurers tried to spread their risk over larger areas with less hurricane exposure. Pearce describes “A severe imbalance between the need for insurance and the industry's capacity to provide it.”

But Andrew did not slow the settling of Hurricane Alley and no laws were passed to limit such exposure. After all, Florida’s coastline is its main attraction for new residents and the travel industry. So now insurance is provided as a shared risk between insurance companies, the state and the homeowner. This is not, however, a comprehensive answer to the risk of storm damage and destruction. Another Andrew – given the continued build-up along the coast – could still bankrupt all of the provisional insurance sources.

For everyone whose home is at risk now or may be in the future due to the impacts of climate change, following the thinking of insurance providers is key for several reasons:

• They are experts in risk assessment. On the ground, that’s what we all wonder – “What are the odds that I’m going to be affected by the forecasted impacts?”
• People pay insurers so that they can recover or rebuild lost property due to catastrophe. Policy holders trust that they’re covered in case Nature clobbers their homes with wind, fire, flood or earthquake. Insurers, though, are constantly re-evaluating the risks associated with that coverage.
• Policy holders may not be covered as well as they think. Those re-evaluations are leading to cancellation of policies in many locations where the risk is seen as too great for continued coverage.
• We all need to know how to respond to the new reality where our locations disqualify us from insurance coverage or when high deductibles and premiums force us to make the choice of whether or not to pay for policies.

Government at both the state and federal levels understands that any region where insurance coverage for expected catastrophe is denied or is unaffordable to the residents is a ticking time bomb. We have the aftermath of Katrina to look at as an example.

Assuming that you can afford the insurance for your most likely disaster, you’d follow the advice of someone like Liz Pullium Weston in this column on MSN’s MoneyCentral page. Read it and you’ll see that unless you can afford to put plenty of money away in your own insurance reserve, there are no guarantees that your coverage will replace your losses.

This is where FEMA would be expected to step in. I know; hold your laughter. But more effective federal support for disaster insurance is being discussed in Congress, which brings up a moral question.

As the New York Times opened its lead editorial yesterday:

There is impeccable logic to the argument that taxpayers should not be made to pay for the risks incurred by people who choose to live along a hurricane-prone coast or atop a major geological fault.

It then noted that 50 percent of Americans live within 50 miles of a coast, and thus are vulnerable directly or indirectly to the damage of hurricanes and sea level rise. At some point, as climate change advances and shows itself, many of those residents may no longer be able to buy or afford insurance.

Since Hurricane Katrina — which caused a record $50 billion in insured losses — private insurers have jacked up premiums as much as they can and, when barred from raising prices, dropped coverage of riskier homes.

Many of these companies, which have turned denying valid claims into an art form, deserve little sympathy and certainly no government subsidies. Still, taxpayers would end up picking up the tab through federal disaster relief if millions of homeowners lost their insurance or decided to drop it due to high premiums.

If, as the editorial continues, the reality remains that we all stand to pay for uninsured losses one way or another, it seems that insurance companies may be let off the hook and relieved of their own risk. That would seem to also relieve them of the responsibility to deliver objective risk assessment - the single most valuable product of their expertise.

Bill McKibben says it all

I don't think anyone can improve on what Bill says in this column in the Washington Post.

It's the oldest and most cliched of metaphors, but when it comes to global warming, it's the only one that really works: We're in a desperate race. Politics is chasing reality, and the gap between them isn't closing nearly fast enough.

And, as he pitches at the end of the column, don't forget to get involved with StepItUp07.org. Invite your political representatives. Get real, get answers, get action.

Flood Defenses After the Fact

Here are three examples of "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, ummm.....oh yeah. Shame on ME." (Not that Nature feels any shame about it.)

What to do AFTER the flooding has caught you unprepared.

In Wales, if you can't beat Nature, join it. From the BBC Web site:

Flood damage in Wales costs an average of £70m a year and spending on defences has doubled in the last eight years.

But now the Welsh Assembly Government is working on a new strategy which involves working with nature rather than against it.

This may involve some areas being flooded in order to protect other communities.

Environment Minister Jane Davidson has ordered a fresh look at policy in the wake of flooding this summer.

She has ordered a three-year programme to refresh flooding policy, with the aim of developing a new strategy which involves "working with nature, rather than against it".

"The trigger for it was having the latest evidence which suggests that within the next 100 years sea levels will rise by 1 metre and there will be a 20% increase in flooding risk," she tells BBC Wales' Eye on Wales programme.

She said that one solution would be to look to countries like Malaysia as an example and use playing fields as storage ponds in the event of flooding.

"When we see over the last few years that we're already seeing small increases in flooding risk - every single one of those is a devastation for the community and individual involved," she added.

But she warned: "If we're going to have the kind of sea-level rise that is predicted, we will not be able to build walls high enough to tackle those issues effectively.

"So what we have to do is use the land to our advantage. And it might mean sometimes that we have to allow some areas to flood in order to ensure that bigger communities further down a river don't flood."

While in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, there are questions and a "Well, duh!":

The Brownsville Municipal Authority is trying to figure out why there is flooding in an area that's never had flooding before during heavy rain.

Engineer Bill Johnson said it hasn't happened during every storm, but on several occasions since the new sewer lines were installed, there has been flooding on Water Street between 12th and 16th streets. Johnson said the problem started about a month ago, so it is being caused by something that has occurred since the installation, not because of the installation.

"The flooding is weather-related. We need to find where it's coming from," Johnson said.

Can't stop the weather, so they better look elsewhere for the answers.

And in the Big Apple, the M.T.A. is pulling out all stops to prevent future subway flooding from extreme rain storms.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority unveiled plans yesterday for significant and costly changes to subway stations to prevent the shutdown of service that followed last month’s intense flooding.

The proposals include new ways to keep water out of the stations, like raising ventilation grates off the ground and building steps at subway entrances that would require passengers to walk up before descending into stations but would prevent rain from flowing downward.

***

The authority’s executive director, Elliot G. Sander, said short-term improvements, like raising the grates or installing valves, would cost $30 million. But more extensive projects under consideration, such as increasing sewer or pumping capacity, could cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take at least several years. There was no immediate indication of how the authority, which is facing a financial crisis, would find the money for the projects.

Insurance Companies Rewriting the Future

In Spike Lee's heartbreaking retrospective of Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, we hear the angry laments of survivors who were denied insurance benefits for damage because - their carriers claimed - water damage was not covered in their policies.

Katrina was an exceptional event in the universe of risk management that is the domain of insurance companies, and when it comes to compensation, the insurance company is the final interpreter of its own policy language. For an event as huge as Katrina, a policy for protection from hurricane damage may be interpreted as specific to the effects of high wind, excluding the accompanying storm surge or torrential rains. Insurance adjusters on the ground are given their marching orders and scripts, while policy holders are left standing dumfounded and incredulous to deal with the total losses of their homes and property.

As one New Orleans resident put it, "There is a special place in Hell for these insurance adjusters." This is the reality we're looking forward to. You may not be "in good hands" after all. Insurance companies are about showing profit to shareholders; they are not sentimental, nor are they altruistic. As this blog has reported here and here, insurers are reassessing their assessment methods to prevent losses in an increasingly threatening environment. [This is not meant to be an indictment of all insurance adjusters, who, when it comes down to it, have their hands tied by policies from on high. See comments posted to this article.]

A column in the Washington Post describes one upside of the rising alarm among insurance companies - their joining the chorus demanding immediate reduction of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.

Ten years ago, Peter Levene, chairman of Lloyds of London, was skeptical about global warming theories, but no longer. He believes carbon emissions caused by human activity are warming the Earth and causing severe weather-related events. "At Lloyds, we feel the effects of extreme weather more than most," he said in a March speech. "We don't just live with risk -- we have to pick up the pieces afterwards." Lloyds predicts that the United States will be hit by a hurricane causing $100 billion worth of damage, more than double that of Katrina. Industry analysts estimate that such an event would bankrupt as many as 40 insurers.

Lloyd's has warned: "The insurance industry must start actively adjusting in response to greenhouse gas trends if it is to survive." The Association of British Insurers has called on governments to "stem ominous weather related trends" by cutting carbon emissions. U.S.-based companies AIG and Marsh -- respectively, the largest insurer and broker -- have joined with other corporate leaders to urge Congress to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 60 to 80 percent by mid-century. AIG's policy statement on climate change "recognizes the scientific consensus that climate change is a reality and is likely in large part the result of human activities that have led to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere."

Good for them, but meanwhile for all localities with vulnerability to climate change impacts, this stands as a major issue, for as risks rise for damage or destruction from storms, floods, wildfires, drought and sea level rise, we know that insurance companies are making their adjustments in advance. They are taking their place - consistent with their profit-oriented mission - in the vanguard of climate change risk management.

Of course, this means that policy holders and buyers must begin to examine the small print with even more care and scrutiny than before. Insurers understand that a direct hit by a Katrina-like storm on a location like Miami could bankrupt them if every potential claim is filed. This creates even more incentive for property owners to protect themselves proactively and defensively.

So get more involved in local mitigation activities - reduce your local eco-footprint, pressure your local government to take protective measures addressing the threats that apply to your area, and finally, improve your property's survivability in the face of those threats. Don't rely on your insurance policy to save you. And as part of that, start putting together your local adaptation strategy. Reduce your community's risk level wherever you can.

Hard Choices for Local Government

If your community or region is going to prepare itself for CC impacts, it's going to need local politicians who are willing to educate themselves and advocate energetically in the face of more immediate issues. We're lucky to have a couple of staunch, environmentally informed local supervisors on our board of 5 members. Unfortunately 2 does not give them a majority vote.

The Marin Countywide Plan is being updated and one of the most contentious issues is the zoning of several hundred acres adjacent to an old but still operating rehabilitation center for boys, called the St. Vincent Home. Most of its property consists of a flat meadow between highway 101 and the San Francisco Bay - land that is vulnerable to sea level rise and that the county's Planning Commission had zoned as part of the the Bayfront Corridor where no development is to take place. That parcel of land is also one of the last remaining available areas where low-cost and senior housing could be built in the county.

If climate change looms as a serious threat in Marin's future, even more immediate is the dramatic demographic shift that will happen as we Boomers reach our senior years. Unless more senior housing is provided, many of us will be forced to relocate to other areas within the next 20 years. The over-65 demographic is by far the fastest growing one in Marin, and there has been a strong movement to reclaim the St. Vincent property from the Bayfront Corridor zoning.

Yesterday I attended the Board of Supervisors hearing where this zoning question was debated. Over 140 citizens made verbal comment, with environmentalists standing up for preserving the zoning and most of the seniors and low-cost housing advocates speaking for building out on the property. It was a wonderful demonstration of democracy in action. Too bad "our" side lost.

Yes, we do need to provide for the aging population, and yes, a levee could be built to protect the new development from a 1-meter rise in the level of the Bay. But these facilities will not help reduce Marin's huge ecological footprint by taking vehicles off the roads. The units will be isolated from any shopping areas or medical services and I'm sure more imaginative and convenient solutions could be found for locating the same facilities.

Most significant to me, though, were the fact that the County now acknowledges the threat of a 1-meter sea level rise and the quote by my local supervisor, Charles McGlashan, who told a reporter, "We are fighting, in my view, a race against potential extinction." Yes, those could very well be the stakes.

And as to the 1-meter sea level rise, I'm following up with McGlashan's aides to find out if that threat is being applied to the rest of the County's coastline. If it's recognized as a threat to a large, currently uninhabited wetland and meadow, it should certainly be considered as one in the many inhabited and developed coastal locations.