R-e-s-p-e-c-t

We feel the warming climate not only through weather but also our landscapes. Rather than persisting with arguments that suggest a battle of landscape management versus climate change as the cause of wildfires and floods, we need to develop approaches to building that respect the landscape and the changing climate that shapes it.

The canyons of Los Angeles and the mountain sides of western North Carolina link extreme fires and floods in ways one might not expect. What connects the two are extremes and excess — extreme terrain, extreme wind, wet and dry excesses of water, and excessive building. This highlights the importance of landscape in disasters, and during recovery in our warming climate.

It’s enormously appealing to live in valleys, canyons, and ravines. They come with a sense of shelter and, under normal circumstances, they are places with reliable water and comforting vegetation. However, it is important to remember that this sculpted landscape evolves over thousands to millions of years by erosion from running water. Canyons and ravines are the natural course that water takes during storms. Water is concentrated and gushes through restricted spaces; it gets deep, and it moves fast.

Less intuitive are the roles ravines and canyons play in firestorms. They concentrate vegetation that can become fuel; they channel airflow, accelerating the wind. Fuel is an essential ingredient of fire, and wind spreads fire across large areas. In the Santa Ana winds of Los Angeles, the ravines and gullies constrict the flow of air and, when full of embers, become blow torches.

The effects of canyons, unfortunately, align with the consequences of a warming climate. They each amplify the dry and wet extremes of weather.

Therefore, human alterations of terrain — what we build, what we grow, and how we manage it — are essential parts of analyzing climate risks. Since we are in charge of the decisions we make about our landscapes, landscape management is a large lever in adapting to climate change and disaster recovery.

Expect the unexpected

Most places experience various conditions of water abundance (floods) and water scarcity (drought). We should expect flood-drought cycles to continue in a warming climate. And we should expect them to reach new extremes.

In the more stable climate of our past, we grew accustomed to the “average” weather and its less dire extremes. This reliability gave us some confidence in what to expect. In our rapidly warming climate, though, those averages and extremes are evolving.

The changes in the extremes challenge the balance that developed between ourselves and weather. Sometimes that balance is codified into land-use regulations that determine where and what we build. Other times it is present in building standards — when we reinforce the roof on a structure to withstand wind and fire, for example.

We are living in a warmer — and warming — climate. And though we’ve considered the wet and dry periods of the last decade as extreme, they are only extreme when compared to the weather of our past — the weather in which we evolved our balanced co-existence. It’s helpful to reimagine these extreme periods as typical of the weather that is currently emerging. And if we don’t curtail the emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, these current extremes will likely be construed as gentle in our future climate. What is coming, weather-wise, will be new to us yet again.

This is the time to develop a more robust, straightforward, and knowledge-based approach to adaptation. We must recognize that land-surface conditions strongly influence how we experience weather extremes, and we are largely in control of decisions about landscape management. Considering landscape and a warming climate together provides the opportunity to move beyond the false arguments that separate the two and pervade the political divide.

Warning

As a unifying theme, it is useful to consider ravines, canyons, and coastlines as edges, or places of transition. These are attractive places to build, but they are always changing, moving. And we expect the consequences of a warming climate to be felt first and severely at these edges. Canyons are geologically active with rock, land, and mudslides. We cannot rationally expect to build in these places in the future in the same way we have in the past. Our past landscape-weather balances change most at the edges.

One of strongest human responses to weather-related disasters is to build back, to not be defeated as individuals or communities. I call this protect and persist. Indeed, our emotional response of protecting and persisting is often supported by our policies and practices.

When we do decide to build back, we need to build back with regard to our future climate. We need to be thinking of the balances that our children and grandchildren will be trying to achieve. We cannot simply bump up the design specifications and land-use codes as we build on the same lots, putting people and buildings too close together. It sets us up for the same costly and deadly results.

We need to build back in places that are safer. We need policies and incentives that are forward-looking rather than backward-looking. We need policies that encourage individuals and communities to move to new places. We need to build in ways that are insurable and durable.

Individuals and communities must recognize that we feel the warming climate not only through weather but also landscape. Centuries ago, we learned where and how to build through trial and error. Often, we did such a good job at finding a balance that we did not have to keep weather and landscape in the forefront of our behavior.

As that balance changes in the face of new extremes, adaptation is required. Adaptation decisions can be made individually, but they stand to be more effective if made as a community. They benefit from state and federal policies that consider the impacts of a warming climate. Rather than persisting with arguments of landscape management versus climate change, we need to develop approaches to building that respect the landscape and the changing climate that shapes it.