Our Infrastructure Is Being Built for a Climate That’s Already Gone
Our drain pipes, reservoirs, power lines, roads, sewage systems, and more are all designed based on past climate data. But with the climate crisis comes the uncomfortable realization that the past can’t predict what we’ll need in the future.
by Shayla Love
Jun 2 2020, 1:05pm
In 1979, the Army Corps of Engineers predicted that by 2014, Optima Lake, in the panhandle of Oklahoma, would have 600,000 visitors a year camping, fishing, boating, and swimming. Instead, the lake sat empty, a dry expanse of land about three miles long. Today, it is still abandoned.
The Optima Lake and Dam was originally intended to control flooding from Beaver Creek and the North Canadian River. After $45 million was spent on its construction, though, the lake never filled up, and it has never reached more than 5 percent of its capacity.
Ed Rossman, a planning branch chief for the Corps of Engineers’ Tulsa District, told a local NPR station in 2013 that the project had been led astray because planners used historical climate data to pick the spot where the dam would be built. That data was wrong by the time construction was completed, and the water no longer flowed there. “We know that the historic record may not be a good snapshot for the future,” Rossman said.
In other parts of the world, the opposite problem has occurred. A flooding barrier put up in the 1990s in the Netherlands to protect Rotterdam will likely fail 25 years sooner than was predicted when it was first built in the 1990s. Replacing the barrier will cost around a billion euros, 10 million of which would be just the cost for taking it down.
The issue here, in its different guises, is one that engineers and city planners continue to face, and which reveals an inherent problem with how we’ve planned, designed, built, and made predictions around all of our infrastructure. At its core, this problem revolves around a concept called stationarity.
The tropics lost 11.9 million hectares (46,000 square miles) of tree cover, the study found, 3.8 million in older, primary forest areas – the third highest loss of primary trees since 2000 and a slight increase on 2018.
“The level of forest loss that we saw in 2019 is unacceptable,” Frances Seymour, from the World Resources Institute, said.
“And one of the reasons that it’s unacceptable is that we actually already know how to turn it around.
“If governments put into place good policies and enforce the law, forest loss goes down.
“But if governments relax restrictions on burning, or [are] signalling that they intend to open up indigenous territories for commercial exploration, forest loss goes up.”
Miami’s fight against rising seas
By Amanda Ruggeri
22nd May 2020
Just down the coast from Donald Trump’s weekend retreat, the residents and businesses of south Florida are experiencing regular episodes of water in the streets. In the battle against rising seas, the region – which has more to lose than almost anywhere else in the world – is becoming ground zero.
Stationarity is the idea that, statistically, the past can help you predict and plan for the future—that the variations in climate, water flow, temperature, and storm severity have remained and will remain stationary, or constant.
Nearly all the infrastructure decisions with which we live have been made with the assumption of stationarity. Engineers make choices about stormwater drainage pipes based on past data of inches of rain. Bridge engineers design foundations that can withstand a certain intensity of water flow based on the severity a certain location has experienced in the past. Reservoirs are designed to hold water based on historical information about water flow, and the historical water needs of a community.
Climate change: older trees loss continue around the world
By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent
In 2019, an area of primary forest the size of a football pitch was lost every six seconds, the University of Maryland study of trees more than 5 metres says.
Brazil accounted for a third of it, its worst loss in 13 years apart from huge spikes in 2016 and 2017 from fires.
However, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo both managed to reduce tree loss.
Meanwhile, Australia saw a sixfold rise in total tree loss, following dramatic wildfires late in 2019, .
As well as storing massive amounts of carbon, primary, tropical rainforests, where trees can be hundreds or even thousands of years old, are home to species such as orangutans and tigers.
The first time my father’s basement flooded, it was shortly after he moved in. The building was an ocean-front high-rise in a small city north of Miami called Sunny Isles Beach. The marble lobby had a waterfall that never stopped running; crisp-shirted valets parked your car for you. For the residents who lived in the more lavish flats, these cars were often BMWs and Mercedes. But no matter their value, the cars all wound up in the same place: the basement.
When I called, I’d ask my dad how the building was doing. “The basement flooded again a couple weeks ago,” he’d sometimes say. Or: “It’s getting worse.” It’s not only his building: he’s also driven through a foot of water on a main road a couple of towns over and is used to tiptoeing around pools in the local supermarket’s car park.
Ask nearly anyone in the Miami area about flooding and they’ll have an anecdote to share. Many will also tell you that it’s happening more and more frequently. The data backs them up.
It’s easy to think that the only communities suffering from sea level rise are far-flung and remote. And while places like the Solomon Islands and Kiribati are indeed facing particularly dramatic challenges, they aren’t the only ones being forced to grapple with the issue. Sea levels are rising around the world, and in the US, south Florida is ground zero – as much for the adaptation strategies it is attempting as for the risk that it bears.
Florida State Road A1A runs the entire length of Florida along the ocean, making it vulnerable to flooding – as shown here in Fort Lauderdale in 2013 (Credit: Alamy)
One reason is that water levels here are rising especially quickly. The most frequently-used range of estimates puts the likely range between 15-25cm (6-10in) above 1992 levels by 2030, and 79-155cm (31-61in) by 2100. With tides higher than they have been in decades – and far higher than when this swampy, tropical corner of the US began to be drained and built on a century ago – many of south Florida’s drainage systems and seawalls are no longer enough. That means not only more flooding, but challenges for the infrastructure that residents depend on every day, from septic tanks to wells. “The consequences of sea level rise are going to occur way before the high tide reaches your doorstep,” says William Sweet, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The flooding would be a challenge for any community, but it poses particular risks here. One recent report estimated that Miami has the most to lose in terms of financial assets of any coastal city in the world, just above Guangzhou, China and New York City. This 120-mile (193km) corridor running up the coast from Homestead to Jupiter – taking in major cities like Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach – is the eighth most populous metropolitan area in the US. It’s also booming. In 2015, the US Census Bureau found that the population of all three counties here was growing – along with the rest of Florida – at around 8%, roughly twice the pace of the US average. Recent studies have shown that Florida has more residents at risk from climate change than any other US state.
* extreme weather events
* flood insurance
* feedback loops
* tree deaths and deforestation
* The Human Induced Climate Change Experiment