The Future is Here: The Case for Climate Change Adaptation
Photo courtesy of Jacques Rougerie Foundation
Below is an article I wrote that never made it for publishing. Thought it'd be worth sharing here instead:
On November 2019, a harrowing report signed by over 11,000 scientists from 153 countries declared that we are now faced with a global climate emergency. This marks the very first time that the world’s scientists have formally labelled the current state of the climate as an “emergency”. In spite of the numerous international negotiations over the past 40 years – from the First World Climate Conference in Geneva to the 2015 Paris Agreement – the report claims that humanity has nonetheless conducted “business as usual” and largely failed to address the issue of climate change.
Such heightened awareness of climate change is also reverberating in the architecture world. A manifesto called Architects Declare Climate and Biodiversity Emergency urges architects to advocate for and commit to regenerative design practices to minimize the industry’s typically large carbon footprint. The movement has sprouted up in the UK, Australia, Canada and Singapore, among many others, and was signed by over 800 architecture firms in the UK alone.
While this is a step in the right direction, one major oversight is that most of these movements operate within a universal timeline, which overly simplifies the reality of the situation. The idea of “climate change prevention” fails to consider cases where the tragedy has already occurred. As Sci Fi writer William Gibson said “the future has arrived – it's just not evenly distributed yet”. In some places more than others, the climate crisis is not a threat of a distant future, but a real hurdle in their daily lives. With barely 2 months into 2020, the world has witnessed numerous climate change-related disasters, including the floods that killed more than 50 people in Jakarta, the Australian wildfires that wiped out nearly half a billion native animals, and most recently, a historic flood event at Mississippi. This is not to mention the ongoing issues faced by the people of the disappearing Pacific Islands and the increasingly vulnerable river deltas of the world.
In Apocalypse Forever, Belgian geographer Erik Swyngedouw breaks down the flaws of global efforts against climate change. I have extracted and interpreted a couple of points as follows (Swyngedouw, 2010):
These movements view nature as a homogeneous entity. Climate change is viewed as a tragedy with one protagonist – Nature – and one clear villain – the CO2. The fight against climate change is watered down to the vaguely heroic act of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, climate change actually materialises in multiple complex scenarios, redefining each community’s specific relationship with the various forms of nature. Maybe a more effective approach would be to examine these relationships and arrive at more targeted solutions.
They deny the irreversible socialisation of nature. They believe that there is a pristine version of nature that we can work towards, rather than working with the one that we are faced with. Perhaps it is time to redefine our relationship with this new, mutated version of nature, rather than fruitlessly attempting to reverse time and recover a state that is long gone.
It is time to accept that the earth is an ever-evolving, dynamic entity, and by that token, climate change may never be stopped. The inconvenient truth is that it is not the earth that is dying, it is us. The earth has existed billions of years before us and will probably survive billions of years after we are gone. Yet instead of declaring that “humanity is doomed”, there is still time to turn this apocalyptic scenario into a triumphant tale of adaptation and survival, an evolutionary narrative, if you will. Philosophers like Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers believe in the power of stories or speculative fictions that imagine a radical post-Anthropocentric existence that breaks the cycle of destruction between man and nature. We must reassess what it means to be human in this new ecology, to inhabit great new fictions of our socio-environmental futures. Most importantly, we must adopt a new ideology that displaces human needs and activities from the centre of our design inquiry.
Imagine a world where human life is integrated into – rather than dominates – its surrounding ecosystem. Imagine a community that does not impose rigid developments on a fluid environment, and is instead evolving along with the dynamic changes of the earth. Design and technology, in this case, could be used as an interface between humans, nature, and other species, creating an entirely new form of techno-nature. Only then would we be able to break free from the destructive system that had created climate change in the first place.
Without being overly optimistic, I imagine that these changes could be incremental. As mentioned earlier, climate change is not evenly distributed, with some communities that are a lot more vulnerable than others. At the forefront of our losing battle against nature are coastal and delta communities, especially those that depend upon the stability of the environment for things like agriculture, aquaculture and fisheries. Threatened by sea level rise and land subsidence, their livelihoods and survival are gradually being compromised. Spurred by the urgency to adapt and survive, these communities could then become pioneers of the new world order.
It was within this theoretical framework that I began my Master of Architecture thesis, “A Living Organism: Design for the End of the World”. Taking Mekong Delta as a testing bed, I examined the local issues of declining agriculture yield, salinization of drinking water as well as frequent floods due to climate change and sea level rise. I explored the ways in which the endangered Mekong Delta community could begin to evolve along with the incremental changes in sea level, eventually adopting new infrastructure that could support their new lifestyle as a multi-species, self-sustaining, floating aquaculture community.
While it may sound idealistic and naive, I was heartened to find that I am not alone in my vision. With a Coup de Coeur Award nod from the Jacques Rougerie Foundation, I realised that a student’s idealism could be the very perspective that is needed in the face of such a big and unprecedented problem like climate change. Jacques Rougerie Foundation is one of a few organisations that are working towards the idea of human adaptation to sea level rise. Just last year, The United Nations announced the commissioned design of a floating city by world-famous Danish firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Meanwhile, the architects and engineers of Seasteading Institute as well as Waterstudio have been dedicating their practices on the design and technology of floating cities. This includes Koen Olthuis’ famous “floating apps”, which are floating modules that act as a growth planning tool for coastal cities or slums.
With that said, I propose that we put in more effort on climate change adaptation than we do on climate change prevention. The future is here, and instead of delaying the inevitable, we need to construct narratives where we begin to occupy these new realities. Maybe then we could turn what was meant to be a tragedy into an opportunity for reinvention.
REFERENCES
Latour, B. (2014). Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene. New Literary History, Volume 45, 1-18.
Jazairy, E. H., & Ghosn, R. (2018). Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment.
Streeby, S. (2017). Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making Through Science Fiction and Activism.
Swyngedouw, E. (2010). Apocalypse Forever? Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change. Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 27(2-3): 213-232.
United Nations. (2017, June 5-9). The Ocean Conference, New York.Retrieved from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Ocean-fact-sheet-package.pdf