Perspective: Rising seasEven for Non-Believers, These Are the Next Steps on Climate Change

It was a dramatic contrast on our screens last week. John Macomber writes in Harvard’s Working Knowledge that as Hurricane Dorian unleashed nature’s fury on the Bahamas and danced with a wide swath of the East Coast of the United States, he flipped to the CNN Climate Town Hall, where Democratic presidential candidates discussed very expensive plans for taming global warming and other environmental threats.

These intense juxtapositions must leave many wondering what we should be doing in the face of these perils. Just what are the next steps?

He says he has an idea about that. His research indicates we need to go beyond observing wreckage and pondering trillion-dollar plans to attempt to mitigate carbon. Businesses, homeowners, and local governments must focus on what can be done today to address these direct threats to people and property.

There are three major tools in the “what to do next” approach: probability, selection, and migration.

Macomber writes:

We can’t just debate how many trillions of taxpayer dollars to spend on federal carbon strategies; we also have to think about what to do if that carbon mitigation does not work or is not even attempted. To this end, homeowners and businesses and mayors can’t just watch the news, react, and randomly pile up sandbags and pump basements, over and over. They need to think about which assets to protect and which people to relocate.

Finally, one area’s dislocation can be opportunity for another. How can cities think about this conundrum? How can investors uncover opportunity in resilience? What are implications for the most vulnerable populations that can’t or don’t want to move to Minnesota or even to Orlando?

Answering these questions is the next step in climate action.