New Orleans: What Climate Change Adaptation Looks Like

One point that many on the social justice side of the climate change issue repeat over and over is that the impacts of climate change are going to be felt primarily by the world’s poor. The wealthy will be able to move to the last livable areas if need be while the poor will be stuck in poverty, driven off, forced to deal with the desertification, rising sea levels, flooding, etc. In other words, it will look like New Orleans 10 years after Hurricane Katrina. David Roberts:

Which brings us back to Katrina.

The debate over whether the hurricane was strengthened by climate change — which tends to be the focus of any attempt to link the two — is utterly beside the point. We know events like Katrina are going to become more common in coming decades. And what Katrina reveals is that adaptation, in this world at least, is a cruel joke.

The failure of New Orleans to properly prepare for a foreseeable hurricane has been written about a great deal and there’s no need to rehash it. One key factor in that tale is the role played by the extraordinary inequality and segregation within the city, which made lawmakers and taxpayers loath to spend money on shared resources.

So when disaster struck, all of New Orleans’s submerged dysfunctions rose to the surface. There was shockingly little solidarity. Wealthier white people fled; poorer black people were trapped. The authorities were grotesquely racist in every stage of their response, nowhere more unforgivably than in the way police treated dislocated black residents. It was a nightmare in slow motion and an uncomfortable experience for everyone who watched it unfold on television. This was a wealthy city in the wealthiest country in the world. And this is what happens?

What’s it going to look like when climate change brings storms, droughts, and floods to more and more places, more and more often?

Perhaps New Orleans isn’t a fair example. It’s unique in many ways, not all of them good. New York seemed to handle Hurricane Sandy at least somewhat better. But even there, residents in lower Manhattan made out a whole lot better than residents of Rockaway, Queens. And what city in the world has more social and economic capital than New York?

This is not inevitable of course. We can make reducing inequality part of our climate change strategy and we should. But we sure aren’t doing that right now and there’s no evidence that we will.

And not surprisingly, white people think New Orleans has recovered splendidly! African-Americans? Not so much. That’s in no small part to the racialized response to this natural disaster that is part of most natural disasters and which will probably be the case for climate change exacerbated disasters as well.