Last December’s Thomas Fire and January’s Montecito debris flow sounded a wake-up call: Climate change is not a thing happening far away in other countries, or far in the future. It is happening here and now, in our backyards.
While we cannot attribute any specific disaster to climate change, the statistics and science are overwhelming: Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, more severe, and ever less predictable. Globally, we’ve seen about a 330 percent increase in hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and extreme storms since 1980. These severe weather events have disastrous consequences that destroy lives, damage property, depress economies, and tear at the fabrics of our communities. They have impacts that go far beyond the boundaries of the communities most immediately affected. Worldwide as well as in California, 2017 was a monster year for natural disasters, telling us that we are facing a new normal. The long-term forecast is for things to continue getting worse — until we succeed in drastically reducing the release of greenhouse gases and sequestering some of the excess carbon already in the atmosphere.
Even as we work to cool down our climate, we must confront the reality climate change poses now and find ways to protect human lives, limit damage to our economy and communities, and build systems that can bounce back more quickly after disruption — that is, we must build climate change resilience. The new reality of a changing climate means that we cannot go on doing things the way we always have, but need to examine all aspects of our lives and consider what we can do to change in order to sustain those things most essential for our existence and those of greatest value to us.