[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNcUC1xUB5c”]
A basic principle of the UNFCCC agreement is CBDR, or Common but Differentiated Responsibilities. This stems from the idea that based on historical emissions, developing countries should not have their development taxed because of harm to the environment caused by already developed countries’ development 100 years ago. Because of this, developed countries are held responsible for funding any climate change efforts developing countries decide to embark on. Furthermore, developed countries are to share information and technology to help developing countries develop in a “greener” way than developed countries had in the past.
My question is, how can we do this if we still haven’t gotten the hang of smart development in our own country? I’m not suggesting the U.S. should help itself before it helps others, but instead should be taking a bilateral approach to both change domestic ways and provide support internationally for cleaner development.
Yesterday, the story “With Dry Taps and Toilets, California Drought Turns Desperate” made the front page of the NYTimes. Households in California, and especially those in Tulare County, a rural county with especially impoverished residents and barely any water. With three years of drought and still going strong, the California drought, although as a single event it cannot be attributed to climate change, calls for more caution when dealing with the climate. Even in one of the richest country in the world, the U.S. still doesn’t seem to be able to come up with even effective adaptation plans, never mind mitigation. One family the article focuses on hasn’t had running water for more than five months. How is the U.S. caring for these Californians? They aren’t. When families call the state and local governments for advice, they are told there are no public agencies set up to help them. Water is provided through bottled water from residents’ pockets and local charities. Even the counting of households without water is spotty, with an estimate of 700 households, overlooking households in rural areas with dried-up wells. One volunteer is quoted describing the drought as “it’s a slow-moving disaster that nobody knows how to handle” (Medina 18).
The U.S. is obviously having trouble preparing for and dealing with the “slow-moving” crises brought on by climate change, so how can it be expected to help others? The solution is not, as I said before, to focus on itself first before it helps others. There is no time to wait; climate change does not wait for domestic pilots, it comes when it wants, where it wants, and countries must be as ready as best they can. This means focusing on security threats from more than just other states but from the earth itself. The U.S. needs to take the terrible lessons it’s learning in California to realize that a much more though-out, cross-sector, and multi-level approach must be employed in adapting to climate change domestically and globally.
Medina, Jennifer. 2014. “With Dry Taps and Toilets, California Drought Turns Desperate.” The New York Times, October 3, p. 1, A18.
Thanks for sharing this Keziah. The lack of coordinated assistance to households that have lost access to water due to the drought highlights that we have an “adaptation deficit” in the US. If we are to manage the effects of climate change effectively, plans for adaptation need to be developed by public and private sector organizations.
I agree with Neil, thank you so much for posting this! The magnitude of the drought in California is definitely hard for people to wrap their head around (I say that as a Californian who has seen utter ignorance about the drought in my own community) and these hard facts really hit home. The drought is definitely an interesting predicament and eludes to the “adaption deficit” you are talking about, but I find it is something that has also shown the inability of the state to even take basic precautionary measures to alleviate the drought. I spent the majority of my summer working with Environment California to ban fracking throughout the state. The process uses millions of gallons of water and also taints the local water table, however, the state legislatures have failed to pass a moratorium on the practice and Governor Brown (a perceived champion of environmental issues) is actively allowing it to happen. I’m wondering how we can ever get to a point of comprehensive adaption if we can’t even confront these types of “low lying fruit” in handling climate change?