Geography in the News: The front line of climate change - adapting to survive

The effects of climate change are being across the globe with many communities at the front line facing the greatest threats - be it extreme weather events, higher temperatures or sea-level rise. But how are they adapting?

Governments across the world have agreed that reducing emissions is the most important way of mitigating climate change - however we are already seeing the effects, and even if we eradicated all emissions today we would still see the effects of CO2 release and warming for the next few decade, meaning that those vulnerable communities would still suffer.

And it's in these most vulnerable communities where we are seeing some innovative ways to adapt to the changing climate...

Raised roads in Miami Beach

In Florida's Miami Beach (an island city) sea water is breaching the island's walls and seeping up through the ground beneath the streets through the porous limestone rock. So in 2014 the city started a programme of elevation work to lift the city up above sea level, starting in the lowest and most vulnerable neighbourhoods, where exceptionally high seasonal tides were causing floods even on cloudless days. In some areas roads have been raised over half a metre.

This has been part of a US$650 million project, which also includes new pumps that can remove up to 75,000 litres of water a minute.

Natural sea walls in Indonesia

Around the world coastal communities are protected by sea walls. However because the northern shores of Java in Indonesia are soft and muddy, they frequently collapse.

In the Demak district 3km of land has been lost to erosion, including whole villages, so they have taken a different approach in the form of mangrove restoration. Mangroves can help protect coastal areas from rising seas by trapping sediment in their net-like root systems, elevating the sea bed and dampening the energy of waves and tidal currents. A 100-metre-wide belt of mangrove forest can reduce the height of a wave by half.

Within the first year, sediment built up by 45 centimetres and new trees appeared. Coastal erosion stalled and local shrimp farmers, who were taught sustainable aquaculture methods that would support mangrove regeneration, saw their income triple. Unfortunately there are issues in areas with subsidence due to groundwater extraction, which loses the restored land.

Cheap cooling in South Africa

Houses in informal settlements, such as those in !Kheis in the Southern Cape, are often built using repurposed materials such as corrugated iron. This contributes to extremes: at night, the temperature indoors can be as high as 40°C, leading to people were sleeping in the streets. In 2013 the South African National Energy Development Institute (SANEDI) launched a pilot programme to test the application of solar-reflective ‘cool’ paints to the exterior of buildings in !Kheis, with excellent results.

Cool coatings are increasingly being adopted as a cheap, low-tech, low-maintenance method for reducing temperatures in hot countries. The paint is typically designed to reflect a higher percentage of the sun’s energy than white paint - around 94%. At the newly painted Department of Defence health training facility in Lephalale, Limpopo, the interior temperature was recorded at 29°C, while outside it was 47°C.

Amphibious housing in Vietnam

The Mekong Delta is home to more than 17 million people who have adapted to life near the floodplains. But sea level rise and flooding caused by storms and dam construction means that the current elevation of homes may no longer be enough. So the Bouyant Foundation Project has been trialling homes that are built to float - retrofitting amphibious houses instead of the traditional homes built on stilts.

The solution is simple: flotation blocks are placed under the house while a structural frame distributes the uplift they produce on water. Telescopic poles secure the house to the ground and resist the forces from wind and flowing water. It is much cheaper than permanently elevating houses (as there is no need for foundations), and it avoids the problem of taller houses being at greater risk from wind damage.

Cool streets in Los Angeles

During the summer so much heat is retained by LA's roads that in the early hours of the morning they often register temperatures of 23°C leading to an urban heat island effect, meaning that cities get hotter and stay hotter than the surrounding rural area, which can lead to heat related health issues.

Cool Streets LA has trialled tree planting and cool pavement installations to try to bring down temperatures, using GIS data mapping which identified very hot streets with low tree canopy cover. These were coated with CoolSeal, a light-grey, light-reflecting coating, which had already been shown to reduce road surface temperature in the city by 6°C. In light of its success Cool Streets LA launched its $8 million project to plant 1,900 trees and paint 200 city blocks across eight neighbourhoods.

Read the full article here - https://geographical.co.uk/cli...