Cities have much to learn from Singapore and Copenhagen on climate adaptation
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Raise your hand if you’ve been victimized by bad weather in the last year or so. Was your travel disrupted? Did your home get unbearably hot? Have you been impacted by flooding? When I asked these questions at a panel event recently, only a lucky few in the audience kept their hands down.
Even if we weren’t individually experiencing climate change, we’d want our communities to avoid tragedies. After all, societies can’t thrive underwater, which is why the Netherlands has excellent flood management systems. Yet, emissions from burning fossil fuels are baking the planet and its impacts are coming at us thick and fast.
In many cases, we need to prepare and adapt with more urgency than planned. Take the example of the UK, where I live. In April 2023, the government brought forward deadlines for raising tidal flood defences upstream of the Thames Barrier by 15 years to 2050 because sea levels are rising faster than projected.
In 2021, the UK’s Climate Change Risk Assessment said “there is a very small chance" of the UK exceeding 40° Celsius by 2040. In 2022, temperatures rose to a record 40.3° Celsius. The London Climate Resilience Review, commissioned by Mayor Sadiq Khan and chaired by Emma Howard Boyd, former head of the Environment Agency, pulled no punches when it laid out the multiple “lethal" risks for Londoners, concluding that the UK’s capital is underprepared for more frequent, overlapping and severe climate impacts.
Adaptation, the process of adjusting our lives and infrastructure to the effects of climate change, was once mitigation’s controversial cousin. Now, it’s a necessary evil. Some considered it a taboo topic out of fear that it accepted the damage done to our planet and
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