The riverside community could also take a more deliberate and anticipatory approach to transformation. The levees necessary to hold back the water may become too expensive or so intrusive that they undermine any benefit of living near the river. At some point, as the scale of flooding increases, such adaptation hits its limits. If countries allow greenhouse gas emissions to continue at a high rate and communities adapt only incrementally to the resulting climate change, the transformations will be mostly forced and mostly bad.įor example, a riverside town might raise its levees as spring flooding worsens. The question is what the mix of good and bad will be in those transformations. The IPCC reports make clear that the future inevitably involves more and larger climate-related transformations. As more people experience the harms of climate change firsthand, they may begin to realize that transformation is inevitable and embrace new solutions. In the past, delaying inevitable change has led to transformations that are unnecessarily harsh, such as the collapse of some 13th-century civilizations in what is now the U.S.
This effect may be even more pronounced for larger changes. Wanting to retain things as they are – known as status quo bias – explains all sorts of individual decisions, from sticking with incumbent politicians to not enrolling in retirement or health plans even when the alternatives may be rationally better.
People often resist transformation because their fear of losing what they have is more powerful than knowing they might gain something better. The industrial revolution vastly raised standards of living for many people, but it spawned inequality, social disruption and environmental destruction. Other transformations have had both good and bad effects.
Residents of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati describe the changes they’re experiencing as sea level rises.
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