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Whatever your politics, alternative facts aren’t a thing and climate change is happening along the trajectory of the worst-case scenario. In fact, climate change caused by humans has been predicted for a century now, yet as a species we seem reluctant to look the truth in the eyes and prepare for the risks.
One key risk being widely ignored is intensifying flood events combined with a global population trajectory of aging, points out a new study by Wenyu Yang of Yunnan University and colleagues in the journal Earth’s Future, published by the American Geophysical Union. This combination has not been studied together before.
At this point, climate change is worsening. How can we prepare for global warming and glacial meltdown? The oceanographer John Englander said it best in a book title in 2021, “Moving to Higher Ground.”
The spirit of the advice is simple: If a freight train is coming at you, get off the tracks. That is where age enters the equation. It’s harder for them to move quickly in the event of sudden extreme weather.
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What is the core problem? Over the last 150 years, industry has been releasing carbon dioxide in unnatural levels. Make no mistake, for all the vows about “net zero carbon,” emissions are still increasing.
The higher the concentration of atmospheric CO2, the warmer Earth gets, but how warm will it get? We don’t know. We have no precedent for this. Never in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history have CO2 levels risen so fast, insofar as we know, which means that we have no road map for what to expect. We are unclear how high the temperatures may rise. So far the global average temperature has already increased by about 1.5 degrees Celsius – and as predicted, the climate is becoming destabilized. Which is a euphemism for, unpredictable.
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Climatic destabilization means weather in specific areas is to harder predict. Forecasts are increasingly irrelevant, famously failing to foresee “freak storms,” let alone flash flooding. There’s no point in grousing at the weatherperson. But the following is entirely predictable.
Global warming is intensifying flooding at two levels: along many coasts, due to sea level rise mainly from melting ice; and everywhere else because the hotter it gets, the more water evaporates, so it rains more.
Regarding the coasts, during Ice Age peaks, enormous amounts of seawater were “trapped” in glaciers, and the oceans were about 130 meters (430 feet) lower than present. That’s how humans walked from Siberia to North Africa in the Mesolithic: over exposed land bridges. Predictions for how high the seas could rise if all the ice melts, leaving even the poles ice-free, are about 70 meters (230 feet) higher than the sea level today.
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Meanwhile, the hotter the temperatures become, the more water will evaporate. The more water evaporates, the higher the moisture in the atmosphere will be and the more rain will fall inland.
Since the climate is becoming destabilized, there is some argument over whether there will be more storms that are also more powerful, or fewer storms but fiercer. Everyone agrees they will be monsters. There are also signs that the stronger storms are moving more slowly, which means they drop precipitation on a given area for longer, causing local flooding.
One study published in the AGU journal Earth’s Future predicts that “100-year floods” are going to become “every year events” by the year 2100.
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It isn’t that every spot on the planet will experience more rain. In some areas such as much of Africa, the Middle East and southern Europe, climate change is leading to desertification and drought. Parched land hardens and when it does rain, the water has difficulty penetrating the soil, causing flash floods.
Who is at risk as the world warms and flood risk mounts? Terrestrial animals but especially, the growing population of elderly people, Yang and the team stress in their research on potential flood risk for the old in Europe by the year 2100.
Average global fertility is still about 2.2 births per woman, with decline anticipated from roughly 2080. Meanwhile worries are mounting about how to economically support growing numbers of the elderly. Apparently, we should also be considering how to boat them out of trouble. Yang and the team’s analysis finds that flood risk is already significantly higher in major European river basins such as the Loire, Rhine, Elbe and Danube. They expect this situation to worsen.
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Prague, a city on the Elbe, was noted both for being flood-prone and for having a growing population of elderly. Almost half its aged people exposed to flooding live in specifically high flood-risk areas. In the Elbe basin, the team predicts doubled risk of “100-year flooding” by the year 2100 and a theoretical 15 percent increase in elderly population at risk.
Although a river view might be pricey, the study revealed that vulnerable groups including the elderly and poor are disproportionately threatened by high-risk floods.
All this is important to know for the sake of future housing policy and personal decisions. But the team also reached another important conclusion. As climate change intensifies in an aging world, the extreme flooding hazard will likely widen regional inequalities.
It isn’t enough for planners to look narrowly at flood risk, the authors sum up. Planning must incorporate social vulnerability into the equations of risk evaluation and management.
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