Efforts to boost climate resilience need to include government accountable, experts say

Climate experts say community-wide changes are the valid next step in climate resilience, but policymakers don’t seem to have an appetite for making adjustments on a larger scale.

“I think that mitigation is very well defined, you know how to measure greenhouse gases, you know that if you build a project you’re gonna have a direct impact of x, y, z,” said Nabig Chaudhry, director of climate adaptation strategy for Probable Futures at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference. “That is much more inspirational for policymakers who want to see real benefits that come through immediately.”

Executive director for the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at Arizona State University, Patricia Solis, said political officials may be more hesitant to put money and resources towards vulnerable areas because they are already receiving help in the forms of mitigation tactics, preparedness strategies and others.

In almost all forms of current climate resilience, the strategies seem to push the responsibility of mitigation and adaptation onto the individual.

Examples of individual climate resilience come primarily in the form of preparedness. Chaudhry said that most people are taught to be ready at all times for the next natural disaster, such as forest fires, hurricanes, extreme heat and earthquakes.

Solis emphasized that climate action should be more tactical. People should be asking system level questions like, “If I buy this house, will the city protect me?” and “What does this mean for my insurance and will my insurance company protect me?”

These types of questions will help an individual hold their city and state government accountable, Solis said.

Alongside Chaudhry and Solis, climate editor for New York Times Opinion, Eliza Barclay, and communications coordinator at the Desert Research Institute, Kelsey Fitzgerald, raised the point that the way journalists and people speak about climate change needs to be changed.

Oftentimes granular information and data, such as forest fire risk in a specific region, is what leads people to take a hands off approach.

An out-of-site, out-of-mind mentality is something that can be addressed in the storytelling done by journalists, Fitzgerald said.

“Journalism is so crucial because a lot of stories that exist today don’t actually help us foresee what it means to live a good life in an unstable climate,” Chaudry said.

It’s important for journalists to dial back from “panic doomsday stories,” Fitzgerald emphasized. These stories have led many people to become paralyzed and numb, which has contributed to the “I don’t know what to do” mentality.

Amelia Monroe is a junior at Arizona State University, and is part of a student newsroom led by The Arizona Republic.

Coverage of the Society of Environmental Journalists conference is supported by Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism, the University of Arizona and the Arizona Media Association.

These stories are published open-source for other news outlets and organizations to share and republish, with credit and links to azcentral.com.