Adapting to the effects of climate change
A
AAcross the globe, countries are no longer merely bracing for climate change; they are already adjusting to the disruption it brings. The carbon dioxide given off since the industrial era has, in effect, locked in decades of change: even a complete halt to emissions tomorrow would spare us nothing, and researchers estimate the planet would keep warming for roughly fifty more years regardless. Throughout that time glaciers would go on shrinking and the seas would keep rising. Because the weight of these shifts falls far more heavily on some regions than others, it is in the worst-affected places that inventive solutions are taking root.
B
BIn the heat-battered city of Vallreza, in southern Spain, Mateo Rell runs the municipal heat-resilience unit and oversees a cluster of trial schemes gathered under the name Keeping Vallreza Cool. These range from lining the avenues with freshly planted trees to laying down a specially devised cool-surface treatment, all serving the council's aim of lowering the city's average temperature by 2°C. For somewhere like Vallreza, Rell says, drawing the heat out of the streets comes down plainly to a question of survival. To decide where to begin, the scheme leaned on a satellite-linked geospatial mapping platform that singled out the avenues with the thinnest tree cover across four districts; those roads were then treated with a pale, light-reflecting coating already shown to pull local road-surface temperatures down by 7°C. One of them, in the Almeda district, now stands out when viewed from orbit as a lone cool strip against a heat map that glows red everywhere else.
C
COne October, when the yearly floods spread across the Sundal rice plains, five modest homes refused to stay grounded and lifted gently as the water climbed. Houses in this low delta have always stood on stilts, but these few had been engineered to float outright. Behind the redesign was the Floating Homestead Initiative, a not-for-profit that since 2004 has studied and refitted buildings to let them ride out flooding. Hardly anyone was speaking about a shifting climate when the work began, recalls its founder, Dr Helena Vos, yet what her team does is now called for in places that had no use for it before. Making a house buoyant, she notes, runs to only about a quarter of what wholly replacing its foundations would cost, and it dodges the added wind danger that a taller, raised building invites. There is a further gain: a floating home can be adjusted with real sensitivity to local custom, made to echo the dwellings a community already lives in.
D
DNowhere is more at the mercy of a warming world than the low delta country of Meharra, most of whose land rests barely a metre above the waves while some three-quarters of it sits on floodplains. Along Meharra's coast, notes Farah Idris of the relief group Delta Futures Trust, roughly 28 million people already wrestle with salt working into their soil and water. One initiative, rather than battling the salt, is showing coastal villages how to live alongside it. Eight thousand farmers have joined the Trust in taking up salt-tolerant vegetables such as carrot, potato, cabbage and beetroot, all of which handle briny ground far better than the rice and wheat that has long been the norm. The contrast, Idris says, leaps out at anyone who looks: on one side a lifeless, barren field, on the other the flourishing green plot where her team has laboured beside the growers. Those who have picked up these saline-farming methods now report two or three extra harvests a year.
E
EOn the low island city of Port Aldis, the sea does more than press against the walls along the shore; it wells up through the ground beneath the streets, so the town's one genuine defence is to raise itself higher. Where the land lies lowest and most exposed, the work began first, with roadways built up by as much as half a metre. All of this forms part of a costly but unavoidable reworking of how Port Aldis handles its stormwater. To the raised roads the authorities have added high-capacity new pumps, each able to move as much as 90,000 litres of water a minute. Measures like these are far too readily forgotten once a flood has passed, warns Lucia Herrera, the city's senior resilience coordinator, who is nonetheless sure they cannot be done without and that the task is far from complete. Two, three or four decades from now, she says, they will simply have to return and adapt once more to conditions that never stop changing.
F
FFor many coastal settlements a sea wall is the obvious answer, yet along the soft, silt-laden northern coast of Larang such walls give way time and again, only deepening the erosion they were built to halt. The mangroves of that coast have been the target of one restoration attempt after another; these are tangled stands of trees and shrubs whose dense, mesh-like roots guard the shore by catching sediment, lifting the seabed and draining the strength from waves and tides. According to Bram Okonkwo of the Coastal Wetlands Alliance, most such replanting drives, popular though they are, come to nothing. His organisation opted instead for another route, erecting semi-permeable barriers of bamboo and brushwood that stand in for mangrove roots and coax the trees into re-establishing themselves unaided. Success has been modest, and greatest where the ground is subsiding least. The weakness of conventional infrastructure, Okonkwo argues, is its habit of chasing one fix at a time; lasting results demand a move toward many-sided methods that fold in natural processes while drawing in and rewarding the communities and local decision-makers on the ground.
Kéo chỉnh
Question 1 - 4
Which paragraph contains the following information?
A
B
C
D
E
F
1.
the way one kind of plant life gives a coast a natural defence against the sea
2.
an estimate of how many years may pass before a warming climate’s effects begin to ease
3.
a remark that a particular solution is unusually inexpensive
4.
the use of a tool for pinpointing the places where action is most urgently needed