The Brittleness Trap
When most of us think about being on the receiving end of climate chaos, we imagine disasters: hurricanes and wildfires, heat waves and floods. We think of people dying or having their entire lives destroyed by catastrophic events.
Such things do happen, obviously — heck, no matter when you’re reading this, they’re happening now, in some part of the world, and they’re going to continue to happen more and more frequently. We’ve only seen a little of it, yet.
But even with the worsening weather, many of us will never experience a genuinely catastrophic event. Even in the grimmer scenarios with far more frequent disasters, few experts predict large-scale weather deaths in the wealthy world. And total desolation — the kind we see in the wake of a huge tornado, say, or a war zone — is rarer than many think. Real climate impacts won’t play out like the catastrophes in blockbuster disaster films.
Instead, we’re more likely to feel climate/ecological losses as a constant and mounting pressure on our lives. We’ll feel a growing sense of brittleness and erosion. We’ll be aware of the dangers of major losses around us, but mostly experience hassles and set-backs and increased costs. In most of the developed world, climate and ecological disruptions will unfold less like a post-apocalyptic struggle for survival and more like the emergence of a new Rust Belt.
The brittleness trap is what happens to people in less defensible, less valuable places as society enters its reckoning with risk. In these brittle places, climate chaos will be the context for a deep economic hollowing-out. As brittleness spreads — and our capacity to respond to growing risks gets spread thinner — these communities are becoming places where staying is a bad, but for most people, leaving is hard to do.
If you’re looking to ruggedize your own future, one of the most important steps you can take is making sure you don’t end of trapped in these “ruins of the unsustainable,” too.
How do we spot these brittleness traps? We begin by acknowledging gaps.
Almost everything about our lives, communities and economies was built for the past, when conditions were different. The essential nature of the planetary crisis is discontinuity with that past.
All that is of that past and unready for the future must to be protected, redesigned or rebuilt for the reality ahead. That takes money, lots of it. Many places are about not only be battered by climate change, but also squeezed through a political competition for resources and an economic competition for advantage.
We see a massive disconnect between the scale of the need to update systems, protect communities and help people in trouble, on the one hand, and the limited resources we can muster to do these jobs, on the other. There ain’t enough to go around, and everyone thinks they have a good claim to more than their share.
What gets defended, and to what degree, and how soon, is becoming one of the core political fights of our time (even if most current political leaders still take positions somewhere between soft climate denialism and well-spun triangulation).
It’s by no means certain that any society will deliver the staggeringly large funds needed to bankroll a widespread program of foresighted and effective ruggedization investments, while there’s still time to make them, and while they’re still affordable1.
If societies don’t invest, we’ll likely still eventually see huge, panicked campaigns to adapt — but it’s very likely that those massive investments will be too little and too late to avoid intensifying society-wide fights for means of securing safer futures. The longer we wait, the more conflict gets baked into these problems.
Who will lose out in those contests?2 What will happen in the losing places? These are questions climate foresight can help us answer.
I often talk about a climate response four-box, that goes something like this:
Some places are relatively easy to defend, because (at least in the next couple decades) their relative risk is low. Others are riskier, and a growing number are probably impossible to defend at any plausible price.
Some places are valuable (in economic terms, or simply because cultural and political factors make them valuable to decision-makers). Others are less valuable, and as risk is priced into measures of their value, it will drop.
This gives us a rough rubric for understanding the futures places face in the coming scramble for climate protection.
We can say (with some confidence) that everything that’s high value and easier to defend will be saved. (This is why many places that are relatively safe and reasonably prosperous are likely to see rising fortunes, even as the crisis deepens, but that’s a story for another time.)
In places where values are low, but where the costs of needed investments are relatively modest as well, the key variable seems likely to be the overall scale of response being undertaken. If a nation’s reaction to growing endangerment is a massive investment in ruggedization, it’s likely that many easy-to-defend place will get the resources to respond in meaningful ways. If every community in the country is scrapping over a few tens of billions each year, odds seem good that less money will be spent on poor, powerless and obscure places, even if they’re geographically advantaged.
In places that are hard to defend, but still valuable, the key variable is influence. Can a place use the power derived from its current wealth to secure outside resources to defend that value? (Think of the owners of seaside mansions who manage to grab grossly inequitable amounts of government funding to get beaches replenished, roads raised, and damaged power lines, water mains and sewer systems rebuilt.)
But in places that do not have much value, and are also hard to protect against worsening problems, there is no hope. These places are irremediably brittle, under any realistic assumptions, and the acknowledgment of this reality will sink the values there much further, further undermining the prospects of needed investments being made, in a sort of climate doom loop. The financial losses involved are potentially staggering, and they won’t be evenly or equitably distributed.
Obviously, there are a host of other considerations at play here: though the planetary crisis is the overarching context for all future decision-making, that doesn’t mean it’s the only force shaping our future. But if you want a general guide for looking at places and judging their prospects as climate chaos worsens, you could do worse.
This landscape of risk and value is not stable, though.
As they intensify, climate chaos and ecological collapse escalate the endangerment we all face. The hotter and more degraded the planet becomes, the more danger we’ll find ourselves facing. (We already face a scale of discontinuity that renders our previous hopes for an orderly transition moot.)
The number of places with grim futures grows day by day. The more the planetary crisis worsens — and the longer we wait to respond — the greater the number of places that face repeated disasters, economic erosion and unofficial abandonment. The default destination on our current trajectory is more collapses of value across broader landscapes. We are unprepared for how quickly these problems could deepen, and how much harder it may be to reverse these declines than it would have been to prevent them.
Gradually, more and more of the world will slide into the brittle quadrant, and it will keep sliding as long as we let the crisis grow more savage. Rising temperatures will bake more and more places into brittleness
What is realistic to defend at one degree of temperature rise may be impossible to defend at two degrees, much less three. Places that are valuable now, even considering current risks, may bleed value as threats become unignorable.
The people living in these places, though, aren’t passive objects being acted upon by vast and unknowable forces. People recognize changes, adapt to new realities, formulate strategies to better their odds of success. Most of all, in relationship to place, people move.
People tend to move away from danger and towards opportunity. (Money moves even faster.) A lot of people will be moving in the coming years — as many as 50 million Americans, some forecast, will be forced into motion by this crisis in the next three decades, and that’s not the highest credible estimate you can find.
People are moving, already. Millions of people around the world have already made relocation decisions with climate as a consideration.
An increasing number of people are intentionally moving to relatively safer places, precisely because they understand that securing themselves against climate losses is critical to enjoying the future they’ve worked so hard to build. This personal ruggedization is common sense, and a fundamental building block of any personal climate strategy.
The planetary crisis is hitting everywhere. We can find, though, places that are less exposed than others, or better prepared for coming shifts, or preparing to ruggedize themselves more rapidly. Wise choices about where to move as winds rise will shape what our lives will look like when the storm is here.
But what happens when someone can’t move?
Let us first differentiate between can’t and won’t.
Lots of folks have reasons why they have no intention of ever leaving their home towns — even if the threats to their communities are growing. The people they love live there. They bear positions of responsibility in their community: their neighbors depend on them. They have deep roots and a love of the local landscape. They value their way of life above material concerns: who they are matters more to them than what they have.
These are all fine reasons. I’ve worked with people trying to balance the need for personal ruggedization with their commitment to staying put. It can be done, to some extent. Doing so demands a combination of repositioning (living on a property with less direct risk), household preparation, and more community-building (to help neighbors meet new threats more realistically and together).
The thing is, all of the people I’ve talked to about this problem could move. They have the resources to ruggedize their lives, even considering risky geography, which means they also have the resources to move, if they wanted to. They’re making their own choices.
Not being able to move is something different, though3. Lacking the financial means and social support needed to relocate to a better situation — being trapped where you are — is profoundly different than making a choice to stay where you know life will get harder.
Social immobility and physical immobilization have always been linked. The economic effects of unaddressed brittleness, though, look to be uniquely poised to become entangling to the people who didn’t get out when they could have, who now find themselves no longer able to make a planned, successful move elsewhere. The brittleness bubble leaves behind it brittleness traps.
The realistic worst case scenario, for many North Americans and Europeans, is not one of existential cataclysms and desperate refugee camps but one of the erosion of wealth and security, the foreclosure of options, the loss of agency, and a return to immobility, to being caught in prospectless places we would like to escape.
Two-thirds of Americans report being unable to pay a $500 emergency expense without borrowing. What percentage could gather the cash to make a quick, successful move to another region? And how many could support themselves in places with much higher costs of living (basically any place offering relative safety, as the climate squeeze takes hold)?
Too few.
And it’s going to get harder. With even “moderate” impacts, many millions of middle class people face costs they will not be able to bear, costs that will not only show in direct damages, but in the loss of the economic capacity to repair those damages, to rebuild, and to restart local economies.
So though its true millions will find themselves spurred to move, it seems discouragingly likely that even more people will be unable to move, even if they desperately want to. It’s possible that this ensnarement is a greater societal challenge than migration.
These impacts are coming fast. Places that today are reasonably prosperous, if by no means wealthy, can slide into brittleness and decline over a matter of just a decade or two (or even faster if that community suffers a serious disaster).
Without resources to invest, every small damage becomes a loss. Outside relief funds don’t restore everything. Insurance doesn’t cover the whole bill. Lost work days never get paid for. These losses add up.
The more the losses pile up, the more pull-back places see from owners, banks and investors. Chain stores leave town. Factories and warehouses shut down. Insurance policies get cancelled. Credit scores drop. It gets more expensive for the local government to raise bonds to fix infrastructure and undertake adaptation, so the community is less prepared.
Property and other assets take price hits. Uninsurable homes sell at fire sale prices. Small businesses can’t grow, lose money and slough jobs — and no one wants to buy out their proprietors. Homes require more repairs. Cars need more work. People get sicker. Commutes get longer. Interuptions come more and more frequently, from power cuts to closed schools, costing locals more time and money as they hurry to adapt to instability. There’s increasing dependence on fraying community ties, charity, the informal economy, and greater numbers of people getting public assistance (like the spread of disability benefits). The dangers of addiction, crime, violence and deaths of despair all grow.
There is a flight of youth, talent and wealth. People with the means to move find somewhere better to live. Professionals move towards better jobs. Young people who want a chance at a better life move away. As those who can leave do, those who remain must work harder to keep things running.
The most likely future for brittle, low-value places amidst climate chaos is that they become zones of social hardship, economic decline and unrepaired weather damage that still manage to resemble a poorer version of contemporary life. A downspiral runs for years, and though people are resilient and a new equilibrium will often be found, life in that place will be much worse than people remember from just a decade or two before.
That’s a trap most of us want to avoid finding ourselves in. Steering wide of trouble will be easier for those who act before the breakdowns begin in earnest.
Problems of these magnitudes can induce hopelessness and apathy. It’s important to remember that few of us in prosperous places are totally powerless in the face of this crisis, and many of us already have the capacities we need to change our futures.
We can act on our own, and with others, and get results. We can ruggedize against climate impacts and ecological shifts. There are major opportunities for prosperity and security in places that respond rapidly to climate shifts and ecological upheaval. We’ll have to work hard and change quickly to realize those gains, though, and under mounting pressures (all we have to do to suffer losses is keep doing what we’re already doing now). But if we do the job well we can succeed.
Success in personal ruggedization doesn’t mean the crisis goes away and we never have to think about it. It means we know how to think about it, and ready ourselves accordingly.
Those of us in the wealthier parts of the world are tumbling into a future that’s one of familiar life struggles against a backdrop increasingly stressed systems and bouts of disorienting chaos. The better our personal climate strategies, the better prepared we’ll be to manage those stresses and disorientations.
Most of us find it hard to conjure up a picture of a world where much in our lives is the same, but many communities and institutions are battered and semi-functional, and where not just change but strangeness is everywhere.
We need to learn to be at home in that world, because that’s the only world we have now, and the cost of inattention will often be extremely high.
Pay attention.
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I’d actually say there is zero chance that we’ll rescue every place or even manage a graceful retreat from all the places that we’ll decide can’t be saved. We’ve let the planetary crisis grow too severe and we’ve waited too long to start, especially given that ruggedizing against impacts involves many thousands of serious infrastructure projects — systems that often take decades to plan and implement — and to save many places, we’d need to already be building these systems there now.
(In case it needs to be said, I desperately want a heroic future where we mobilize as we did for World War Two, launch an unprecedented program of large-scale ruggedizations, do our best to save as much as possible, and try to work in a way that doesn’t disadvantage anyone — let’s buy out the folks in the floodplains and fire zones, restore the wetlands and control the burns, build new housing on a massive scale in the safer parts of our country, and spend whatever it takes to see people through the transition! I’d love to see it. I don’t think I will.)
(Barring extremely improbable, nearly revolutionary political mobilizations of national resources, led by wise and foresighted leaders.)
One some level, of course, everyone can always move. Millions of the poorest people on Earth have made journeys of thousands of miles with next to no money, because they’ve had to. But I think we can all agree that forced migration is different than voluntary relocation, and some who may end up refugees were never in much of a position to relocate in a more planned way.