Adapting to climate change means spending the money to do it

With the “cyclone bomb” and the “atmospheric river” both hitting California again, the resulting floods are showing us again that we are not ready for the rain.

A good watershed protecting forest coverage will not be able to do more than slow down the high-water flows produced by excessive rains.  But we do not even have that kind of watershed protecting forest health.  When it rains in California we have floods.  Some of them are avoidable.  Some can be mitigated and some just cannot be helped.  Our land management does little to slow things down or get out of the way. 

And now we have bigger swings in our weather.  It is dryer for longer and then it rains harder.  There are a lot of details, exceptions, caveats and questions that need more study.  What does not need more study is that we are not doing what it takes to deal with the weather that we should expect.

The call for strategic reforestation embracing our waterways and traditional prescribed burns to keep the forests healthy and fire safe has been gaining ground.  The result is a lot more than lip service.  The people fighting the wildfires are taking proactive measures. Some of the landowners have come around. 

And it is all insufficient. 

It is not insufficient because nothing can be done.  It is insufficient because we are not spending the money.  Making the decision to reverse the land management policies of the last century and a half is not easy.  It is a case where we are telling people what to do with their property in name of the greater good. It is the larger society that is deciding what that greater good looks like. 

It is time that society at large be willing to pay for what we are telling individuals to do in our name.  

Some of the new rules need not cost much.  A field is just as productive when the fence is a few yards away from seasonal and all year creek beds. 

Some of the rules should cover things that people are going to have to spend money on anyway.  A roofing tile should not be made out of flammable materials, not in this state.

Then there are things that will cost quite a lot, and the state should help pay for.  If we need to move houses away from repeated flood or burn zones, the public needs to pick up the cost. We need to reclaim wastewater and capture flood waters and build the structures and artificial wetlands needed to clean up water and allow it to soak back into the aquifers. We need more and larger flood channels than ever before. We need to plant trees all over and create more forest buffer zones.  We will need to be telling people what to do on big farms in a way we never have before.  The government will have to tell, not ask, but at the same time it can work with established landowners to make the changes understood and done in a way that people can live with. 

We have to give up on the old American practice of making a big plan and then sticking only certain people with the bill. We need to share the costs, and nobody should be treated as “undeserving”.

If we rise to the occasion, we can adapt and mitigate the global crisis.  The trail to doing so leads back to everyone doing their share to pay for it.  That includes the wealthy paying a fair share.