Climate change – let's hear solutions, not just problems
OPINION : When you walk into your doctor's office and they give you bad news about your health, unless your case is terminal, the diagnosis almost always comes with treatment options. Behind the scenes, central, regional and local government are working on both the "diagnosis" and "treatment" options for climate change. However, working up climate change solutions can involve long lead times. So what ends up happening is that we are being drip-fed the first part of the process work on the diagnosis without there having been time to formulate clear treatment options. How this is all playing out in the media is reflected in the article headed How vulnerable is your home? (Aug 5). It showed maps from a just-released Greater Wellington Regional Council report showing which areas are likely to be inundated. Such work is a sensible first step from the regional council. However, when the public see such maps, they give the message to anyone who lives in the possible inundation zones something like: "be afraid, be very afraid for your insurance and property values". The report went on to say that regional and local government want to "engage with coastal communities to develop options for responding to climate change". A fair enough approach. READ MORE: * Your council - what's its job description? * The NZ council leading the way on climate change * No, the heatwave isn't lovely, it's extremely worrying * How vulnerable is your home? However, as the public watch more and more news of the Amazon burning and polar ice melting, they may start to panic. If this happens then a drip-feed approach to climate change risk management may no longer be appropriate. It might sound to the public a bit like your doctor saying: "Hey, the bad news is you've got a major lump. But, sorry the appointment is over now". Most of us would say, "Doc, can't we start talking about treatment options now so I don't go home and stew about what might, or might not, be able to be done". It is going to be challenging for local and regional government to avoid a situation where the public hears a progressively more scary diagnosis combined with the much slower process of councils working through a longer-term dialogue with communities about possible solutions. As well as the fact that working out solutions takes time, I suspect there is a perspective on consulting the community which, while being laudatory, may not be the best way of framing up the climate change community consultation issue given the situation we now face. As a strategist who has worked on other areas of government-community dialogue,I see that at one end of the consultation spectrum is the idea that government whether central, regional or local has to go to communities without formulated solutions in order to "just let communities speak". At the other end of the spectrum is the idea, now rightly discredited, that government can just turn up with a plan and "tell communities what is going to happen". The best approach, especially for climate change, lies somewhere between these two extremes. The problem with the "telling communities what the answer is going to be" approach is obvious. However, the idea of local or regional government just saying to communities "what do you think should be done about this, we don't have any specific ideas" is unlikely to work. Communities may well respond with panic, a head-in-the- sand approach, or a shoot the messenger reaction and have no useful way to process what it is realistically possible to do about the problem. A happy medium is for local and regional government, as soon as possible, to work up some possibilities they can take to communities addressing potential solutions. Given the political, media and legal ramification they will obviously have to be careful how they frame such options. The reality is that as soon as the average person realises the scope of the problem, they will be crying out for information about what might be technically possible. For instance, what height can sea walls feasibly be built? Roughly how much would they cost? If things get really insane, could we dam the mouth of the harbour to spare us the expense of building sea walls all the way around? Or is this just impossible to do? I would suggest that local and regional councils now prioritise working up such sets of possible definitely not certain solutions. In addition, they need to rule out solutions that lay people may have that are simply not possible from an engineering point of view. This regional council "solutions work" is at least as important as the ongoing technical work on specifying areas of vulnerability. Given where we are at with rapidly escalating public awareness of climate change, producing such preparatory work on indicative solutions sooner rather than later is central to having a coherent discussion with communities. The other option may well just terrify them out of their wits as we drip-feed them what climate change is likely to bring. D r Paul Duignan is an honorary research fellow at Massey University, a psychologist, strategist and tech entrepreneur. http://parkerduignan.com/pwd/climate-change