Climate Risk in the Kitchen

The starting place for seeing climate risk begins often begins in one of two distinct places. By far the most widespread perspective could be called “impacts-first” thinking. A key sign is when you hear someone describe the primary threat we face from climate change as droughts or floods, a certain amount of sea-level rise, or the frequency of super-typhoons. Most climate change professionals would include themselves in this category.

The second perspective target is what could be called the “decision transition.” The most succinct version of this worldview came from a prominent climate scientist I heard recently in a panel discussion: “Our problem with climate change is not floods and droughts. Our problem with climate change is that we don’t know what tomorrow looks like, and all of our decision making systems assume we do.” Perhaps we could also call this the floods and droughts instead of the floods or droughts problem. Her chief insight comes from an ability to look at systems — social, natural, design — and how they interact with each other. Instead of facing one kind of threat, these systems have to be resilient to many kinds of threats, which are often interacting in complex ways that are hard to predict. I find the water community has a lot more folks in this group. I think this is also where many people working on climate risk are converging whether they work on water or not.

In practice, these two perspectives remind me of trying to learn to cook as a child by watching my parents. My mother has a very detailed approach to meals: she keeps a library of cookbooks and annotations of recipes she has evolved and modified over time. My father was an improvisational cook, who never read a recipe (or wrote any of his down). He cooked where his intuition led him. He had guidelines.

I would say that a secondary characteristic of impacts-first thinking is focusing on making good projects, where separate projects are often quite distinct with hard to reproduce patterns — not unlike my father’s approach to cooking. People who frame climate change as a decision transition often want to look at whole programs, which of course are the ultimate source for streams of projects. They prepare carefully: consider a range of options in various (annotated) cookbooks, look through the pantry, visit the grocery store, ensure utensils are clean and ready. The same dish, reliably prepared, perhaps varied and improved over repetition.

Of course, some nights I model my father, while other nights I model my mother. I try to teach my son both approaches for cooking. If we know what to prepare for, our efforts can be very thorough. And sometimes steadfast planning requires improvisation and creativity. But my intuition tells me that we need more formal guidance to help with decision transitions. Indeed, that’s really been AGWA’s work for the past decade: working to transition specific types of decisions, for specific decision makers.

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA