The Need for Thoughtful Imagination in Adaptation

Best wishes to you all for 2022; I hope this year brings some respite from Covid-19 and continued progress on climate issues and investments on personal, professional, and global levels.

A persistent issue I struggle with is recognizing that one of our largest obstacles around effective climate action is “a lack of imagination,” to quote a story from The Guardian from 2021. It’s very easy to identify floods and droughts (or cyclones or melting glaciers) as our primary issue, or to focus on climate change only through the lens of access to drinking water and sanitation, water use efficiency, or resilient energy generation systems.

I would argue that a key aspect where we need the most imagination is in the rules that we use to make decisions as people, programs, and institutions. To quote a brilliant essay by J. Peter Scoblick and Philip Tetlock, “Every policy is a prediction,” in the sense that we are constantly generating or following policies, methodologies, and systems, and these “policies” always include assumptions about what the future will look like and a theories of change that will result from implementing these policies. And many of these policies miss an updated sense of the risks and opportunities associated with climate risk and resilience.

Neither of these essays are really about water, and the Scoblick and Tetlock essay doesn’t even really explore climate resilience. But their insights are important for helping us see that our theories of how things change and evolve should at least be reconsidered if not seriously refreshed.

A colleague about a decade ago tried to minimize the importance of climate adaptation for East Africa: “This climate is already so variable in annual precipitation, and climate change can’t do much more than add about 5 percent to that variability.” He was right about the state of one type of climate impact at that stage in 2010. He was also wrong about the trend, the risks, and how we might need to compensate for that impact over time (as well as many other impacts in the same region).

What I see differently in my own work between 2010 and now is that I no longer believe that a climate risk assessment is sufficient in itself; we also need to think about climate change at a higher level. Here in Oregon, my wife and I bought a piece of land in 2021 well away from the forest edge where we live now, largely on the basis of a sense that the forest fires we see as a persistent feature of regions to my east and south will become regular parts of this landscape as well. This transition may be sudden or with little warning. We updated our theory of change considerably after major fires began appearing in our valley 18 months ago so that we can be ready for that transition — even if it doesn’t occur as soon as I fear.

As water and climate professionals, we have an obligation to explore the predictions embedded within our policies, even if they do not look like “policies.” I look forward to sharing that journey together, through a common path.

John H. Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA