Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for the Coming Climate Disruption by Alice C. Hill
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
As the title suggests, this book concentrates on resilience, which in this context means resilience against the consequences of climate change. The authors who are experts in the field, describe various ways organizations and governmental entities can provide that resilience. They address such issues as building on or near shorelines or in flood plains, modifying laws to shift liability for climate disasters to incentivize parties to build in more resilient ways, or to relocate, preparing the health care system better to respond to floods, hurricanes, investing in better climate and disease modeling, and so forth. Most of their suggestions are sensible and useful.
Some of the better ones are: to encourage architecture schools to include climate risk and methods to ameliorate it in its curriculum; government subsidies to insurance companies faced with catastrophic losses should be phased out so that insurance companies weigh the true risks of climate disasters better and raise rates to incentivize developers and homebuyers to make better choices; local community leaders should develop and implement heat emergency plans and centers. Some are little more than wishful thinking or meaningless technobabble, like “governments should apply insights to advance climate resilience” or “business leaders should lead a process to develop a protocol that enables companies to better understand climate risks.”
The book is aimed entirely at governments at all levels and people in a position to influence policy on a large scale such as industry leaders. It is an advocacy piece. There is little here for the average reader. I had hoped that after reading it I would be more prepared personally for coming climate-related risks, but I was disappointed in that respect.