This episode examines the challenges faced by vulnerable communities in Netherlands, Wales, Bangladesh, and Florida. WATCH: Inside the planet’s race to adapt, Global Warning E2, Featured Documentary, released Oct 17 transcript below
The series looks at new climate science and faces the harsh realities of a changing world- collapsing ecosystems, marine die-offs, and escalating extreme weather phenomena. Episode 2, Against the Tide, explores how countries and communities are responding to rising sea levels, increased flooding and more frequent droughts.
TRANSCRIPT:
Our world has turned. The climate is breaking down. No longer a subject for debate. Now it is a matter of fact. The last two years have been a window on the future. Famine, fire, flash flood, and killer heat waves making suathes of our planet effectively uninhabitable. Within 10 to 15 years, all of this will be the new baseline, A planet that will at times feel hostile to our very existence.
But we are endlessly innovative. We already have all the tools and techniques we need. If we work fast and together, we can reshape our homes and our cities to better cope. But will we? Can we adapt in time to spare future generations the worst of what is coming? [Music]
1.54
From the evidence we have, life conditions on Earth would be disrupted. Billions of people would actually have to move out because a large part of planet Earth would be unlivable because of life-threatening temperatures, storms, floods, droughts hitting very hard, making food production very difficult. So you would have a a complete reshaping of the the conditions for life on Earth. [Music]
This term a new normal. I really I find it really difficult because there is no new normal. The pace of change is like that. It's not like this. And actually, the pace of change is only going to get worse.
Once pumped into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide can last a thousand years before breaking down. A millennia of trapping heat and warming the globe. from the very first moment it was emitted. A legacy that means that in the centuries ahead, even if carbon emissions stopped everywhere in the morning, there is 5m of sea level rise that will occur regardless.
The map of the world is going to change profoundly, erasing hundreds of coastal cities.
And it's not just coastal areas. It's the inland economic and and physical ripple effects of forced relocation of people that will destabilize political systems and economies.
But it will happen far enough into the future that we should learn now from others how best to adapt. 2/3 of the Netherlands is floodprone. A third of it lies below sea level. In spite of this, the Dutch face into the next century better adapted to sea level rise than many of us on much higher ground. Storm surge barriers, dams, sluices, locks, pumps, levies, and 22,000 kilometers of dikes have climate proofed the Dutch till the end of the century.
We all feel very safe here in the Netherlands and that has a reason because we are already for a thousand years working on those sea defenses and we are confident about that. But that confidence also has to be renewed all the time.
Dutch engineering is a marvel and we will have to copy some of it. But the most valuable lesson they have to teach us is don't try to defeat sea level rise. Let some of the water go where it wants to. We have in the Netherlands a room for the river program that actually means making space for the river again. I think many other countries face this process right that there's encroachment to in the river flood planes. So basically meaning that if you start living there you become way more vulnerable to flooding.
We started to give space to the river again in several ways either by lowering flood planes or by actually extending flood planes again. We have a certain strategy of looking ahead even beyond hundred years which keeps us safe and that is a very important aspect of our way of dealing with this phenomena.
6.10
At the Deltarius facility in Delft, they test the Netherlands existing dikes and flood barriers to destruction. To find out how long they will last,
we need top quality dyes here in the Netherlands. It's obvious because we have such a low-lying country.
Mark and his colleagues take a crosssection out of a dyke and then rebuild it in their flume. Then they pound it repeatedly with waves to see how long it will hold up.
We have here a continuous slope of grass and clay. And that is very handy for our research because we want to find the relation between the waves attacking the clay and how much erosion it will take, how much clay will be washed away over time. And we can generate here the largest waves artificial waves of the whole world.
because of what has happened to you in the last years. In the last thousand years you are always thinking years ahead.
It used to be just seeing what happened and then responding to that and now we are looking ahead rationally. We are calculating the exceedence of certain water levels etc.
I understand you have stopped emergency planning. You have started adaptive planning.
Yes. Yes. Yes. And that adaptive planning can help us much better also regarding climate change.
And that adaptation need not always be expensive or complex engineering. These dunes and beach are actually entirely man-made and protect against storm surges. Rahia Vanveenbek is an expert in nature-based solutions. Soft engineering mimicking nature. We walked along one of the Netherlands most successful artificially created natural defenses. Enormous amounts of sand here have been pumped from the seabed onto the shore, creating a robust flood buffer.
So, it's all about the amount of sand you put somewhere. And during a storm, the waves actually lose energy by taking away the sand. We're not going to protect all these coastlines with hard defenses. It's a matter of cost. It's a matter of maintenance, a matter of resources. So, I think we know there will be sea level rise, which will actually translate into coastal erosion. So large part of the answer is in keeping the natural system along these coastlines as resilient as possible to sea level rise.
The Dutch have adapted their political system to rising waters just as much as their sea defenses. Climate change preparations have been moved beyond politics. They have what they call the Delta program, a process of planning, funding, and building these defenses, which has taken the decision making out of the political realm and handed it over to experts.
I think for other countries to also adopt the Delta program way of thinking and take away the longer term decisions on climate change adaptation out of the political arena, it could be a wise model to actually start the discussion and I think the close collaboration there with science is very valuable.
10.00
This has not been easy. Letting the water in goes very much against the grain for the Dutch. As part of their room for the river program, 23 km of dyke keeping the Nurvard pulder dry were removed. Better they thought that farmers be occasionally compensated for flooding than a densely populated city be destroyed.
Four and a half thousand hectares of farmland became wetland. 50 farms were relocated. It was traumatic for those who had to move and even now locals don't like talking about it. But to polder is now a word in the political dictionary in the Netherlands. It means to agree something in the common good. [Music]
Time then that we stop defending against the flooding that has already happened and start planning for what science says will come. [Music] Time to stop thinking in four or five-year election cycles. Now is the moment to decide where we stay and defend and from where we will start a staged retreat. Because when governments get it wrong, it is devastating.
11.55
It would be fair to say that if there was a blueprint for how manageary realignment should be done, Fairborn is exactly and precisely the opposite of that. Ten years ago, Gwyinid Council in Wales realized that defending the village of Fairborne from rising seas was no longer sustainable. Without deciding what should be done for the people of the village, they announced that after 2054, Fairborn would no longer be protected from the sea.
It's a momentous decision was one that was unique at that moment and it suddenly turned the residents' lives upside down.
The decision may have been financially pragmatic. Keeping the 700 people of Fairborn dry was going to cost 70 million pounds. But there was no discussion of relocation or compensation. and not doing that passed an effective death sentence on Fairborn.
You saw property prices slashed significantly. This this is people's what they were going to pass on to their next of kin, their family. People wanted to try and get out of Fairborn before all of these things came to a head and more money was lost. The town's future became a national media issue. There was frenzy of coverage particularly because of this idea, the UK's first climate refugees.
Much of the world's coastline is just as if not more vulnerable than Wales to climate change. Getting the policy right will be tricky. But at least we know what getting it wrong looks like.
I think that you get to this situation where you must look elsewhere. there must be better ways of doing it and there are discussions of that in various different places around the world but certainly Gwynev and Fairborn is an example of of how not to conduct yourself.
The choice is clear. We can have an uncomfortable and probably heated debate now about retreat or we can ignore it and pay a higher bill when evacuation is the only option. In the centuries ahead, we will have to contend with 5 m of sea level rise. All of our major cities sitting on the sea and at the mouths of large rivers will need to be entirely reimagined.
14.45
It would be a serious mistake to think that we only have things to learn from rich countries. There are much poorer countries in the climate change firing line right now who are doing more with less. [Music]
Bangladesh pummeled by cyclones, rising seas, coastal erosion, drought and heat waves. There are few places where climate change is more pressing, but also few that have such a head start in figuring out what must be done.
In the last three decades, we lost 10% of arable lands. It has gone down from some 9 million hectares to approximately 8 million hectares by 2050, the projection is that we are likely to lose another to % of land.
Climate change has a habit of hitting those with least the hardest. Coastal erosion caused by rising sea levels means the Manta people have had to adapt to a way of life completely alien to humans. -foreign lgg
Once the manta were farmers, but floods and river erosion took their land. So they took to the water. The people of this community will be born, married and die on these boats. foreign lgg
Every meal and night sleep of their lives will happen on these boats.
17.18
Bangladesh is three times smaller than Germany, but has twice the population. When your land is taken by the sea, there simply isn't any more to hand out. For 300,000 manta people, this Mad Max meets Waterorld existence is their future. [Music]
Bangladesh is home to two of the world's great rivers, the Ganges and the Brahaputra. They split into 700 rivers in the delta. Climate change has made river and coastal erosion here ever more dramatic. Of those who opt to stay on land after their homes have been washed away, Masima Beum's story would be typical. foreign lgg
19.09
Here is a slum in the city of Barasal, an area the size of five football pitches which is home to 8,000 people and just one of thousands across the country increasingly filled with climate refugees. The problem of urban migration in Dhaka city for example we are seeing every 24 hours in the order of 2,000 migrants coming here mostly from the coastal zone of the country many of them climate refugees no longer just economic migrants [Music]
Masima and her friend take me an hour down the coast to where she used to live. We don't really get close, though, because what was her farm just 8 years ago is now over a kilometer out to sea. for mass. foreign lgg
20.54
Masima is just one of 173 million people in what is reckoned to be the seventh most climate change vulnerable nation in the world. But Bangladeshies see themselves as the most climate adapted country in the world.
People in the west just do not believe it's going to happen to them. There is no expectation that they're going to be hit by a storm or that, you know, they would be losing assets or the possibility of losing their lives. We anticipate storms and our disaster preparedness has been done accordingly. As a result, we have lost fewer lives in Bangladesh. foreign lgg [Music] [Applause]
In Vatarakanda Government School in the floodprone southwest of the country, children learn about climate change and how to prepare for the cyclones which now come several times a year. Okay. foreign lgg
22.58
This school and thousands of others in Bangladesh were rebuilt to serve two roles. It is now Vatacanda Government School and Vaticananda Cyclone Center. foreign lgg
Room for livestock on the bottom two floors and everyone else in the community in the classrooms above. foreign lgg
Bangladesh's main adaptation trick is social, not physical infrastructure. When extreme weather hits, Bangladeshes don't act individually, but communally. They don't see themselves as safe until every last person is safe. Deaths from storms or floods are now virtually non-existent. Whereas for us in the developed north, it seems to be practically assured. And when the water recedes, the community acts as one to repair what has been damaged. Strikes me looking at it from the outside though that your secret ingredient is social cohesion. You're responding at a community level.
Absolutely. Investment I would say that we have had most success with is in children in the coastal zone of the country. Every school has a cyclone warning program. We try to leave no one behind and we are pretty successful at doing that. Everybody helps everybody. rich, poor, we all get out and we help each other as soon as something bad happens.
We tend to measure climate adaptation in the height of our flood protection. It feels like a mistake to not also measure the depth of our social solidarity. [Music] The United Nations estimates that by the end of this decade, we will need to be spending $350 billion a year to adapt lives around the developing world to climate change. Just 3 billion a year in foreign aid would allow Bangladesh to implement its adaptation plans. [Music]
26.13
Florida's coastline is one of the most vulnerable in the western world. Its property market is also one of the most valuable. The estimated cost for a sea wall to keep the entire state safe is $76 billion. and that would only work until 2040. The most vulnerable part of the Sunshine State is the Florida Keys, a group of islands south of Miami.
We are looking at almost 5 ft of sea level rise by the year . If those projections actually come true, that's a lot of water rising over very low islands. We're going to lose large swats of islands. We will lose entire islands
in the Keys, even without the storm surge of increasingly common hurricanes, the water is creeping uncomfortably high.
So, when you look at what you see here for this time of year, this is what we call good. Just a few inches of water localized here to this corner. What it was a week ago, two weeks ago was almost the entire neighborhood. This street around the corner all the way down that street halfway down. So affected many, many residents. It's not what we like to see, but unfortunately it's a sign of the times now in the Florida Keys with the sea level rise.
Some residents of Key Largo feel that this is not what they pay their taxes for. They have already rebuilt their houses on stilts and now they want the county to elevate the road so that they can come and go as they please for 12 months of the year, not just 10.
[overlapping] We don't have garbage pickup. We don't get mail delivery. You can't get food delivered. You can't have any work done on your house. We're in a third world country over here. A third world country. Come on. Eh, I mean, we get our mosquitoes and our smell and the smell and the Yeah, it's not pretty. It's Bangladesh. Yeah, it's not that bad, right? It's not Bangladesh, guys. It's really not Bangladesh. No.
28.44
Probably the most vulnerable neighborhood in all of the Keys. $40million it's going to cost to elevate the roads in that neighborhood. It's about three to four miles.
The problem from Broward County's point of view is that $40 million for the roads around just 200 homes misses the bigger picture of what needs to be done
for the roads adaptation program. We're looking at several billion dollars, probably four to five billion for a county of 85,000 residents. So we have thousands of homes here that are ground level and so when the water comes in they're just going to go underwater. So we have a federal program where they're have a list of homes that they are recommending for elevation to make them more resilient to sea level rise. And that's at a cost of over 2 billion.
But 5 billion for roads and 2 billion for house raising will only buy the Florida Keys another two or three decades before the waters come. Anyway, bizarrely though, property prices don't seem to be affected by this information.
[overlapping] You have to wonder and I asked the residents that. I said, "How's the real estate market?" Oh, yeah. They have banner year. Last year was a banner year. The year before was a banner year.
But this is the very dictionary definition of what a stranded asset is.
It is. It is. And I get a I get a lot more calls than I used to now from realtors and mostly from people looking to buy here. So what I tell them is if we get the plans, if we get the money to elevate, your road will be good for 20 years. If not, it's not going to be habitable even in the next 3 to 5 years. So it's roll the dice. [Music]
Is 40 million a wise money to be spending on a place that you know is going to end up underwater several decades from now?
No. No. And no. I mean a crazy amount. I mean for 40 million I mean there has to be a cheaper solution. For very less for a lot less money they could just raise our roads. Yeah. And we could get in and out. there a lot of u
I suppose though CJ the question is why spend any money when you know that you're throwing good after bad.
But you could say that about okay Long Island I think and Manhattan are both experiencing that right now.
Can the taxpayer subsidize your lifestyle justly and in fairness?
No. I mean, if they came, if somebody said, "Hey, you know, here's incredible amount of money for you. You got to leave. Okay, we'll leave." [Music]
The budget for just raising the roads throughout the Florida Keys would fund the whole of Bangladesh's national adaptation plan for two years. Kelargo's dilemma is true of so many other places. the tyranny of sunk capital. Too expensive to abandon, too costly to defend. Clever climate adaptation will be about exercising ruthless and unsentimental common sense.
32.35
In the years ahead, rising waters will be added to by the challenges of fire.
It's been described as hell on earth. Firefighters are battling desperately. For the first time, a catastrophic danger warning's been issued.
In 2023, a billion acres of land around the world was destroyed by wildfire, smashing all previous records in an already worrying trend. Wildfire experts believe that global warming means many countries are going to have to start managing the landscape very differently to adapt to what is coming. With longer, warmer, wetter growing seasons thanks to climate change, there will be more vegetation and with longer periods of drought. Also, thanks to climate change, that vegetation will some years turn tinder dry.
Experts in wildfire management like Nura Pratqitar say that across Northern Europe, even countries as wet as Britain and Ireland are going to have to start thinking a little more like Mediterranean countries about how to adapt to fire.
So we have had wildfires in the landscapes we are now for centuries and millennia. Fire has been an element that has shaped Mediterranean landscapes. But it is true that we've seen different changes in the landscapes through the centuries and especially in recent years that are showing us that the wildfire risk is increasing. We see that because the fire seasons, the time of the year where we see fires is getting longer. Previous years we've seen fires almost all year long when before it used to be in the summer months between June and September. We see fires that are more intense. so higher flame lengths spreading faster, more extreme fire behavior. And we see that the consequences, the severity that those fires have in the ecosystem are also increasing. [Music]
35.10
Wildfires in temperate countries are mostly manageable now, but Nura's research shows they are evolving into something far more destructive and deadly. The modeling results are telling us that right now for instance we have flame lengths of 1 meter to 2 m high of firefront and those are going to increase to more than 2 meters. So having people fighting those kinds of flames it's not possible. It's not safe.
In her native Catalonia, Nuria showed me the aftermath of a recent wildfire. [Music] [Music]
The official reports from the Catalan fire service indicate that in some places the flames were over 60-70m high. So a fire like that it cannot be fought. You can only evacuate.
Managing the landscape be it northern or southern Europe is the best way to reduce the risk of fire. And how do you manage the landscape? One way is with a fire flock. [Music] The sheep graze the undergrowth, the goats, the lowhanging branches. Between them, they substantially reduce the available fuel without being allowed to graze one place long enough to damage biodiversity. The fire service are such big fans of fire flocks that there are now 90 of them in Catalonia alone.
Farming is one of the primary activities that we have in these landscapes and definitely helps preventing large forest fires. This is an opportunity for farming and for managing wildfires, reducing the risk, creating more resilient landscapes to climate change. Siliculture doesn't work alone. Generally, it requires additional payments or support and this can be done through different systems, but it's definitely a cheaper way to maintain our landscapes managed and prevent wildfires than having machinery or definitely cheaper than wildfires that will cost millions. [Music]
36.17
Fire and flood will be challenging, but the climate change threat that will make or break all of human civilization is famine. [Music] [Music] Like all of Subaharan and Africa, Malawi frequently experiences drought followed in short order by floods. Now climate change is reducing the recovery periods between each extreme weather event.
Malawi cannot feed itself in the coming years. In years to come, it will be very very difficult for the nation to produce food enough for its growing population. Amidst the climate involvement that we are experiencing these years, [Music]
humankind's greatest immediate task of climate adaptation will be to ensure that the 1.2 billion people living in Subaharan Africa are fed in the next years. Thanks to climate change, the hungry months start earlier and earlier each year
Foreign lgg*
But there is cause for optimism. With the assistance of NGOS's like Tokura and their Malawian partners, Eric and Elizabeth have learned how to diversify their crops and intensify production. [Music] Where once he relied on just one crop of maze harvested in March, now Eric grows up to a dozen different foods that are harvested throughout the year. Foreign lgg*
Learning how to diversify and harvest rainwater for use all year round has meant the difference between hunger and being better fed for Elizabeth Boyce. Can you give me a list of all of the crops that you're growing now? Foreign lgg*
And do you think that as the climate changes more, it's going to become even more important to have a lot of different things growing on the farm? Foreign lgg*
These adapted farms are solving the problem of an unkind climate, one household at a time. But the money that the West gives governments and NOS's to help make subsaharan Africa food secure is nowhere near enough to adapt every farm.
If the west is not able to support Malawi in terms of food technologies and all irrigation and all means that will help Malawi to get food, people are going to leave Malawi to look for greener pastures in the west because it is where they can find what they need.
Making countries like Malawi food secure is very much in our interests. [Music] Saying how many would migrate to the west in the years ahead is guesswork. But already it is easy to see how migration is twisting Malawian society out of shape. The district of Machinga has seen so many men leave looking for work that the population is now 70% female. foreign lgg*
And do you think that your husband or other men are thinking now about moving to Europe or to the wealthy countries? Foreign lgg* Music]
44.22
Aisha may have lost her husband to migration, but she has gained food security thanks to one of those many small and lowcost irrigation projects that are helping people to stay on the land and better weather what is coming. This is what adaptation looks like. A hard grind farm by farm, country by country.
Adapting only to problems within our own shores misses the point completely. As Bangladesh taught us, we are not adapted to what is coming until we are all adapted to what is coming. It's natural to assume that human civilization will endure more or less how it looks now. But we can't say that with any great confidence any longer. Humankind will not disappear. But throughout history, civilizations have risen and fallen.
The history books are full of those that failed to adapt when the future arrived. Over the next 50 years, as many as three billion people could be left trying to live in conditions that no human has ever survived. If this is the start of the decline of human civilization, then that will have been our choice. Their future will be what we make it. [Music]
In the final episode, there is only so much adapting to what is coming that humankind can do. We need to stop overheating the planet immediately and start cooling it down. Getting off fossil fuels will be perhaps the most monumental task undertaken by humankind. How can it be done and how will it change our lives? [Music] All From Al Jazeera English
***Sunday, October 12, 2025
45-min film Global Warming Ep 1 Into the Storm from Al Jazeera English w outstanding quotes n transcript at Heating Planet blog
"I've been reporting on global warming for over 20 years. You'd think that I'd have heard
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