Vacations, Global Climate Change, & Risk
A recent article in RealEstateJournal | Global Climate-Change Island Guide: Weather-Proofing Your Vacation highlights what will probably be a growing trend in the future: choosing island vacations based on environmental risk factors.
Fiji, for instance, may have a romantic South Pacific ring to it—but four severe typhoons have made landfall there in the last 20 years, which helped put it near the bottom of our rankings.
While this list of island vacation rankings is more of an interesting spin on global climate change than any real index of risk, the thought nevertheless crosses my mind that such an index could eventually be compiled by insurance companies. Check out Code 46 (thanks, Victor!) as an interesting glimpse into a possible future that such activity might produce.
My concern is that while insurance companies certainly have a huge role to play in how and when companies respond to global climate change, focusing solely on the statistics associated with risk could cause people to overlook the physical reality of the world around us. Risk in the abstract is something to be managed, but the numbers constituting “risk” are grounded in reality, in circumstances and environments. Maybe those people who vacation in vulnerable places will be sensitive to the changes they experience in those locales over time (beach erosion, for example). The question is whether they will associate changes in those exotic locales with any changes or potential changes in their hometowns.
What would happen if the same attempt at ranking was made for larger cities? This is a rhetorical question, because I know such studies have been done for natural disasters and rising sea levels, but they never really make much of an impression—they’re too abstract and require people to think about the future. But in addition to those two points, I think another reason people aren’t perhaps as sensitive to the effects of climate change in their own cities is that their cities contain very little which is sensitive to climate change. Quite simply, there’s not much nature there. There’s no rainforest, no reefs, no Serengeti plain.
I can look at the clean-up of the Duomo in Milano for evidence of climate change to some degree—acid rain, for example—but in the day to day there’s not much which screams DANGER! Perhaps something like a bleached coral reef in the city is needed…