adaptation

Despite a steady transformation of business attitudes on climate change, businesses have been relatively slow to address adaptation to the physical impacts of climate change.

A population of White Bearded De Brazza’s monkeys were sighted recently in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, far from their original homes, raising concerns over climate change. The monkeys were spotted in a forest area that had dried out as the climate in Kenya became more arid.

Part of our shift toward less unsustainable ways of living, traveling, and doing business in the islands involves mitigating our footprints. Another part involves adapting our systems. These threads are interwoven. Our island living is threatened by global warming, resource wars, and social unrest, just like everywhere else. And our way of doing things in business, households and governance must change to fit the special challenges of our tropical islands.

Nothing could be finer than sitting with cocktails at sunset on the treehouse deck, chatting with my wife about the day’s learnings. Most often, we come round to morsels of science and insight that crossed our screens this day. Some days, it’s the crunch, others it’s the crew. Always, it’s about connecting our work with the world’s transformational trajectory. And, we weep for our grandkids. Not just for wot we know their planet will be like, but especially for wot we don’t know we don’t know about the terrestrial triggers our epoch has fingered and fired.

Sure, beach closings in Hawaii jumped way up last year as we floundered through 40 days and nites of rain. That’s one of the key findings in a report just out from the National Resources Defense Council. Still, to say that Hawaii is responsible for the nation’s poor showing on this score is to miss the point of the story. Much of the nation learned about this from headlines like “Hawaii woes push up U.S. beach closures”. The story might better be cast in terms of extreme weather events, and what the nation can expect as these increase.