Don’t despair, Del Mar.

Never stress, Newport Beach.

Yes, sea levels are rising. Yes, California’s coastline is eroding and changing. And yes, even with Californians taking action against climate change, we are going to lose beloved beaches, bluffs, and homes.

But we must not let our relationship with the coast become dominated by fear, division, and local politics. Approaching sea-level rise as another legal-political fight encourages the kinds of climate response—drastic, panicked, and litigation-driven—that our descendants will rue.

Instead, we should embrace the coast’s constantly shifting nature, cling to its mysteries, and celebrate its evolution as a way to encourage our own.

How? In the spirit of California, I want us all to party on the beach. All day and all night. The state known for social innovations such as Beach Blanket Bingo should apply the full force of its fun-making genius to organizing free, public events that draw Californians to the coast.

These events would combine the spirit of an Irish wake, a beach barbecue and an urban planning meeting. There would be good food, abundant drink, and grand visions to help us mourn the coast we’re losing so that we might imagine a better future for our coastal communities, and ourselves.

In saying this, I don’t mean to minimize the seriousness of climate change or sea-level rise. West Coast waters are now rising as fast as any on earth. Under worst-case scenarios, nearly 1 million Californians could be displaced, nearly 400,000 homes could be lost, and property damage could approach $200 billion. Our coastal species face extinction, our biggest industries could suffer crushing blows, and transportation infrastructure from the airports to the Amtrak rail line to San Diego are at risk.

In this context, my plan for beach parties addresses a serious flaw in our climate change planning process—that we’re fighting too much over what we do, and not thinking enough about how we do it.

Already the state is mired in bitter struggles over rising sea-levels in our coastal communities—between those who want to defend themselves from the ocean with sea walls and those who prefer “managed retreat” from the coast—that threaten to harden into divisive, decades-long legal and political battles.

We’ll be better off if we face the rising seas with a welcoming attitude, as you would when an old friend—in this case, the ocean—moves back to town. Yes, our coast is changing, and so must we. We should seize on rising waters as an opportunity to appreciate a new coast. In the process, we might get to know the visible edge of our continent, and ourselves, even better.

After all, this is the California coast, one of the world’s greatest treasures, and, according to the state constitution, it belongs to all of us. It has come to define the California ideals of beauty, play, refuge, and environmentalism; images of the coast have inspired millions of people to visit California, and even settle here.

So let’s not build a wall. Let’s not retreat. Let’s put on our wet suits and wade in. Let’s embrace the flood.

And let’s move the conversation out of the courts and city council chambers—and onto the coast itself. Bring on the beach parties, and the potlucks. Let’s have open houses at homes and fire stations that sit atop doomed bluffs. Every coastal community should have a grand coastal fair. And given how fossil fuels contribute to climate change, the state could justifiably use a small piece of its oil revenues to help pay for all this fun.

Coastal fairs would combine food, fun and games—surfing, volleyball, even sandbag-filling contests, and plenty of cold beer and ice cream—but they’d also create opportunities to share information. Agencies and experts could be on hand to answer questions, and lay out markers to show where the coastline might move, and what might be lost, under different sea-level projections. Artists could drop by to create visions of the future coast.

The goal of such gatherings would be to expand local knowledge, and to introduce new realities to the inland Californians who don’t get to the coast much. At coastal fairs, they’ll quickly understand that sea-level rise is already quite visible—and not only in places like Pacifica or Del Mar, which have made the news for losing property. In Malibu recently, I was shocked to discover that my favorite beach is now completely gone at high tide.

Bringing more people to the coast could help build consensus about the challenges we face, and inspire new ideas. Given the long-term nature of the problem, kids should get involved in this new thinking, too. Why not have California schools ditch the outdated mission reports and have their students report on particular stretches of coast instead?

Responding to sea-level rise with beach parties also could stoke local democracy. Communities have been slow to create the inventories of vulnerable properties that they need to plan for sea-level rise. Coastal fairs could speed up the process. If local communities don’t get their act together with smart, unifying plans for their coasts, the state government in Sacramento is likely to fill the void, imposing one-size-fits-all policies that only cause more conflict—like the never-ending water wars that plague California’s inland regions.

Sea-level rise also offers a huge opportunity to reclaim access to the coast, which is too often controlled by rich homeowners and other wealthy interests. With the coastal properties of the rich now at risk, there’s a real opening for Californians to take the coast back—but only if we pull together.

The idea of partying around sea-level is as old as the Book of Genesis, when Noah celebrated surviving apocalypse in his ark by getting drunk and taking off all his clothes. And in recent years, a few communities, from San Rafael to Santa Cruz, have hosted wonky events on sea-level rise.

“What’s the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?” asked the Canadian-turned-Californian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen.

The best answer to that query is: something happy. California’s most powerful tools for responding to sea-level rise are our affection for the coast and our sunny optimism in the face of Armageddon.

Let’s use both.

The post Why Californians Should Party on the Beach Now appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A panel of experts gathered at Artistry Honolulu to take their best shot at the urgent question “What Can Hawai‘i Teach the World About Climate Change?” The Zócalo/Daniel K. Inouye Institute “Pau Hana” event brought together Chip Fletcher, a University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa geologist; Robert Lempert, a RAND Corporation scientist and contributor to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and Joshua Stanbro, chief resilience officer for the City and County of Honolulu.

Despite the recent torrent of grim United Nations reports, and terrifying TV footage of Florida beach homes being blown to smithereens, the evening’s tone was relatively upbeat. While nationalistic leaders bellow about withdrawing from international climate accords, states like Hawai‘i and California are aggressively pursuing their own environmental paths, and the panelists suggested that significant work is being done at the state and local level to keep Earth from turning into a giant Sahara.

Much of the discussion, which took place before an overflow crowd, focused on how the most remote of U.S. states (as well as one of the smallest) could become a climate-change laboratory and set an example for others to follow. Moderator Catherine Cruz, host of Hawai‘i Public Radio’s “The Conversation,” dived straight into the question of how Hawai‘i—which lately has been battered by torrential rains, volcanic eruptions, and other torments—can bring its citizens together around climate-related issues.

Stanbro, the Honolulu official, acknowledged that even experts sometimes are unsure how to size up the risks to the planet—and figure out how best to respond. “We don’t know how this is going to shake out, so we’re sort of inventing it in real time,” he said.

That’s one reason, Stanbro explained, why Honolulu city and county are holding a series of nine meetings around the island of Oahu, to get a sense of what various communities are doing to address specific local problems, set priorities, and develop action plans. Stanbro said that many cities and counties have stepped up their responses to global warming, now that bond agencies are including climate change as a risk factor in evaluating municipal credit ratings. If a municipality doesn’t have a good plan for mitigating these threats, a bond agency may give it a lower credit rating, making it more expensive for the municipality to get credit and take on debt.

Lempert, the RAND expert in climate management and adaptation, said he has studied communities around the country that are making climate-change response a critical part of their planning. Stage one of this process, Lempert said, is simply for communities to notice and acknowledge that climate change is happening. Step two is making a risk assessment. Step three is coming up with an action plan to reduce the municipality’s carbon footprint.

“We’re just starting to see people moving into it, and there’s a lot going on,” he said, citing communities that are developing new guidelines for bridges, roads, and other infrastructure that now have to take climate change impacts into account.

Fletcher, the geologist, said he recently co-authored an op-ed in a local newspaper about sea-level rise, which could reach one meter (about three feet) by the end of this century. Hawai‘i is very susceptible to this menace, particularly during the summer, and high-tide flooding could prove catastrophic before mid-century, if present carbon emission rates persist.

Rather than stick their heads in the sand, communities need to start adapting to these changes, Fletcher said, and some are doing just that. He has proposed that if a community is going to invest in long-term expensive infrastructure, like a coastal power plant, it needs to anticipate as much as a six-foot sea level rise because it’s unclear how fast the Antarctic ice shelf will melt. Fletcher also said that improved climate-change modeling also can offer better predictions on how (for example) erosion caused by rising seas will affect Oahu’s north and south shores in different ways.

Climate change is in many ways a numbers game: A rise in global temperature of 1.5 degrees centigrade could prove devastating. Such a figure may sound small, Lempert said, but on a global scale, over long periods of time, “that’s a gigantic number.”

“When we were six degrees colder, we had miles of ice on top of North America,” Lempert said. “When you gather up all the scientific evidence, half a degree makes a surprising difference.”

Such an increase could swamp parts of Hawai‘i, whose seas already have risen 3.5 inches since 1960, according to some calculations. And with world temperatures currently heading for 3.5-degree centigrade increase by the end of the century, much will hinge on what happens in places considerably bigger and more densely populated than the Aloha State. There’s a growing demand for new energy, and about half of this is coming from India and China, whose populations are eager to enter the global middle class.

What’s really needed, the panelists concurred, is “a war on carbon.” The developed world needs to be helping poorer countries buffer themselves against the worst effects of a warming atmosphere while slashing overall carbon emissions by about 50 percent per decade, if global warming is to be limited to no more than 2 degrees by mid-century. That scenario, the panelists conceded, would be a huge stretch. But Hawai‘i, which has vowed to be virtually carbon-free within three decades, already may have helped sway California Governor Jerry Brown to make the same pledge, Stanbro suggested.

Hawai‘i also can learn from other communities. Fletcher said he recently did some research on how flood-threatened Miami has invested a small fortune to build 80 pump stations which will take rain runoff and other water, spin out some its contaminants, and recycle it into Biscayne Bay. The city is studying how to sacrifice the first and second floors of buildings to allow water to move back and forth through these structures, and also how to raise many of its most vulnerable roads.

Some of those same strategies could be applied to Waikiki Beach, he said, because it’s obvious that fleeing an area is simply too costly and too difficult technically. “We’re wondering how to adapt in place” to surging seas, said Fletcher, adding: “A year ago, I was wondering when are we going to get going on this. Now I stand in amazement at the city and county of Honolulu, and also the state, at the progress we’ve made… in the last two years.”

During the audience question and answer segment, one attendee asked how renewable energy could figure in plans to grow Hawai‘i’s rail system. “By 2045, the entire grid is going to renewable,” Stanbro replied. “As the grid gets greener and greener, the train gets greener.”

Another audience member asked how to make fossil fuel corporations aware of their environmental responsibilities. “We need to stop subsidizing them,” Fletcher responded—but, he continued, we should remember that fossil fuels helped lift humanity out of the hunter-gatherer phase. The problem is that we should’ve started shifting away from fossil fuels in the 1970s. That didn’t happen, and the energy companies “are a main reason why it didn’t.”

A third audience member asked how to ensure that we don’t put the costs of environmental sustainability on the poor and on indigenous communities. Stanbro said that such groups already have borne a disproportionate share of climate-change impacts. “We’ve got to figure out how we put equity into this,” he said.

Still, the challenges before us are monumental, the panelists agreed, and they’ll require many municipalities to experiment with many different approaches. “Humans have been figuring their way out of pinches and problems for a long, long time,” Stanbro summed up. “I am optimistic about the models and the innovations that are going to come out as a response to the challenges.”

The post Can Hawai‘i’s Local Communities Lead the Global Fight Against Climate Change? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.