Managed Retreat - or What?

 

This essay relates features of the Covid-19 health pandemic [1] to impacts of anthropogenic global change, which societies must manage within the next century [2, 3]. As an illustration, the essay discusses the retreat from ocean shorelines because of the global sea-level rise. Mutual learning may be helpful, so the conclusion of this essay.

 Introduction & Context

Industrialised production, global supply chains, and globalised societies require geoscience knowledge to function. 

Applying geosciences involves decision making with high economic, environmental, and social costs, benefits, and risks. Therefore, professional geoscientists often face circumstances like systemic uncertainty, context-dependency, path-dependency, differentials of power, or conflicting values. These features of socio-ecological systems emerge through profound intersections of natural and social realms impacting professional dealings. Therefore, geoscientists have a genuine praxis of responsible practices, although pertinent philosophical reflections within geosciences consolidated only recently.

The philosophical school ‘geoethics’ evolved within geosciences in the last decades, emphasising the importance of the intersection of both natural and social realms wherever humans interact with the Earth System. The Covid-19 health pandemic is an example of such an intersection. Therefore, it can serve as a lesson, example and test case.  

On the other side of the coin, a specific impact of climate change is forced retreat (migration) from ocean shorelines. The underpinning threat, the century-long rise of the global sea level, is scientifically evident, difficult to mitigate operationally, communicated through media, internalised through insight; and societal response requires lasting and massive cooperation.

 Governing the retreat from ocean shorelines because of rising sea levels due to global warming is one of the 21st and 22nd centuries' challenges to make a ‘good’ Anthropocene.

 

Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic?

Any pandemic is a social-ecological system. Such systems exhibit complex-adaptive dynamics, including the emergence of counter-intuitive system behaviour. The profound challenges of the Covid-19 health pandemic arise because the economic and engineering prowess of developed societies combines tightly natural processes and cultural practices. That feature is genuine to any anthropogenic global change (e.g. global warming).

The features of the Covid-19 pandemic embed an experience of uncertainty, which is: (1) systemic, because of the complex-adaptive dynamics of the pandemic; (2) operational because action plans were missing; (3) perceptual, because any individual might fall ill seriously or, more likely, not; and (4) cognitive because many people have neither tangible experience (of the illness) nor understand the counter-intuitive dynamics of the pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic ruptured societal practices. For many in affluent societies, it is a unique collective experience of challenges to the preferred style of daily life and the perceptions of the likely personal future. The pandemic showed the (un)preparedness of contemporary societies to handle emergencies that cascade into their respective jurisdiction. It may be a cultural defect of contemporary (western) societies to expect a (governmental) plan. However, reacting in a context-depending learning-by-doing mode may be more appropriate because complex-adaptive dynamics of social-ecological systems require such heuristic strategies. 

Hence, the following question: what (ethically sound) principles may render heuristic strategies effective and efficient?

 

Sketching geoethics

Topical studies of the professional obligations of geoscientists led to an aspirational ethical concept called ‘geoethics’ [4]. Broadening this discipline-specific example of ‘responsible science’ lead to a philosophical framework of the societal contexts of the geosciences. Initially, geoethics scholars only envisioned professional applications. However, considering global anthropogenic change shows geoethics also is about proper governance. By design, geoethics is an instrument of empowerment to seek context-dependent solutions.

Six tenets describe geoethical practices [1, 5]: 

• agent-centricity, 
• virtue-focus, 
• responsibility-focus, 
• [scientific] knowledge-base, 
• all-actor inclusiveness, and 
• universal-rights base.

These tenets offer a method, so the implicite claim of geoethical thinking, to reach a balanced decision and guide learning and acting when facing, for example, systemic uncertainty, which in turn suggests the search for effective and efficient heuristic strategies when learning-by-doing is the only option. In its current form, geoethics is less normative than the notion geoethics may indicate; instead, it promotes ‘practical wisdom’ (phronesis). Hence, geoethical thinking might be helpful in the Covid-19 health pandemic and, alternatively, lessons from the Covid-19 health pandemic may inform geoethical practices. 

Example: Managed Retreat

Climate change will cause increased flooding of densely populated and highly productive urban and rural coastal zones. Significant regional differences and major local uncertainties will characterise the unfolding of the global phenomenon. Initially, the flooding (and forced migration) will be local.

 

For many, "retreat" will be a media-reported experience before understanding emerges that a coordinated response is required. A stepwise relocation of the population and infrastructures at a regional scale to higher grounds (behind a new line of shore defences) is needed with a hundred-year planning horizon. This process will involve many uncertainties, will be recurrent, and no unique strategy will be available.

Local retreat for example, from the shorelines of the North Sea because of high sea level, which is expected to exceed the threshold for safe shore defences in the early 22nd Century, would be a historical novum. So far, the lasting cultural response has been to rebuild settlements, protect them, and reclaim land from the sea. On the other side of the world, the options are not the same, for example in the Vanuatu archipelago (0.9 metres above sea level). Also, other island countries are at risk of being a vanishing nation, and their citizens risk Climatic Statelessness‘ refugees status [4].

    Conclusions

Retreating instead of reclaiming, hence, doing things differently will be a tremendous cultural, social, and economic challenge. Therefore, to learn from any experience - a health pandemic included -  to support [geo]ethically and scientifically sound endeavours.

1.         Marone E, Bohle M (2020) Geoethics for Nudging Human Practices in Times of Pandemics. Sustainability 12:7271. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12187271

2.        Kulp SA, Strauss BH (2019) New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding. Nat Commun 10:4844. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12808-z

3.        Piguet E (2019) Climatic Statelessness: Risk Assessment and Policy Options. Popul Dev Rev 45:865–883. https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.12295

4.        Bohle M, Preiser R, Di Capua G, et al (2019) Exploring Geoethics - Ethical Implications, Societal Contexts, and Professional Obligations of the Geosciences. Springer International Publishing, Cham

5.        Bohle, M., and Marone, E. (2021). Geoethics, a Branding for Sustainable Practices. Sustainability 13, 895. doi:10.3390/su13020895.