Donald Trump is a Catastrophe for our Climate and we Must Start Preparing for the Disasters to Come

What would you do if a flood like the one that brought disaster to the people of Valencia at the end of last month hit your community?

Perhaps, like most of us, this isn’t something you’ve given much thought. But we all need to start taking this possibility much more seriously, as do our governments.

Because the hope that global heating can be limited to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is now dead. Even before Donald Trump’s election, many scientists were warning that this aspiration, the central goal of the Paris Agreement, had receded beyond reach.

Carbon emissions show no sign of slowing, let alone of falling at the steep rate needed to stay within this limit. 

In October, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) reported that emissions had risen 1.3% in 2023, and last week data from the EU’s earth science agency, Copernicus, showed that 2024 looks certain to be the hottest year in human history – and the second year running with an annual temperature anomaly clearly above 1.5°C.

Trump’s promise to reverse the Biden administration’s clean energy plans and “drill, baby, drill” mean that emissions and the global heating they’re driving are now sure to rise even faster.

Carbon Brief calculates that, with Trump’s foot hard on the fossil fuel pedal, US emissions will add an extra four billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030 – more than twice as much as has been saved worldwide in the past five years by the deployment of clean energy technologies.

This doesn’t mean that it’s time for other people in other countries to give up on efforts to get their governments to take faster action on emissions; quite the opposite.

As the UN tweeted on 6 November: “Every fraction of a degree of warming that can be prevented will soften the impacts of climate change.”

But it does mean that we can expect the catastrophes we’re already seeing – deadly heatwaves, hurricanes, forest fires and extreme rainfall – to get rapidly worse.

Few people have experienced anything like the rain that inundated western Spain at the end of last month. On 29 October the small town of Turis, south east of Valencia, saw 77.18 centimetres (30.4 inches) in the course of 24 hours. More rain fell on the nearby village of Chiva in eight hours than had fallen in the previous 20 months. 

As one resident told AP: “We could hear the roar of the waves, which was unbelievable. The street was completely flooded and we were hoping for some lightning so that we could at least see what situation we were in. It was all waves, currents everywhere.”

When dawn broke: “We saw all the houses that had disappeared and there was a feeling of impotence because you didn’t know where to start looking for people.”

Many in Valencia feel that both national and regional government failed to give people adequate warning of what was about to happen and were slow to help stricken communities. When King Felipe VI visited the badly hit town of Paiporta with Regional President Carlos Mazón, they were pelted with mud by a hostile crowd.

Valencia’s regional government, an alliance of the conservative People’s Party (PP) and the far-right, anti-environmentalist VOX, had recently dismantled a regional emergency unit set up by the previous administration to coordinate the response to “natural” disasters.

Although Spain’s meteorological agency, AEMET, issued a red alert early on the morning of 29 October, the regional government failed to send a text warning to residents until 8pm, by which time overflowing rivers were already sending torrents of water and mud through villages and towns.

In the aftermath, the people of Valencia have shown great solidarity, turning out in their thousands to search for the missing, bring food to the homeless and help clear the wreckage.

Heartwarming as this is, it also raises questions about how well prepared our own communities are, and how we are going to respond to the huge strains that accelerating climate breakdown will be putting on them for the foreseeable future. 

People can sometimes behave very “badly” in the face of such disasters. Social order can quickly break down, as it did for example when Hurricane Otis hit Mexico last year. In the tourist city of Acapulco, where luxury hotels sit alongside shanty towns, widespread looting quickly broke out. 

Looting and violent conflict are often seen in the desperate conditions that follow major disasters, but they’re not inevitable. As in Valencia, people can sometimes behave extraordinarily well, working together to help others survive and recover. This was the case, for instance, after the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit the north-west coast of Japan in 2011. 

These differences are not because some communities are inherently good or bad – it’s much more to do with how their societies are structured.

I lived in Japan for several years and wouldn’t want to claim that Japanese society is idyllic. But – unlike Mexico – it’s a highly cohesive and relatively equal society with very little extreme poverty.

Japan also has a high level of disaster preparedness – every neighbourhood and household has a plan for what to do if an earthquake strikes. Every schoolchild in the area worst hit by the 2011 quake had received survival training and knew of a safe place to gather, and mutual aid groups quickly sprang into action to help survivors.

So how well are we prepared in the UK? How well do people even understand the risks? We should be clear that these are not just to homes and physical infrastructure; they’re also to incomes, food supply, health, and security from civil violence. And the truth is that not many people, or indeed national and local authorities, have begun to think in depth about what can be done to mitigate them.

However, quite a bit of research has been carried out into what makes some societies and communities more resilient than others. In 2020, Dr Nadine Andrews, a social researcher for the Scottish Government, presented some of this at an event organised by Architecture & Design Scotland.

Some of the physical factors Dr Andrews highlighted are fairly obvious, such as making sure that buildings and infrastructure are climate-ready and investing in flood reduction measures in vulnerable areas. At least they ought to be; but we’re still building houses on flood plains and very few new homes even now are insulated to help people withstand the sort of extremes we’ve already begun to see. 

But Dr Andrews also wanted to stress the key role of social infrastructure: whether a society is structured so that people feel they have a stake in it, that they’re treated fairly, and so that they’re not made immediately desperate and destitute by climate shocks, either local or global. 

The UK’s food sector is now highly integrated into global food chains. But what happens if – or more realistically, when – these break down as a result of climate stresses on agriculture? How are people going to be able to feed themselves and their families? 

This is not a distant prospect. Harvests of many staple crops have been badly hit by drought and extreme rainfall recently, including potatoes, rice, soy beans and olives. And the recent flooding in eastern Spain is going to impact significantly on prices and availability of fresh vegetables and fruit in UK supermarkets this winter, as many of these originate from this region.

National food security is an issue that UK governments have hardly thought about at all since World War Two. Yet in January, eight million adults and three million children experienced food insecurity, according to the Food Foundation.

NHS data shows that more than 800,000 patients were admitted to hospital with malnutrition last year – three times more than 10 years ago. Because food security is not just about the availability of food, it’s about its affordability relative to income. 

As Dr Andrews underlined, knowledge, planning and decision-making are all crucial to resilience. Are people being made aware of the kind of impacts we’re going to see, and being involved in planning for these? If so, they are far more likely to respond successfully when these arrive.

And how well do people actually know each other? If you know your neighbours and feel that you’re in the same boat as them, you’re much more likely to want to help each other in an emergency. This kind of social cohesion can make the difference between surviving or going under, both for individuals and for society itself. 

Extremes of poverty and wealth erode social cohesion, and societies that have allowed such extremes to develop are going to be particularly vulnerable to chaos and violence as climate impacts intensify. From this perspective, the outlook for the UK does not look good. 

Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that the number of people living in destitution rose by 69% between 2019 and 2022, to 3.8 million. Destitution meaning that these people are unable to meet their most basic needs – to stay warm, dry and fed – even before disaster strikes. 

For all these reasons, the idea that climate justice equals social justice is much more than a slogan. It’s not only that climate impacts are felt much more sharply by the poor, both in developing countries and in wealthier ones.

Societies that fail to address problems of social injustice, or allow these to get even worse – as the UK has been doing – will be poorly equipped to deal with the unprecedented challenges to come.

The good news is that a lot of the same things that we urgently need to do to transition to a zero-carbon world can be done in ways that actually reduce inequality and social injustice, and make our society more cohesive and resilient.

A massive programme of home insulation could not only reduce emissions but also create jobs and cut people’s fuel bills. The same is true of renewables: the UK’s failure to invest in these, particularly in onshore wind, is one reason why so many people are now facing fuel poverty.  

A wealth tax on the ultra-rich could help not only to pay for such investment but also to reduce the grotesquely large carbon footprints of people who currently use private jets, own multiple homes and take several foreign holidays a year. 

These are political choices, and any government that fails to take them is failing in the most basic duty of government – to protect people’s lives. 

Clearly, this duty will not be featuring in the plans of the Trump administration – and this will inevitably come back to haunt it as further climate-driven disasters hit the US. But there is much more that our own government can and should be doing.

Given the extreme climate impacts that are heading very quickly towards us, this is not just a question of social justice – it’s a question of survival.