Two maps explain why climate resilience is hard
I receive a steady stream of invitations to discuss “climate resilience”, jargon which refers to how communities might prepare for the inevitable, unpredictable climate changes that will be happening over the coming decades.
These are changes, which are bound to wreak havoc on people’s lives under almost all scenarios. It’s a matter of degree. In the worst cases, severe floods, crippling droughts, overwhelming heatwaves, deep freezes, disappearing coastlines will test infrastructure, unexpectedly interrupt businesses, turn cities into uncomfortable furnaces or open-air sewers.
The worst of climate change will bring varying degrees of misery to lives that most people had hitherto imagined taking place untrammelled, in an immutable context of security.
Water is of course at the heart of all this, simply because the majority of the climate phenomena people experience is mediated by water, by meteorology and hydrology. It therefore follows that climate resilience requires re-calibrating the management of water resources for a different regime, securing coastlines, preparing for flooding, augmenting irrigation infrastructure, and generally adapting water supplies for industry and cities so that they can continue to function.
The management of water resources is, in turn, mostly about transforming the landscape: reclaiming land, building infrastructure, canals, reservoirs, changing land use, managing ecosystems. Therefore, planning for resilience is, inevitably, about imagining a different landscape: a different configuration of what surrounds us to better manage what is already upon us.
I recently wrote a piece on the struggles Italy has in letting go of a fixed, immutable, imaginary landscape. That struggle is a real barrier to thinking strategically about the national landscape, particularly when it comes to developing resilience to climate change. In this sense it is a barrier that Italy shares with many countries around the world.
Overcoming this problem must start by placing water at the heart of strategic national planning. Specifically, placing it back where it once was: on the managed landscape. While romanticizing the past is a dangerous pursuit — I doubt anyone alive today would rather live in the sixteenth century — learning from it as an allegory for the present can prove useful.
The image above is a photograph of a frescoed detail I took last year, while visiting the Vatican’s Gallery of Maps. All who have visited the museums of the Holy See have seen this extraordinary place. It is the inevitable herding bottleneck for all tourists being shephearded towards Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.
The gallery is over a hundred meters long, and along its walls are forty frescoed maps of Italy, shown in part or whole. Pope Gregory XIII, mostly remembered today for having introduced the modern calendar, commissioned the work in 1580.
Tourists sauntered right along, paying little attention to the painstakingly rendered details of these extraordinary maps. But I was struck by the image above, showing a segment wide enough to encompass the central part of the peninsula.
The map drips with water. Lake Trasimeno is in its centre. Rome, at the bottom right. I remember noticing this detail almost immediately: countless deep Prussian-blue rivers cascade down the Apennine mountains on both Tyrrhenian and Adriatic sides, large and out of scale compared to the rest of the map’s green and yellow background. This version of Italy is a country overrun by water.
The reason for this depiction is straightforward. When the map was produced, water was the dominant contributor to life, as the economy was overwhelmingly agrarian.
Rivers were the transport routes of the country. Despite the infrastructural legacy of Rome, in the sixteenth century roads were impractical and dangerous. Transporting goods on them was expensive. Any significant commerce had to happen along rivers in order to reach coastal ports. From there, they would reach the rest of Europe by sea.
Rivers were also the only source of mechanical power, aside from animal or human strength that is. Water mills, in use since Roman times, provided the basis for the proto-industrialization of the textile industry that followed the plagues of the fourteenth century. During the sixteenth century, water was ingredient, transport system, and fuel for most production.
Finally, people were finely attuned to how vulnerable they were to changes in water conditions. By then, Europe had long entered the Little Ice Age, so water infrastructure would have been essential to sustain farming. The middle of the sixteenth century was the lowest point in the Spörer Minimum, a period of low solar irradiance which resulted in colder winters and drier summers.
Given how central water was to the economic life of the country, and how directly salient some form of resilience was to everyday life, it should be no surprise that water featured so prominently on the imagined landscape represented on those walls.
Now, to a second map. It is a modern one, showing the same area. To produce it, I simply captured a screenshot from the mapping app on my phone. My position is the little blue dot at the centre top.
Lake Trasimeno is still the largest lake in the center, Rome still in the bottom right. But the only other water features are a couple of unavoidable lakes, incoherently disconnected from anything around them.
In this map, any functional role for water has disappeared. Roads have taken its place as the principal means of communication, brightly coloured and out of scale. No rivers cross the country represented in this map, nor does rain seem to fall on it.
The difference between these two maps speaks to the degree to which the imagined landscape can be an obstacle to building resilience. The viewers and producers of the modern map evidently no longer feel the need to provide clear indications of where the waterways are, where they come from, or where they go.
Modernity has created a dangerous illusion of security, the belief that where water is and what it does should not be the concern of the general population. The ability to imagine a different landscape and subject it to political scrutiny is limited by culturally determined ideas of what the landscape ought to look like.
It is not that modern Italy is any less dependent on, or vulnerable to, its water conditions than it was in the past. Without fail every autumn, news of catastrophic flooding in many modern Italian towns litters the pages of the national broadsheets. Indeed the value at risk from uncontrolled water phenomena has never been higher. And by all accounts, climate change is going to make it worse.
Yet, also without fail, Italians treat each of these events as unexpected, catastrophic, unique acts of God. Almost every autumn, the nation reliably stands in amazement at the sight of water suddenly reclaiming its territory, as if rivers had no business being there in the first place.
The degrees of freedom that a community has in building up its resilience to change are limited by how that same community imagines its surroundings. Planning how we might have to modify our home to prepare for change is a tricky pursuit, when those doing the imagining do not recognize the presence of the very substance responsible for the most egregious impacts.
Resilience must start with reconciling the imagined and real landscape on the waterways of the country. If Italy, like many other countries, is to manage a changing climate, it needs to relearn what it once knew: that acknowledging and managing water contributed to making the nation secure, and that Italians depend above all on their waters.
