Lambert here: I wish “resilience” wasn’t one of those words. But it is. Like “do as you wish.”
By David Introcaso, Ph.D., health care research and policy consultant. Originally published on Undark.
Building climate resilience—the ability to adapt to climate-related disasters—defines the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ response to the climate crisis. HHS’s stated goal Climate Action Planis to “enhance climate resilience and adaptation across all HHS activities.” The department’s primary climate-related programmatic effort is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Strengthening resilience to the effects of climate changeor BRACE, which “enables state health officials to develop strategies and programs to help communities prepare for the health impacts of climate change.”
The fact that HHS has adopted resilience as a policy without explanation or public discussion is concerning. When analyzed, building resilience is an inconsistent response from THE federal entity charged with protecting the health of Americans in the face of climate catastrophe.
Ecologists first used resilience in the 1970s to describe the ability of non-human living systems to adapt to danger or disaster. The concept has since been falsified. The federal government defines Resilience is simply defined as “the ability to adapt to changing conditions and to prepare for, withstand, and recover rapidly from disruptions.” Resilience now implies the ability of organizations, communities, and individuals to quickly return to normal operations or lives after a disaster. Resilience encourages the growth of a culture of preparedness, because a future defined by endless cycles of disaster and recovery requires continuous adaptation. Building climate resilience in healthcare means adapting to, resisting, or recovering from air pollution resulting from fossil fuel combustion and anthropogenic warming.
For health policy makers, building climate resilience presents several insurmountable challenges.
Resilience ignores the fact that the damage to human health caused by the climate crisis is innumerable and inexorable, and that it can impact everyone, everywhere, at any time. For example, the World Health Organization concluded in 2022 that 99 percent of the world’s population is exposed to air pollution that threatens their health. More specifically, recent study concluded that for the more than 60 million Medicare beneficiaries, there is no safe threshold for exposure to the chronic effects of fine particulate matter (particles 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter), resulting largely from fossil fuel combustion. Another 2022 study found that almost 60 percent Known infectious diseases may be exacerbated by hazards or pathways related to climate disruption.
In 2022, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth evaluation report Prospects for climate-resilient development become increasingly limited if current greenhouse gas emissions do not decline rapidly in the near term, particularly if average global warming exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). did not decline rapidly. They are the the highest ever recorded. And for 12 consecutive months ending in June, global warming on average 1.64 degrees CelsiusConsecutive months of record temperatures have prompted the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization to announce In March, “the WMO community issues a red alert to the entire world.” In an article published in June speechThe UN Secretary-General concluded: “We need an exit ramp from climate hell.”
The inherent problem with resilience is that, as Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Sarah BrackeAs others have argued over a decade ago, it is not a solution but rather a cause. Resilient thinking assumes that danger or catastrophe is endemic, a fait accompli. Beyond our control, climate catastrophe is made acceptable. As such, resilience leaves us anxious about the future or deprives us of the ability to imagine a future beyond climate breakdown. With our lives in permanent danger, unsecured, resilience is a form of subjectivation, which denies human agency.
The populations least resilient to climate change are also minority populations. They are the ones who pay the heaviest price for climate change. They are forced to accept the conditions of their own vulnerability. In fact, resilience creates a population that is permanently exposed to climate change. Climate Apartheid is a given.
Living a life of constant exposure to climate disasters, having to constantly adapt or react to climate threats, is, in a word, exhausting. Roy Scranton described it in his book:Learning to Die in the Age of the Anthropocene”, as if we continue to act “as if tomorrow will be like yesterday, less and less prepared for each new catastrophe that presents itself, and more and more desperately invested in a life we cannot sustain.” Unsurprisingly, Ajay Singh Chaudhary titled his recently published study on climate policy “The Exhausted of the Earth” Chaudhary wrote: “Resilience is the categorical imperative of the status quo; it is crisis managers buying time. For others, resilience is exhausting.”
Resilience itself can become a significant threat. When resilience succeeds, it can become inseparable from the climate catastrophe it sought to overcome. In healthcare, for example, Medical aid and other payers have recently decided to pay for air conditioners — and, presumably, for the carbon pollution they emit.
By its reactionary nature, resilience teaches apathy, fatalism, and a perverse sense of optimism, because developing resilience makes it impossible to achieve a desired future or to design a changing world. Life lacks coherence, or what medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky calls salutogenesis. In doing so, resilience cancels out or at least undermines resistance or efforts to prevent climate catastrophe. Resistance is futile because climate threats and catastrophes are, once again, inevitable.
Resilience is an attractive policy because it gives license to a world ravaged by climate disasters. Human life, like nonhuman living systems, is a lifelong process of continuous adaptation to disasters. As Evans and Reid wrote in 2013, policymakers “want us to abandon the dream of ever achieving safety and accept danger as a condition of the possibility of life in the future.” Ecological disasters are seen as necessary for our development. words According to philosopher Frederic Jameson, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Chaudhary argued that resilience excuses resource misuse and environmental degradation: “Commitment to the ideal of resilience only maintains a world that demands it.”
With resilience, there is indeed no climate crisis. Neither targeted federal funding nor strict federal regulation to eliminate GHG emissions is needed. On the contrary, as Adrienne Buller explains in her 2022 book:The value of a whale“The best approach to climate policy is to combine regulatory relief with a greater emphasis on market efficiency. Resilience enables a “political imaginary that refuses to consider anything other than the current bleak state of political affairs,” Evan and Reid conclude. Resilience is nihilism, a will to nothingness, a government without values. Chaudhary defines it as politically inert because resilience “simply counsels quietude and parsimonious austerity.”
For HHS, resilience as a policy explains why the department has failed, under the Biden administration, to enact Medicare or Medicaid regulatory rules requiring the the health industry reduce GHG emissions or improve climate-related health care, such as by creating climate-specific diagnostic codes and quality performance measures. It is cruelly ironic that HHS allows the health care sector to emit approximately 553 million metric tons (610 million tons) of greenhouse gases per year, because these emissions harm disproportionately Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. Despite HHS recommendations assignment to “improve the health and well-being of all Americans,” resilience allows the department to simply publish a monthly report Perspectives on climate and health predict the adverse consequences that unavoidable climate disasters could have on public health. June ReportHHS’s responsibility boils down to noting that “tornadoes can happen anywhere and at any time,” “there are many types of flooding,” that the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season is expected to be “above normal,” and that “wildfires affect health in many ways.”
For HHS, climate resilience makes the department the author of its own endangerment. For Americans, we are hopeless.
