NDMA announces painting, photography and short film contest
Winners would be conferred cash wards up to Rs100, 000
ISLAMABAD (APP) – The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has announced a nationwide competition of painting, photography, and short film for students above 18 years of age under the auspices of its patronized Pakistan Expo on Disaster Risk Reduction (PEDRR-23).
The painting competition at NDMA’s patronized Pakistan Expo on Disaster Risk Reduction would help the youth to use their art to inspire the “Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)” spectrum in Pakistan and win cash prizes.
The winners would be conferred cash wards up to Rs100, 000 for 1st, Rs75,000 for 2nd and Rs50,000 for 3rd top achiever.
The aspiring students were asked to submit their artwork by 8th July 2023 in oil/water/canvas or digital format in A3 size on any one of the following thematic areas: Pakistan’s Resilience in Natural Disasters & Climate Change Impact, Human Induced Disasters (deforestation, forest fire, pollution etc), DRR and Technology and Better Preparedness Through Innovation.
It also provided an equal opportunity for aspiring filmmakers to showcase their talent and creativity in the short film competition at PEDRR-23 and secure their chance to win cash prizes and recognition.
The first prize winner would be awarded a cash prize of Rs100,000, for 2nd Rs75,000 and for 3rd Rs 50,000.
The short film duration limit must be 30-45 seconds covering any one of the thematic areas mentioned above.
Moreover, the NDMA also provided the opportunity for the youth to have a keen eye for capturing the beauty and resilience of people and nature in the face of disasters.
The top three winners of the photography competition would be given the following cash prizes of 1st: Rs100,000, 2nd: Rs 75,000 and 3rd: Rs 50,000 respectively.
The participants would have to submit their images by 8th July 2023 in A4 size covering one of the thematic areas mentioned above.
It has been mentioned by the NDMA that the content must be original as plagiarism will be considered disqualified. The age limit will be 18+ and only enrolled students will be allowed to participate.
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Wander the world with wide-eyed wonder from the ease of your armchair, as Our Planet II, an inspiring new Netflix four-episode docuseries (premieres June 14), unveils answers to mysteries about why and how billions of animals relentlessly migrate — phenomenal travel adventures that have criss-crossed our globe for millennia. Silverback Films and its Emmy Award-winning team behind Planet Earth and Our Planet dazzle once again with gorgeous swoop-and-soar, dive-and-discover, cutting-edge cinematography, which showcases intimate storylines that are pulse-racing, perilous, enlightening, tender and joyful. “Only now are we beginning to understand that all life on Earth depends on the freedomto move,” declares narrator Sir David Attenborough, British author, biologist, broadcaster and natural historian, whose famously gold-standard soothing voice resonates. “Experience the extraordinary journeys that shape our world,” he invites. “For many animals, the instinct to move is overwhelming, despite the dangers. But for every trip that ends in tragedy, countless millions reach their destination.” This is an opportunity to peek at far-flung getaways and creatures that you might otherwise never see. Orchestrating this ambitious project, the program’s crew touched down in 21 countries on seven continents, tallying up 934 filming days, 292 travel days and 85 quarantine days. More than 200 people were involved in creating the show, including 50 camera operators. Special kudos to music composers Jasha Klebe and Thomas Farnon, who have scored stellar high notes for this production; the official soundtrack (released June 14) is available to stream/download on Amazon and other major digital music services. Series Producer Huw Cordey and Executive Producer Keith Scholey share their personal behind-the-scenes insights below.
Four thematic narratives — World on the Move, Following the Sun, The Next Generation and Freedom to Roam — weave this extravaganza together. Each episode covers three months of Earth’s orbit, celebrating key animal movements. At every hour of every day, astonishing masses of animals — gigantic and minuscule; in the air, on the ground, throughout the seas — are guided by instinct, sun position and a compass-like mental-mapping agility that is intrinsic to their essence, replicating the same often arduous routes that their ancestors followed eons ago, seeking havens to eat, drink, breed, give birth and secure safety. Each episode culminates with a cliffhanger.
Massive migrations stretch across the African savanna.
Elegant drone shots record landscapes’ grandeur, as well as ride the skies alongside flocks of birds, so proximate that you can stare at their eyes and almost sense the air currents uplifting their wings. Newly advanced low-light camera technology now makes possible documentation of night activities and the infiltration of darkest rainforest hideaways. Underwater camera submergence spotlights splashy revelations.
Gray whales are formidable long-distance travelers.
For travel lovers, destinations abound. Among the favorites: lions and buffalo in Botswana; humpback whales in the Bering Sea; Laysan albatross and tiger sharks in the Northern Hawaiian Islands; lions, zebras and wildebeests in Tanzania’s Serengeti; rarely seen Tawaki penguins in Fiordland, New Zealand; elusive pumas in Patagonia; nesting turtles on Mexico’s Escobilla Beach; elephant seals in the Falkland Islands; Gentoo penguins in Antarctica; gray whales off the coasts of California and Mexico; orcas (killer whales) hunting in California’s Monterey Bay and, in the Himalayas, Demoiselle cranes that forge the most strenuous migration of any bird species, navigating at heights of almost five miles above sea level over the stupendous Asian mountain range and continuing across the desolate Gobi Desert in Mongolia before wintering in Khichan, India, where villagers kindly welcome them.
The migration of Demoiselle cranes is a stunning feat.
Huw Cordey, Series Producer: “The integrity of every habitat is dependent on the animals moving in and out of it, particularly those in the more Northern and Southern parts of our planet. But, even in jungles along the Equator, you have animals moving very large distances. Movement is absolutely fundamental to every single habitat on Earth.”
Keith Scholey, Executive Producer: “It’s also about the life cycles of animals, and how crazy they sometimes are. The journey of the sockeye salmon is familiar, but I think a lot of people don’t realize that they are actually programmed to breed and die. They spend their life as an ocean fish until that one journey up the river.”
Cameras were so close to this bear eating sockeye salmon that “crunching” sounds can be heard.
Scholey: “The scientists in the field, the ones who live in these remote places, are the people who know those stories. We are totally dependent upon their knowledge and their skills. Once we actually get on location, our experienced producers, directors and cinematographers can jump in and choose which of those stories to follow.”
Cordey: “That’s why I don’t believe in storyboards for wildlife films. It’s not that we don’t think very carefully about the sequences that we’re going to film, but if you go into a shoot with a storyboard, you will miss important things. Animals don’t read scripts. They do unexpected things and you have to be prepared. I try to get my teams to tear up the shot list at the airport. But we can’t make films without the scientists, or at least the scientific information that they provide.”
Scholey: “When that perfect combination of scientists and filmmakers come together, it’s really powerful. Sometimes the scientists even look at our footage and say, ‘Wow, I never knew that. That’s really helpful.’”
Cordey: “Obviously this is an entertainment series, and we do need to get the big iconic animals in there. But while the audience might come to it for polar bears and lions, I always think the things they remember are the smaller stories. Locusts, for example. Christmas Island crablets. When it comes to migrating animals, some of the best stories are birds, because of the distances they travel. We tried to use a balanced approach, and keep in mind that some shoots won’t work out the way we hoped they would. Although I have to say that for a project that was three years in the making, covering many different species across every single continent, there was very little that didn’t work out – which is, in my experience, quite unusual. I think we got a little lucky with some of the stories, but our research was also very good.”
Pumas, also known as mountain lions, in Patagonia.
Cordey: “Nighttime and drone technology have vastly improved in the last five years. Macro technology, too – there are some very, very innovative macro lenses out there. Our bee shoot is a good example of a very special grip. It was designed by the cameraman that shot the bee story, and the whole shoot was probably a year in the planning. We were working with some very experienced beekeepers in Germany, as well as a photographer who has done an amazing book on bees and a scientist who had been studying bees for years. That was a classic example of where we’re dipping into years of experience to try to film the very best sequence we possibly can.”
Cordey: “In the case of the Laysan albatross, we had the rare opportunity to spend almost the entire shoot following the trials and tribulations of a single chick. There it was — this big, chunky chick — and we could just stick with it for six weeks. The shoot itself was very interesting: It took six days to sail there from Hawaii, and I believe we are the first natural history series to film the maiden flight of a Laysan albatross. They’re the longest-lived birds of all, and they take this enormous journey around the planet for years before they breed for the first time. The original idea was to do an underwater shoot with the tiger sharks waiting in the shallows at Laysan, but the first day the tiger sharks were around, the crew got into these inflatable boats — and two sharks attacked them. It was like something out of Jaws. The crew was panicked, and basically made an emergency landing on the sand.”
Filming the Pronghorn migration necessitated multiple shoots through some of the least accessible … [+] lands in the Lower 48 states.
Cordey: “The changing world is very noticeable at the poles, the ends of the world. We were on a boat in the Arctic for a month, and our sightings of polar bears were virtually nil. We got [an] amazing sequence in the last 48 hours — the crew came across that mother and her two cubs and they were immediately on it. The audience is almost seeing it unfold in real time. The polar bear mother climbs on the island, followed by one cub, and the second cub just couldn’t do it. There were hardened Arctic watchers on that boat who were in tears, because they thought it was just so sad…. In the narration, I think David [Attenborough] handles it very well, because he tells you what’s going on. But as is always the way with David, he doesn’t push it. He just says, ‘Look, this is how it is.’ Where we witness unsettling scenes, we think sometimes you have to show the audience for them to really understand. It’s a delicate balance though, across the whole show. I think we have a duty of care.”
Cordey: “Animals move for a better life. As climate change makes things more difficult, the need to move is even greater. Of course, there’s a huge analogy there with humans, and it’s pretty understandable. If you grow up in a place where you can barely grow food to feed your family, you’re going to want to move.”
Scholey: “The underlying environmental story of Our Planet II is that to have a healthy planet, you can’t have borders. You have to let life roam. We as humans like to divide the world. We like to have territory and we like to protect our borders and stop movement. We have to use our intelligence to look at the natural world and compensate for this tendency of ours, if we want to actually allow the natural world to function. Because so many ecosystems on which we ultimately rely for our agricultural health need to have this movement of nature.”
Balancing Tourism and Conservation
A family of wild elephants in China took a staggering journey. Here, they are sleeping.
Netflix
Scholey: “Through my career, I’ve seen this really interesting scenario happen with the natural world. The big picture is that habitats are being destroyed, and there is less wildlife in the world than when I started. So that’s the downside. The upside is that there have been more people studying the natural world, and in some places, there has been intense conservation. That has led to two things: more knowledge, but actually more habituation.”
Cordey: “Places that become more protected get tourism, and through tourism, animals become more used to humans. They don’t see us as a threat. But it is the most extraordinary thing to get that close to a large, dangerous predator on foot, like a puma. That’s the most surprising thing. The crew did come across a male puma that was on a kill. It wasn’t one of the habituated animals, and he looked extraordinarily angry. They had to back off really, really quickly. So it’s not the species, it’s individuals.”
Ansel Adams created some of the definitive photographs of the Western American landscape long before climate change threatened to obliterate it forever. Born in San Francisco in 1902, Adams is best remembered for his lush black-and-white pictures of the Yosemite Valley and the Southwest, as well as for his role as an educator who influenced generations of photographers after him.
Now, the de Young — the site of Adams’s first exhibition in 1932 — hosts “Ansel Adams in Our Time,” a major retrospective organized in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, examining the artist’s legacy in relationship with the work of 23 contemporary environmental photographers breaking new ground in the genre.
While the exhibition is full of iconic Adams shots, like “Clearing Winter Storm,” c. 1937, or “Moon and Half Dome,” 1960, both made in Yosemite National Park and many deep cuts, the artist’s work is only a jumping off point.
Richard Misrach’s “Golden Gate Bridge” series, shot from the back porch of his home in the Berkeley Hills, responds directly to Adams’s “The Golden Gate Before the Bridge,” 1932, a breathtaking view of the mouth of the Bay between the Presidio and Marin Headlands – sans bridge. Mark Klett implements collage to converse with Adams and other seminal landscape photographers. The titular view of “View from the handrail at Glacier Point overlook, connecting views from Ansel Adams to Carleton Watkins,” 2003, photographed in color by Klett, is overlaid with collage elements snipped from Adams and Watkins’s earlier black-and-white pictures.
By returning to the source, both artists play to photography’s chronological promise, revealing how much – and how little – has changed.
Others are more concerned with interrogating the act of looking itself, challenging the ubiquity of the White male gaze. Catherine Opie’s landscapes, like “Untitled #1 (Yellowstone Valley),” 2015, respond to and contradict Adams in almost every way: colorful and completely out of focus. Binh Danh’s daguerreotypes of Yosemite, a printing process using a highly copper surface, mirror the viewer in the image.
Both Opie and Dahn’s pictures raise the question of how who looks changes what they see, placing the viewer inside the landscapes they photograph. In fact, the traditional absence of humans from many landscape photographers’ work, including Adams’s, presents a bit of cognitive dissonance: The human footprint is increasingly present in nature, from population growth to climate change, while the particular absence of people in Western landscapes carries colonialist connotations. What you don’t see is just as important as what you do.
Some photographers of Adams’s era attempted more ethnographic projects, like Adam Clark Vroman’s 19th-century playing card sets, illustrated with photographs of Native Americans and sold as souvenirs. Contrast that with Will Wilson’s contemporary portraits of Native Americans like “Nakotah LaRance,” 2012, a young man carrying a portable video game system and a comic book, or Wilson’s own self-portrait “How the West is One,” 2014. Wilson’s diptych represents the artist on both sides: on one, Wilson is dressed in Indigenous cultural garb; on the other, he’s dressed like a cowboy, each staring gravely into his reflection’s eyes. Here, we get a clear view of what’s missing from the supposedly objective presentation of the hauntingly empty landscape.
While Adams’s vision of the West became ubiquitous, it was itself far from objective. Credited with several advancements on the technical side of photography, he studiously crafted many of his images post-production, often combining multiple negatives and using all the darkroom trickery available to him to create impossibly breathtaking views. These technological experimentations were cutting edge at the time, and his work continues to be at home in the company of similarly daring experimenters.
Chris McCaw and Meghann Riepenhoff both play fast and loose with the negative, accentuating the illustrative — even painterly — quality photography can possess. McCaw, who builds his own giant cameras, outfitted with periscope lenses, makes long-exposure photographs in which the trajectory of the sun burns its way across paper negatives over time. Riepenhoff’s pieces are contact prints made by exposing photo-sensitive paper to various natural phenomena, like ice, in addition to light. It’s a level of integration with nature Adams never achieved, embedding nature into their work in an inversion of human’s impact on their
environment.
In one of his rare, urban landscapes, “Housing Development, San Bruno Mountains, San Francisco,” 1966, Adams turns his own lens on the direct impact of development, a zigzag of prefab homes tearing through the hillside. Compared to Adams’s earlier nature shots, this feels like a slap in the face, forcing the viewer to confront the degradation of the landscape. There’s a way in which all of Adams’s photos could be considered depictions of humanity’s impact on the land, and the continued impact on the land is fully displayed by his contemporary counterparts.
Mitch Epstein approaches environmentalism through absurdism. In “Altamont Pass Wind Farm, California,” 2007, the arid wind farm serves as a backdrop for a group of golfers playing on the green course that abuts it. “Signal Hill, Long Beach, California,” 2007, offers a scene of an oil pump wedged between homes in a suburban neighborhood, showcasing the intersection of industrial greed, urban sprawl and willful ignorance. Laura McPhee’s diptych “Early Spring (Peeling Bark in Rain),” 2008, is a view into a dense forest of burned trees, the soot-black bark of each trunk peeling away to uncover new growth beneath. It’s a heartbreaking record of wildfire damage, with a hint of a promising future.
The beauty of the natural world has grown bittersweet. Every picture in the exhibition is gorgeous, sublime enough to teach the Hudson River School a lesson, but they’re hard to look at without recalling recent and increasing environmental travesties in the Bay Area and beyond.
By avoiding the sort of didactics often present in climate activism, Adams and company remind us what we have to lose by showing us why we love it, doing so without sacrificing any of the complex dynamics present in humanity’s relationship to the land. These pictures aren’t for posterity: they’re a reminder that time is running out.
Louise Roy, Mother of Paul Nicklen NatGeo photographer (Photo: Instagram)
Therapists will tell you that not everyone can process grief without rude and painful scars on their minds and soul. Some can handle it well by calling forth their inner strength and using their fall-back system to gain support while they pick up the pieces of their life and begin marching again. Some, unfortunately, can go to pieces in grief, guilt, anger, helplessness, and remorse.
Nat Geo’s celebrated photographer Paul Nicklen has posted a touching note on his Instagram handle.
@paulnicklen “We lost our beautiful mother, Louise Roy, yesterday. @mitty and I have lived right next door to my mom for the past 12 years and these have been the best years of my life because of it. My mom ran a successful business with my brother @aaron_nicklen and the fact that we saw our mom every day is an incredible gift that we will never forget. To have had that level of warmth, guidance, support and most of all, matriarchal love, on a daily basis was the greatest gift of all. True to her French heritage, she lived with true “Joie de Vivre”. Her life was a festive party, and she lived by a set of values that allowed her to be loved and admired by everyone she met. Every morning, she hiked up a small local mountain, often with our dogs in tow. In her mid-seventies, she was in the best shape of her life and had recently retired. Tragically, a brain tumour took her from us way too early. Her kindness and generosity live on in all of us and now we carry on, trying to uphold her values as we grieve her loss. We will celebrate her life at Yates Funeral Home, Parksville, BC on November 27 at 2 pm.“
This man has only just lost his mother (two weeks ago) to a brain tumour and was to oversee the beloved mum’s funeral service on Sunday (27 November) afternoon.
With a beautiful photograph of Mama Bear and her two cubs, Paul Nicklen wrote on Sunday 27 November:
@paulnicklen “A mother polar bear would do just about anything to keep her cubs from harm, gently guiding them through a shifting and unpredictable world of melting ice and snow. Mothers are the world’s teachers of resilience, vulnerability, patience, and the fathomless reaches of unconditional love. They keep us safe, feed us, shelter us, and guide us back to ourselves when we become lost. Above all, however, they teach us to hold onto courage in the face of the unknown, giving us the strength to keep them in our hearts even after they finally leave us. Today I would like to honor all mothers across the world as I say goodbye to my own. It will be wonderful to see so many of you at today’s service at Yates Funeral Home at 2pm. #gratitude #life #love #mom“
That touching tribute is Paul Nicklen’s way of dealing with the grief of losing his mother. He glorifies all mothers in the world whose “fathomless reaches of unconditional love” and demonstration of their own “resilience, vulnerability, and patience” mould us into strong and capable individuals and also “teach us to hold onto courage in the face of the unknown, giving us the strength to keep them in our hearts even after they finally leave us.”
Paul Nicklen is not just a celebrated photographer who has done National Geographic proud with the numerous wildlife and nature photographs, he also co-founded SeaLegacy, a nonprofit collective of photographers and filmmakers that aims to inspire the conservation of the world’s oceans. A powerful climate change warrior, he is a part of who’s who in conservation. Al Gore also uses images Nicklen has shot in his lectures on climate change. “It’s an image that really allows you to have a microphone and discuss the biggest issue of our time,” Nicklen says.
So, back to how each one of us processes and deals with the loss of a dear family member.
Dealing with the death of a friend, your family, or your special someone will always be hard and may seem like the end of the world when it has just happened. You may feel at that moment that you will never be able to learn to cope, absolutely impossible. But do remember, things will always get better though at times it will be very hard.
We’ve all been through the event of the death of a near and dear one, at least once. Our condolemnces if you have visited this space after such a loss. Please see the tips below on how to help yourself sort out the gamut of feelings that emerge and threaten to drown you at the moment.
1. Do not be harsh on yourself and do allow yourself to grieve without judgment. You may experience sadness, could be upset, or even feel lost. The line “strong men do not cry” is a huge lie. Don’t be angry at yourself for feeling sad, or tell yourself that you should “man up” or get over the loss. You need not be ashamed or shy of grieving or crying or silently feeling sad as any of those can be the likely and legitimate reaction to a dear one’s death.
2. Stop blaming yourself or that you could have helped it but did not. This wasn’t your fault, you have no reason to be angry at yourself. You may find your mind welling up with any of the feelings listed below:
Denial or disbelief about the death
Shock or emotional numbness
Ruminating in your mind over how you could have “saved” the deceased
Regret for things you might have done
Helplessness or hopelessness
Anger or irritability
Guilt
Finding it tough to go through daily activities
3. You must also not compare your reaction to another’s. Just because another person is crying and choking on tears while you seem to handle it well, does not mean anything bad about either you or that person. Everyone has their individual ways to cope and express.
4. Take a few days off and stay around friends or family. This way you will become each other’s support system, watching over each other’s wellbeing. Seek leave from office or school, share stories that you have of your loved oneshare a meal, activity, or hobby that your loved one enjoyed. Even if you have not much of a bond with the other family members or friends, you can work together to plan the memorial service.
5. Turn tears into flowers. Use the funeral as an opportunity to celebrate your loved one’s life. What has happened may not likely be reversed but why cherish only the sad loss? Your memories of a loved one are likely overpowering, but many of them will be beautiful, poignant, happy moments. Take a vow at the funeral service that henceforth your loved one will only live on in your heart and memories.
6. Stay positive, busy and focussed in the weeks and months to come. Take on activities that challenge your planning and execution and get engrossed. This diversion just might allow you to emerge from the sea of emotions that threatens to overwhelm you. This is not running away but a brief break tto gather your energies and return to deal with emotions with renewed vigour.
7. If you still find it hard to cope, speak with friends, family members.Or therapists.If you still feel you are unable to cope, reach out to a counsellor. Therapists are there to help in a tried and tested manner and there should be no stigma or shame in taking the help of a counsellor.
Disclaimer: Tips and suggestions mentioned in the article are for general information purposes only and should not be construed as professional medical advice. Always consult your doctor or a dietician before starting any fitness programme or making any changes to your diet.
Stranded people along with their belongings wade through a flooded street after leaving their flood … [+] homes (Pakistan, August, 2022). (Photo by Fida Hussain.
AFP via Getty Images
The 2022 Living Planet Report, released earlier this month from the World Wildlife Fund, showed a dramatic decline in monitored populations of wildlife across the world – a 69% decline in abundance, on average, since 1970. A few days ago, I wrote about how halting, and then reversing, this decline will require far more comprehensive actions than what we typically consider as wildlife conservation. In fact, it will require a ‘whole-of-society’ approach.
While that sounds daunting, much of what needs to be done to restore wildlife and nature are transformations that we need to make anyhow for economic security and for people’s health and safety, such as the rapid transition to decarbonized power systems to maintain a stable climate.
Here I will explore one of these needed transformations to make people safer that can be done in ways that also protect or restore wildlife and nature: flood-risk management in response to rising danger from floods, fueled by climate change and other factors. At the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) next month, governments should make good on past commitments to provide funding for low-income countries to adapt to rising climate risks, including floods, and they can do this in ways that are consistent with protecting and restoring freshwater ecosystems.
River flooding is already the world’s most damaging form of disaster, averaging approximately $115 billion in costs per year. The World Bank reports that 1.5 billion people worldwide are at risk from flooding, with one-third of them considered to be poor and thus particularly vulnerable to property losses, dislocation and economic disruptions.
There are several drivers of rising flood risk globally. First, new development often occurs in areas prone to flooding. A recent study projected that, between 2015 and 2030, nearly half of global urban development—500,000 km2, an area the size of Spain—will occur in areas at risk of flooding.
Second, countries with mature systems of flood-management infrastructure (e.g., dams and levees), often have underfunded maintenance and replacement. As a result, these systems are aging and deteriorating. For example, every two years, the American Society of Civil Engineers releases a report card for infrastructure in the United States and their 2021 report card gave both levees and dams a letter grade of “D. ” They noted that hundreds of billions of dollars will be needed to rehabilitate structures to get them up to current standards.
Third, changes in land use are also increasing flood risk. The expansion of urban areas—with their extensive hard surfaces such as buildings, roads and parking lots—prevents rainwater from soaking into the soil, dramatically increasing rates of runoff and flood levels. Drainage systems in agricultural areas can also accelerate runoff and increase flood heights downstream.
Thus, for a variety of reasons, flood risk is rising in much of the world even if temperatures and rainfall patterns were holding steady. But they are not holding steady. The climate change we’ve experienced to date (an approximately 1.2° C increase in average global temperature) is already driving increases in flood frequency and magnitude. Scientists can now do “attribution studies” to discern the influence of climate change on the probability that a given flood event occurred. For example, the research organization World Weather Attribution studied the devastating floods in Europe in the summer of 2021, which killed over 200 people. They concluded that the warming experienced to date had increased the likelihood of a flood event of that magnitude, within a range of 20% more likely to nine times more likely.
Even if we successfully hit the most ambitious climate target (keeping warming below 1.5° C), flood losses will increase considerably. With that level of warming, the number of people exposed to river flooding is projected to increase by 50–60% and flood damages are projected to increase by 160–240% (with global losses reaching nearly US$400 billion per year). Warming of 2° C would result in a doubling of the people affected by floods and an increase in damages up to 520% compared to today. This is a surprisingly large increase in losses relative to warming of 1.5° C, underscoring that seemingly small differences in temperature can have major differences in disruption to people’s lives.
Global flood risk today and areas projected to have increased flood risk due to climate change. Data … [+] for current flood risk (blue colors) and projected future flood risk (hatching) were managed within the Water Risk Filter (WRF; waterriskfilter.panda.org). Current risk is based on data from the Dartmouth Flood Observatory’s Global Active Archive of Large Flood Events between 1985 and 2021. Projected increase in flood frequency (hatching) is based on projected changes to the return period of the discharge currently calculated to be 100-year flood, from multi-model mean projections centered at the year 2050, using RCP8.5. Used with permission from One Earth.
Opperman and Galloway 2022
Due to this layering of rising risk on top of current vulnerabilities, keeping communities safe from flooding will need to be a major priority of governments over the next few decades. In the past, flood-risk management has most commonly focused on building dams, levees and floodwalls, designed to keep floodwaters away from people. In addition to the maintenance challenges discussed above, this strict reliance on infrastructure can have a range of unintended consequences. By preventing floodwater from spreading out on floodplains, levees can accelerate flood waves downstream, increasing risk for others. Levees and dams also can produce a misguided sense of security, leading to dramatic increases in development on what are perceived as now-protected floodplains, resulting in far higher damages if a levee fails or is overtopped. As a testament to this effect, annual flood damages in the U.S. tripled in constant dollars during the last century, even as tens of billions was spent on flood-management infrastructure.
Further, dams and levees fragment river systems and disconnect rivers from biologically productive floodplains and wetlands. The Living Planet Index revealed an 83% decline on average in freshwater-dependent vertebrate populations since 1970. Various studies have found that dams and levees are among the leading drivers of the decline of freshwater ecosystems and species.
These various limitations and unintended consequences of engineered infrastructure have led to growing calls from flood managers for a “diversified portfolio” approach.
While keeping floodwaters away from people (e.g., using levees or floodwalls) will remain necessary in many places, that strategy should be complemented by keeping people away from floodwaters, such as through more careful zoning. Flood risk also can be reduced by directing floodwaters to the places we want to flood—wetlands and floodplains—in order to take pressure off the places we don’t want to flood, such as cities and farmlands.
This diversified portfolio approach can make a critical contribution to halting, and even reversing, the decline of nature and wildlife. More careful zoning that avoids development on floodplains will not only keep people out of harm’s way, it will also reduce conversion of these key habitats. Nature-based Solutions (NbS), defined as interventions that use ecosystems or natural processes to achieve a societal goal, can combine flood management with large-scale protection or restoration of floodplains and wetlands.
Specific examples of NbS for flood management include (and see figure below):
· Protection of forests, wetlands and floodplains to store and convey floodwaters to reduce flood levels in other places we want to protect
· Reconnecting rivers with floodplains to allow floodwaters more room to spread out, by repositioning levees further away from the river and/or through features called flood bypasses.
· Using “green infrastructure” in urban areas to slow, hold back and store runoff and allow it to soak into the soil, reducing stormwater and flood risk. These features can include green roofs (vegetation on top of buildings), swales, wetlands and parks. As a bonus, these features can also make cities cooler in the summer and increase access to nature for city dwellers.
· Allowing rivers to deliver sediment to their deltas, building new land and protecting deltas and the people and agriculture that depend on them.
A conceptual diagram of status quo land and river management (above) compared to using Nature-based … [+] Solutions (NbS) for flood-risk management (below). NbS include flood bypasses, setting levees back from the river, wetlands, urban green infrastructure, and maintaining free flowing rivers and their sediment supply. Used with permission from One Earth.
Opperman and Galloway 2022
All of these NbS interventions can help halt the decline of freshwater wildlife. If implemented at large scales, they can contribute to the restoration of the habitats they need to recover. At COP26 in Glasgow, wealthy countries have committed to directing $40 billion a year toward climate adaptation in vulnerable countries. At COP27, countries should commit to following through on these pledges. When they do, NbS should play a major role in these adaptation projects, so that the projects needed to keep people safe can also help wildlife recover.
In subsequent posts, I’ll go deeper on these various NbS, including how they contribute to flood-risk reduction and how they contribute to the recovery of wildlife.
