Weird, Strong, Adaptable

10 Jan 2012 – Mark Lee

I mentioned in an end 2011 article for GreenBiz, on Simon Mainwaring’s view of Contributory Consumption, that I’d had the opportunity to visit the LIVESTRONG Foundation HQ in Austin, TX as part of a series of Sustainable Life Media meetings last month hosted by Dell.

I was in Texas while COP 17 was playing out in Durban, so it may be the coincidence of timing leading me to make a connection, but I have been pondering similarities between society’s struggles to defeat cancer to the battle against global warming. Is there a lesson here?

War on Cancer

2011 marked 40 years since President Nixon signed the National Cancer Act of 1971, generally regarded as the beginning of the war on cancer.

Fortieth retrospectives on the occasion frequently mentioned two things. First, that no one thought we’d go four decades without a cure. And, second, that part of the challenge has been the growing recognition that it may have been a mistake ever to have thought of cancer as a single disease. Much common wisdom now perceives endless cancer variations, each affecting those afflicted differently, leading some researchers to argue we’d be better labeling cancer – really cancers – something like ‘weird cells’ until our understanding deepens to a point when we fully are able to distinguish between deviations.

Winning Battles

If cancer is so diverse, and a cure or cures likely still distant, how do we help patients in the critical interim?

Enter LIVESTRONG. In an arena dominated by science-based organizations doing (crucial) work to find cures, it focuses on helping people deal with the complexity of the disease and living with it. One of things the foundation does is provide Navigation Services, “to help people affected by cancer learn what to expect during the cancer experience, learn what questions to ask and connect people to appropriate resources.” LIVESTRONG Navigation Services help people understand the affliction and how to keep living while battling to survive it – regardless the current state of the larger war on cancer. Advice covers relatively mundane but essential issues like transportation and childcare, as well as the challenge of selecting treatments and understanding insurance coverage (and options in its absence).

Further, LIVESTRONG is most focused on specific populations including adolescents and young adults – people ranging about 15-35. This is due to the simple reason that while mortality rates among children and more mature adults have dropped radically, survival rates for teens and younger adults have barely budged. More likely to die from cancer, this group needs more and different help.

From Cancer to Climate

Full points to any of you who thought of Thomas Friedman in a climate context when I mentioned ‘weird cells’ as a cancer descriptor above – for some time he’s suggested ‘global weirding’ would better describe climate impacts (and help refute deniers) than ‘global warming’, as, for example, changing weather patterns will deliver their share of harsh winters and snowstorms as temperature patterns change. And kudos too if you recognized LIVESTRONG’s Navigators help people develop appropriate adaptation strategies, orienting on the needs of particularly at risk groups.

Reluctant Adaptation

Up to about COP 15 in Copenhagen, climate mitigation strategy dominated to a point where discussion of adaptation was near verboten. But mitigation is proving to be to climate what research towards a cure is to cancer; essential, but not anything we can count on short term. So adaptation has come increasingly into focus; if not necessarily preferred, its essentiality breeds reluctant embrace, especially when we consider the billions of climate innocents yet unborn who will inherit the greatest challenges of adaptation and have to live new lifestyles shaped by climatic shifts and whatever mitigation strategies are eventually adopted.

Cal-Adapt

If LIVESTRONG models an adaptation approach for cancer, extending and improving lives while science seeks cures, Cal-Adapt is a prototype for the kind of climate adaptation tools needed to transition through ‘global weirding’ until GHG emissions peak and decline.

Developed in response to the 2009 California Climate Adaptation Strategy by UC Berkeley’s Geospatial Innovation Facility with support from the California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program and Google.org, Cal-Adapt “synthesize[s] existing California climate change scenarios and climate impact research and...encourage[s] its use in a way that is beneficial for local decision-makers.”

While the target population – California policy-makers and residents – can’t be described as the most vulnerable, they will certainly suffer climate impacts. Cal-Adapt informs and literally illustrates likely impacts, showing in local profiles on a map of California what will happen in specific places in terms of temperature, sea level, snowpack and wildfires based different carbon emissions scenarios. The tool makes it personal: typing in my own Northern California address tells me my community should be particularly concerned about temperature and sea level rise, with anticipated average annual temperature rising from 1.8 to 3.0 degrees Celsius this century, while the local land area vulnerable to a 100-year flood event nearly doubles. And, bad news, those are the projections for a low emissions scenario.

War on Climate – and Battles Meantime

As surprised and disappointed as researchers have been to arrive at the 40th anniversary of the war on cancer without a cure, those campaigning to stop global warming can’t believe that two decades since the Rio Earth Summit and fifteen years since adoption of the Kyoto Protocol we not only have failed to produce binding caps on GHG emissions, but continue to see ongoing debate on climate science itself.

As chronicled here by SustainAbility Chair Geoff Lye, while COP 17 in Durban delivered more than most anticipated towards “securing a long-term mitigation roadmap,” this was against incredibly low expectations, and even a dramatic increase in resolve and action among policy-makers and business leaders will leave us in a situation where widespread climate adaptation strategy development and deployment is required. LIVESTRONG and Cal-Adapt hint at the kind of resources – weird, strong and adaptable – needed in the decades ahead. I hope the maxim on flattery bears out, and that they have many imitators soon.