I’m Lambert. I wish “resilience” wasn’t one of those words. But it is. Like, “just be yourself.”
Article by Dr. David Introcaso, medical research and policy consultant. Originally published on Undark.
Building climate resilience – the ability to adapt to climate hazards – defines the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ response to the climate crisis. Climate Action PlanThe purpose of the Department of Health is to “strengthen resilience and adaptation to climate change across the full range of HHS operations.” The Department’s main climate-related programmatic efforts are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Building resilience to the effects of climate changeor BRACE, “enables state health officials to develop strategies and programs to help communities prepare for the health impacts of climate change.”
It is concerning that HHS adopted resilience as a policy without explanation or public debate. Looking more closely, building resilience: of A federal agency responsible for protecting the health of Americans in the face of climate disasters.
Ecologists first used the term resilience in the 1970s to describe the ability of non-human organisms to adapt to hazards and disasters. The concept has since been misunderstood. The federal government Define Resilience is simply defined as “the ability to adapt to changing conditions and prepare for, withstand, and recover quickly from disruptions.” Resilience today refers to the ability of organizations, communities, and individuals to quickly return to normal operations and life after a disaster. Resilience fosters the growth of a culture of preparedness because a future defined by a never-ending cycle of disaster and recovery requires continuous adaptation. Building climate resilience in healthcare means adapting, withstanding, and recovering from air pollution resulting from the burning of fossil fuels and man-made warming.
For health policymakers, building resilience to climate change poses some insurmountable challenges.
Resilience does not fail to recognize that the harms to human health caused by the climate crisis are countless and inexorable, potentially affecting everyone, everywhere, at all times. For example, the World Health Organization concluded in 2022: 99 percent 70% of the world’s population is exposed to air pollution that is threatening their health. Specifically: Recent Research For more than 60 million Medicare beneficiaries, the study concluded that there is no safe exposure threshold for chronic effects of fine particulate matter (particles 2.5 micrometers or smaller in diameter), which is primarily caused by fossil fuel combustion. About 60 percent Many known infectious diseases could be exacerbated by hazards and pathways related to climate breakdown.
In 2022, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report They conclude that unless greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly reduced in the near future, prospects for climate-resilient development become increasingly limited, especially if the increase in global average temperature exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Not declining rapidlyThey are All-time highAnd for the 12 consecutive months through June, global warming Average: 1.64℃After months of record temperatures, the World Meteorological Organization’s Secretary-General present In March, he said, “The WMO community is on high alert for the world,” and in June speech“We need exit ramps off the highway to climate hell,” the UN Secretary-General concluded.
The fundamental problem with resilience is Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Sarah Brackeand as others explained over a decade ago, it is a cause, not a solution. Resilience thinking assumes that hazards and disasters are endemic and a fait accompli; outside our control, and that climate disasters are accepted. As such, resilience leaves us anxious about the future or denies our ability to imagine a future beyond climate breakdown. In a context in which our lives are constantly at risk and cannot be secured, resilience is a kind of subjectivization that denies human agency.
Moreover, minorities are the least climate resilient. They bear the greatest climate penalty. They are forced to accept their conditions of vulnerability. In effect, resilience creates populations that are permanently exposed to climate risk. Climate Apartheid It’s only natural.
A life of constant exposure to climate disasters and having to adapt and respond to climate threats is, in a word, exhausting. As Roy Scranton put it in his book:Learning Death in the Anthropocene“We continue to act as if tomorrow will be the same as yesterday, less prepared with each new disaster, more desperately investing in unsustainable livelihoods,” says Ajay Singh Chaudhary. Not surprisingly, Ajay Singh Chaudhary writes in his recently published study of climate policy:Earth’s Exhaustion“Resilience is an imperative of business as usual and something that buys crisis managers time. For others, resilience is Tired.”
Resilience itself may pose a major threat. If successful, resilience may become indistinguishable from the climate disasters it aims to overcome. For example, in healthcare, Medicaid And other ratepayers have recently decided to pay for air conditioning, and presumably the carbon pollution it produces.
Resilience, which is reactionary in nature, teaches apathy, fatalism, and a perverse optimism, because training for resilience makes it impossible to achieve a desired future or to imagine a changing world. Life lacks a sense of coherence, what medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky calls “coherence.” Health GenerationIn so doing, resilience negates or at least weakens resistance and efforts to prevent climate disasters: resistance is futile, since climate threats and disasters are, after all, inevitable.
Resilience is an attractive policy that offers acceptance in a world hit by climate disasters. Human life, like non-human living systems, is a perpetual process of ongoing adaptation to disasters. As Evans and Reid wrote in 2013, policymakers “want us to abandon dreams of achieving safety and accept risk as a condition of possibility for future life.” Ecological disasters are considered necessary for our development. words Philosopher Frederic Jameson once said, “Imagining the end of the world is capitalismChaudhary argued that resilience justifies exploitative resource use and environmental destruction: “Clinging to the ideal of resilience only serves to maintain a world that demands it.”
With resilience, the climate crisis will virtually never happen. We won’t need direct federal funding to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, nor will we need strict federal regulations. Instead, as Adrian Buller explains in his 2022 book, “We will need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.”The value of whalesEvan and Reid conclude that resilience enables “a political imagination that imagines nothing other than the bleakness of the current political situation.” Resilience is nihilism, a will to nothing, and value-free governance. Chaudhary defines resilience as politically inert because it merely “counsels for stillness and frugal austerity.”
For HHS, resilience as policy explains why the department has been unable to promulgate regulatory rules for Medicare and Medicaid under the Biden administration. Healthcare Industry While various measures have been taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or improve climate-related health care, for example by creating climate-related diagnosis codes and quality performance indicators, it is ironic that HHS is allowing the health care industry to emit an estimated 1 million tons of greenhouse gases. 553 million These emissions produce 610 million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually. cause disproportionate harm Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. HHS Mission To “improve the health and well-being of all Americans,” Resilience allows us to simply publish a monthly magazine. Climate and Health Outlook Predict the extent to which unavoidable climate disasters will harm public health. June ReportHHS’s responsibility is to point out that “tornadoes can occur anywhere at any time,” “there are many different types of flooding,” “the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season is predicted to be ‘above normal,'” and “wildfires impact health in many different ways.”
For HHS, climate resilience would put the department in its own peril. For the American people, it would be despair.
