Ebola and ISIS are making the headlines, but climate change is still and will continue to be one of the biggest threats to Americans (and people around the world, of course). You don’t have to take my word for it. Hear it from the Pentagon.
“Among the future trends that will impact our national security is climate change,” said U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in a statement last week. “In our defense strategy, we refer to climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’ because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today -- from infectious disease to terrorism. We are already beginning to see some of these impacts.”
Communities will be impacted by warmer global temperatures (on average), changing precipitation patterns, and observed increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme events like heat waves, leading to food shortages.
The Department of Defense has even released a 20-page climate change adaptation roadmap, calling for Americans to “work together, building joint capabilities to deal with these emerging threats” and that “politics or ideology must not get in the way of sound planning.”
Honest collaboration toward better planning and risk mitigation must be the new normal. If we don't learn to work together ... well, we're going to be in a world of hurt, facing greater risks of civil conflict over increasingly scare resources.
True leaders in this fight -- as in every fight -- must demonstrate two active, essential and interrelated traits: expertise and empathy. That's according to Lieutenant General William Pagonis, the director of logistics during the Gulf War, who's written extensively about leadership in a combat zone.
"Owning the facts is a prerequisite to leadership. But there are millions of technocrats out there with lots of facts in their quivers and little leadership potential. In many cases, what they are missing is empathy. No one is a leader who can't put himself or herself in the other person's shoes. Empathy and expertise command respect," says Pagonis. "Empathy also helps you know where you can draw the line and make it stick."
The empathic revolution we need to survive won't happen overnight, but there are leaders at a local level who are working to turn “what is” into “what should be.” Leaders like Stuart Cohen, the co-founder and executive director of TransForm, who promotes the development of walkable and affordable communities with excellent transportation options.
Cohen points out that such communities should matter to everyone, because they help reduce climate impacts, primarily by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But creating climate-friendly communities takes working together and no small amount of empathy from all parties involved.
“One of the biggest barriers to change is that we have a lot of outdated codes and plans on our books,” he said. “These codes are based in an automobile-dependent framework -- the assumption is that people are going to be driving everywhere.”
Changing citywide codes and regional plans is a tremendous challenge -- one that TransForm tackles through building opportunities to collaborate among community members, city planners, and building developers.
To ensure that decisions happen inclusively and from the ground up, TransForm partners with local community organizations, which survey their members and make them a part of the planning process. “We have to be sure that the community's voice isn’t just heard, but that the community's voice is the basis for what gets planned,” Cohen said.
Another hurdle is gaining the buy-in of building developers, who don’t typically work closely with the public or see themselves as having a role in nurturing green transportation options. To activate empathy and collaboration between developers and community members, TransForm meets early on with developers to help them identify proven traffic-reduction strategies, such as “free transit passes for all residents, car sharing, and ‘unbundling’ the price of parking from rent (so those who give up a vehicle can save even more).”
TransForm uses a certification program called GreenTRIP, which helps communicate to the public that the developer is listening and responding to the needs of the community. Recently, GreenTRIP helped a developer gain public support for a 77-unit building in Berkeley (10% very-low-income units), by encouraging the developer to eliminate plans for a parking garage and offer car sharing options, free transit passes, and bike racks for hundreds of residents.
Developers aren’t the only ones who learn lessons in participatory governance: “What we’ve found is that there’s this unbelievable amount of learning that takes place between siloed organizations and interests,” Cohen said.
In many cases, after six months to a year of empathy building, storytelling and working together, groups not only agree to joint programs, but they also become advocates for issues that have little to do with their primary agendas. In other words, they begin to recognize shared values in a unified vision. Groups like The Nature Conservancy, for example, have become advocates for affordable housing. “It’s a pretty interesting phenomenon,” Cohen said.
It’s also serious business. TransForm has helped raise more than $8 billion for sustainable and accessible transportation projects, including the first Bus Rapid Transit project in San Jose, California.
Cohen and his organization are currently working with the nonprofit Housing California under the banner “Sustainable Communities for All,” a coalition of more than 60 organizations committed to improving the state’s cap-and-trade program, which has come under fire for unduly burdening low-income families, which are often priced out of homes near public transit.
TransForm’s game plan for progress shows that a little empathy can go a long way. It’s a legitimate skill that can guide decision makers to meet economic and environmental goals, minimize expensive mistakes at city, state and regional level, as well as reflect the views of the voting public. It builds trust and accountability. It works.
On a wider scale, climate change is an issue of national security but it demands an international response, which is why leaders around the world should consider taking a page out of Cohen’s playbook. As some of the 300,000 protesters who participated in the largest climate-change demonstration in history recently made clear: “There Is No Planet B.”
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