On the Highway to Climate Hell

Countries have spent decades building critical infrastructure that is now buckling under extreme heat, wildfires, and floods, laying bare just how unprepared the world’s energy and transportation systems are to withstand the volatility of climate change.

These vulnerabilities have been on full display in recent weeks as record-breaking temperatures broil the world, straining power grids, threatening water supplies, and warping roads. July was the hottest month ever recorded—according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service—with intense heat searing Europe, North Africa, Antarctica, and South America, where it is currently winter. Even the world’s oceans haven’t been spared, with all-time high surface temperatures in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic decimating coral reef systems and threatening marine life.

If regions aren’t being scorched, there’s a good chance that they are underwater. China was drenched by its heaviest downpours in 140 years, which triggered massive floods that killed dozens of people and destroyed crop fields. In Slovenia and Canada, surging floodwaters have battered communities and submerged villages; glacial flooding in Alaska has carried entire homes away. Cities in Spain have been flooded worse than Noah and his brood, while southern Sweden is grappling with its heaviest rains in more than 160 years.

“It’s just an unbelievable summer,” said Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and senior fellow at the Pacific Institute. “It’s the kind of extreme weather that we climate scientists have been warning about for decades—it just now seems to be happening everywhere, all at once.”

Climate change, driven by human activity, makes extreme heat and precipitation more frequent and intense—fueling the floods, heat waves, and wildfires that have been wreaking havoc around the world. The fallout has spotlighted how the infrastructure systems underpinning global development weren’t constructed to withstand this increasingly extreme climate reality, and what investment has been carried out has been less than helpful.

China’s massive Belt and Road infrastructure plan has built more coal plants across Eurasia, among other things. Germany shuttered its nuclear power stations, not its coal plants. Florida actually banned state officials from investing public money in green endeavors. The Biden administration’s big clean-energy package angered allies and sparked concerns of a trade war. Meanwhile, Ford sold an F-series pickup truck every minute of last year.

“We have entire cities and transportation hubs that were all built for climate that no longer exists,” said Katharine Hayhoe, the Chief Scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “That’s why we’re seeing terrible things happen.”

China’s most recent bout of flooding, for example, exposed key gaps in its drainage infrastructure. Across Europe, where home air-conditioning units aren’t the norm, extreme heat has throttled communities, strained power grids, and sparked government health warnings—particularly after the continent’s heat wave last year killed an estimated 61,000 people. In Phoenix, Arizona, one flight was canceled because the plane’s internal temperature became unbearably hot, prompting three passengers to faint from heat exhaustion.

Yet even as these threats become more pronounced, experts say countries are still struggling to turn away from fossil fuels and build resilience into their infrastructure systems. In March, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warned that the world was on track to barrel past a key threshold in the next decade—warming 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels—unless industrial governments rapidly cut greenhouse gas and CO2 emissions. “Changes in climate are coming more rapidly than expected,” Jim Skea, the head of the IPCC, said this month.

“The real challenge is that so far, we’re nowhere near addressing climate change with the seriousness that is required to really move the needle,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “If we don’t actually do the hard work of deeply addressing this, then it will continue to get worse. We will see more years like this one, and then eventually years that are significantly worse than this one,” he added.

There are some bright spots: The Netherlands, for example, has spent the last few hundred years building dikes and is now spearheading efforts to build further resilience into its infrastructure amid rising sea levels. More than half of the country’s territory lies below sea level, and the Dutch government has worked to develop a robust water management scheme and implement novel flood control strategies.

“The Netherlands are incredibly vulnerable to sea level rise,” Hayhoe said. “Their water plan is very advanced because they understand the threat, and they’re taking action to ensure that as sea level rises, that they will still have their infrastructure, their homes, places to live, places to grow food.”

Like the Dutch, many governments are increasingly focusing on adapting their infrastructure systems, from incorporating climate modeling into water management to developing heat mitigation strategies. But unless countries take more concerted efforts to both slash carbon emissions and ramp up adaptation measures, experts warn that more suffering lies ahead.

Adaptation “efforts have not been anywhere near to the level to match the threat,” said Alice Hill, a former senior director for resilience policy under the Obama administration currently at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We just haven’t made the kind of necessary investments to protect ourselves and our communities from these extreme events—and with that kind of destruction comes a lot of grief, loss of life, and then economic loss.”

Part of the problem is that retrofitting decades-old infrastructure can come at a steep price. A 2013 study of the world’s 136 largest coastal cities, for instance, found that it would cost $350 million annually in each city to improve defenses against flooding fueled by climate change. While that number pales in comparison to the price of inaction—which by some estimates can run up to hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars—it can be a difficult economic and political tradeoff for many governments.

“We’re talking huge price tags, and we’re also talking something that has not been done systemically before,” Hayhoe said. “We’ve never had to cope with changes this fast in the entire history of human civilization, and so we’re asking people, cities, states, governments, organizations, businesses to do something they’ve never had to do before.”

Physical preparedness is also only one part of the adaptation equation, said Stéphane Hallegatte, a senior climate advisor at the World Bank who was one of the authors of the 2013 study. Beyond infrastructure, a robust response also means developing social systems to help vulnerable communities on the front lines of the climate crisis.

“Adaptation is not only infrastructure,” Hallegatte said. “Adaptation is also insurance, social protection systems—also helping people [have] access to financial tools to borrow when they’re affected.”

Hayhoe likened the urgency of combating climate change to a longtime smoker who needs to quit. Although they may have impaired breathing and spots on their lungs, she said, they are still alive—and every day matters.

“So when’s the best time to stop? As soon as possible. How much? As much as possible,” she said. “Why? Because the sooner we stop, the better off we will be.”