Is Your Planetary Lifeguard on Duty?

It would be a timely, perhaps rude awakening to think how vulnerable all of us living in coastal cities are.

Thank you, Manuela Andreoni, senior newsletter writer on climate for The New York Times for reminding us of this in your excellent reporting on climate change. 

Recently Andreoni reported how flooding from storms has battered cities in the South and the East Coast, from Louisiana to the state where I was once a lifeguard in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  Now he says overlapping atmospheric rivers over the West Coast that brought those heavy rains are likely to revisit     . . . and revisit.

Well, the lifeguard still alive within me salutes such journalism and exhorts all climate reporters to keep it up until we can all get it through our systems that we’d better start preparing for even worse results from climate change for time no longer marches on, but floods on us folks living in ocean-front communities.

This is one of the many wet and tornadic reasons I started Planetary Lifeguard to alert everyone to the perils instore for all of us if we don’t snap out of it and blow the whistle on climate change and other environmental hazards.

Enter Planetary Lifeguard!

With Earth at its hottest point in recorded history, we humans can’t wait for astronomers and physicists to come up with a potential fix: the equivalent of a giant beach umbrella, floating in outer space, which will take years to pull off, or open.

Sure, storms are part of the natural cycle that replenishes water supplies that states rely on during drier months, but thanks to unrelenting climate change there’s now ultra replenishment coming all at once, too much for cities to bear. 

That’s because warmer air holds more moisture, which means storms in many parts of the world are getting wetter, more intense.

Coastal areas are especially vulnerable to climate change, not just because of storms and floods, but from rising seas and erosion. These factors put a tenth of the world’s population, nearly a billion people who live near the oceans, at risk.

The good news is that there is much we can do like supporting Planetary Lifeguard, an organization whose mission is to salute, recognize and inspire entrepreneurs and companies who create and distribute sustainable products that help, not hurt our environment, and recognizing think tanks like Urban Ocean Lab for promoting environmental policies for coastal cities, including a framework it designed laying out solutions governments and communities can implement.

“So often people assume that we need more technological innovation, or huge amounts of money before we can actually do anything meaningful,” says the group’s co-founder, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who adds, “there are so many solutions that we already have at our fingertips.”

Cities can put in place programs to develop new work forces that will help build solar farms, or redesign waterfronts in ways that are both resilient to climate change and strengthen local economies.

City governments can also help take care of nature. Protecting and restoring coastal ecosystems is a relatively inexpensive strategy to both store planet-warming carbon and shield their residents, especially the most vulnerable, from storm surges and sea level rise.

Thankfully, over a third of U.S. cities have climate plans, according to research by Urban Ocean Lab and Columbia University.

But implementation has been slow, and many cities are underestimating how much climate change will transform their communities.

Yet, there is money to act. Urban Ocean Lab identified $21.7 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature climate bill, that coastal cities could use to get ready for global warming.

Planetary Lifeguard salutes those cities ahead of the game of staying above water!

One is flood-prone Hoboken, N.J., where over the past decade, the city has been elevating power lines, building cisterns and new sewers and redesigning to cope with rising seas and more intense rainfall.

New York City is working on a major environmental restoration project in Jamaica Bay to return salt marshes and sand dunes to their natural state to protect the ecosystem and the city.

In Baltimore, Md., the city has implemented “resilience hubs,” places where people can gather to talk about their communities, cool off or get food supplies when disaster hits.

You can be a Planetary Lifeguard too.

It’s a lot easier to influence municipal policy or a City Council race than it is to affect the outcome of a presidential election, that is if you know who the candidates will be.

Citizens wearing Planetary Lifeguard t-shirts can approach city government with their whistles in hand could be a profound influence on how resources are allocated, how policy and regulations are developed.

That may mean showing up to seemingly inconsequential meetings that could ultimately decide how our cities are protected (or not) from climate change.

In related news, a researcher calculated that climate change has killed at least 4 million people in the last two decades. 

Google announced a major deal to purchase offshore wind power for its data centers in Europe, Reuters reports.

Please stay tuned for more news from Planetary Lifeguard founder Tom Madden, who when not blowing his whistle against climate change, is writing books like his latest, WORDSHINE MAN about how to make writing inviting, or he’s running TransMedia Group, the PR firm he founded when he left NBC, more years ago than he cares to mention, especially at meeting with young clients.