Usually, when people think about how we'll adapt to a hotter climate, they think famine in Africa or floods in Bangladesh or dengue fever run wild. But there's a less-appreciated headache in climate adaptation: It's that, as Alexis Madrigal writes, much of our built environment was designed with a fairly narrow band of temperature and precipitation conditions in mind. Tweak the climate just a little, and suddenly all that infrastructure can become woefully obsolete. And there's no better place to see this in action than in the oddly frantic world of dam planning.
There's a perfect, famous example here in the United States. During the 1930s, engineers designed the Hoover Dam based on observations from a 30-year period that just happened to be three of the wettest decades in the last millennium. That didn't last. In recent years, rainfall has plummeted, and Lake Mead, the reservoir created by the dam, is now at about 30 percent of its original capacity. Nearby Las Vegas could face severe water shortages unless it spends billions on new pipes.
Now, Nevada has the resources to tackle its water woes, but Matthews and his co-authors note that there are also plenty of poorer countries in East and South Asia rushing to build dams. And they're all using the West's rigid dam-planning models and relying on historical data. So it's no surprise that the OECD estimates some 40 percent of development projects are at risk because of global warming. Elsewhere, Matthews has written about regions in Nepal that now suffer rolling blackouts because reduced snowpack in the area has made their carefully planned dams ineffective.
The paper's got a few recommendations for dealing with these developments. Perhaps most controversially, the authors suggest that behemoth, multi-decade water infrastructure works, such as China's South-North Water Transfer Project, might not be such wise ideas where it's becoming increasingly difficult to make long-term plans around a stable climate.