Last year, I wrote about the built in resilience in the Florida keys as an example of the larger issue of resilience in business. At the time, the Keys had not experienced a major storm since 2005. Of course, now, Hurricane Irma has forced everyone to come to terms with just how prepared they actually were.
Three hurricaines
Harvey, a category 4 Hurricane, came North West across the Yucatan Penninsula and made landfall in Texas on August 24th causing 71 deaths and an estimated $70-200 billion in damages in Texas and Louisiana.
Irma, a category 5 hurricane, devastated the island of Barbudos and caused extreme damage in Cuba before continuing its path to Florida. Miami residents were urged to stay in doors as the eye of the storm appeared to be veering north toward Tampa while the whole state prepared itself for extreme winds, rain and storm surges. Many people around the world tracked the storm and stayed in close touch with friends and family who lay in its path. The damage to lives and property will be assessed in the weeks ahead.
Jose is another category 4 storm that fortunately stayed East and North of the Caribbean islands it had threatened.
Is this Climate Change?
These three storms have re-opened the debate about the degree to which such major weather events are evidence of climate change or to what degree they are simply part of natural weather cycles.
As with so many topics in today’s extremely polarized political climate, this issue has writers and scientists on both sides claiming certainty and normal citizens left deciding who to trust and what to believe.
The essential logic is that slightly higher water temperatures provide more energy to storms and thus increase the number of such powerful storms. The record shows that water temperatures are higher and that there are more such storms than ever. Many believe this confirms that we are already living with the impact of climate change. Irma was the most powerful Atlantic Ocean hurricane in recorded history.
Many scientists, politicians, activists and some business school professors believe that the world will face more of these events in the future and that the right response is to do everything we can to transition to a low carbon economy at the same time as we build up the resilience of our coastal defenses.
Others say that there have been terrible storms in the past and the main reason these storms cause so much damage is that we have developed the coastline and built expensive houses and buildings on the shoreline.
The same debate erupted when Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012.
Better to take action
In 2006, Professor Lord Nicholas Stern released a report of the economics of climate change for the UK government. The 700 page Stern Review, makes the case that the overall cost of taking action on the climate will be far less than living with the consequences. This and other similar studies provide the logic behind the Paris climate agreement which was reached last year.
In my view, the key question is not whether we should wait until we have absolute scientific evidence that climate change is causing these storms and other problems but whether it is better to take action—just in case it’s true.
Last year, Florida voted for a man who thinks climate change is a hoax. Whatever their cause, Harvey, Irma and Jose are very, very real
Mike Rosenberg is Associate Professor of strategic management at IESE Business School where he teaches in the MBA and executive education programs on strategy, sustainability, globalization, and geo-politics.
