Mark O'Connell: A realistic emergency preparedness booklet would say ‘prepare for a slow decline’

Some time before the end of this month, every household in the country is due to receive a booklet from the Department of Defence advising on how to prepare for and navigate various potential emergencies. It will contain information on how to deal with floods, storms, power outages due to failures in the electrical grid water disruptions and other scenarios. Speaking last month at the launch of the initiative, which the Government has given the name “Be Emergency Ready”, the Minister for Defence Helen McEntee said that the campaign was “about helping people and families take simple actions now so that we are better prepared should disruption occur”, and that “a small amount of preparation today can make a significant difference tomorrow”.All of this is true enough, and there is a good deal of common sense wisdom in encouraging individuals and communities to take practical measures to prepare themselves for potential emergencies. A supply of drinking water and canned foods sufficient to get you through a few days; a wind-up radio stashed away in a cupboard; a couple of flashlights and charged powerbanks; hard copies of important personal documents in a safe place: such things are easy and useful to have as a standby for potential emergencies. The Dutch, Swedish, Finnish and Danish governments have already rolled out versions of this campaign, as part of a wider programme referred to as the “EU preparedness union strategy”. This programme aims to boost member states’ civil and military preparedness for potential crises – geopolitical conflicts, cybersecurity crises and the increased risk of natural hazards as a result of a worsening climate crisis. Despite ever-present talk of a Russian threat to European security, it’s that last category, climate change, that realistically poses the greatest and most unpredictable hazard. Europe has just been through yet another summer of dangerous heatwaves, resulting in tens of thousands of excess deaths. The Continent is seeing wildfires and droughts of unprecedented severity, and at unprecedented regularity. READ MOREHere in Ireland, although we have so far been relatively insulated from the most extreme effects of a heating planet, we have nonetheless just experienced our hottest summer since records began. And earlier this week, a study conducted by University College Cork (UCC) showed that fully one fifth of the Republic’s coastline is at very high risk from flooding, erosion, sea level rise and other hazards expected to worsen as a result of climate change. In Dublin, more than 20,000 people live within 500 metres of coastline classified as “very high exposure”; in Galway, close to 10,000 people are in the same situation. Extreme weather events will continue to become more frequent, and more disruptive to the everyday lives of people in this country. But there is a tendency to think of climate change and its effects almost entirely on the level of acute crisis, as a spectacle of disaster and ruin. The recent devastating floods in Nepal, in this sense, were immediately recognisable as precisely the kind of thing we have come to associate with the effects of climate change: collapsing infrastructure, entire streets submerged, buildings and people swept away in a terrifying deluge. But the reality of climate change, for most people most of the time, is not one of acute disaster, of terrifying wildfires and devastating floods, and nor is it likely to become so. It is much more likely to be a slow burn of worsening effects, a world becoming in various ways less comfortable and more unpredictable. [ ‘What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic’Opens in new window ]One way of talking about this is purely economic. According to a recent analysis by the British economic think tank Verdant, the cost to the UK economy as a result of successive UK heatwaves from May through to late July is in the region of £4.4 billion (€5.1 billion). This deficit is caused by “reduced productivity due to the well-documented effect of all work becoming harder at higher temperatures, and that infrastructure and equipment overheat and fail”. At temperatures above 30 degrees, the report details, each increase of one degree leads to a reduction in average output per hour of around 3 per cent. It’s harder to work when it’s hot, in other words, and the hotter it gets, the less work will get done. A certain amount of this can be offset, of course, by air-conditioned workspaces, but it’s also harder to sleep when it’s hot, and harder to work when you haven’t slept. A fire truck drives past a forested area scorched by a fire near Puilaurens, southwestern France, on September 5th. Photo: Valentine Chapuis / AFP via Getty Images At a higher level, there are the systemic breakdowns caused by extreme heat. Disruption to railway services across Europe, as railway lines buckle in the heat, with passengers left sweltering in carriages without air conditioning. Entire stretches of the German Autobahn system literally cracking up due to the expansion of concrete in high temperatures. Air traffic controllers struggling to contain the chaotic effects of increasingly unstable weather systems. And all of these things, in turn, have their economic effects. The cost of transporting goods becomes higher; consumer prices go up, and the cost of living pinch becomes ever more painful. Energy infrastructure systems, too, are placed under increased stress by rising temperatures. Last month, a nuclear power plant that provides about half of all Hungary’s electricity was forced to go offline, the Danube’s dwindling water levels having made it impossible to properly run the plant’s cooling system. France experienced similar disruptions, for similar reasons, to a grid likewise reliant on nuclear energy. In such situations, the cost of electricity climbs ever higher. And that’s before we get to power-hungry data centres drawing ever more electricity from overstretched grids – an issue becoming more and more acute in our own country.None of these things are disasters in themselves, but they increase the difficulty of moving through the world, of working and living, for very large numbers of people. There will continue to be floods, just as there will be droughts and wildfires, plagues and disasters. But the experience of climate change, for the vast majority of us, will be less a deluge than a slow leak: a mostly banal, mostly manageable decline in the conditions of life, against a backdrop of spectacular disasters affecting less fortunate people, in places mostly distant. There are no plans, as far as I’m aware, for an information booklet on that.