Resilience: the Hidden Political Issue
I’ve been thinking about resilience as a political issue a lot the past few weeks, especially with recent national and subnational elections in Europe, South America, and North America.
This year has also seen dramatic climate impacts in quite a few countries: massive wildfires in Canada, affecting air quality across the eastern part of the continent; extreme heat and drought in Europe, making waves of killing heat while straining transport and energy systems; strange late-season hurricanes in the Atlantic; intense floods in Nepal that wiped away whole communities within moments, killing thousands and displacing tens of thousands. I could go on.
My suspicion is that this year will be remembered as the hinge when large numbers of people across the planet realized that major climate impacts were not about something that might happen in a few decades but that these impacts were happening now, they really mattered, and worse will happen without preparation. How does the political system register these shocks? Do we see political institutions and actors pivot to discussing climate adaptation and resilience as responses that can gather support?
Indeed, these elections seem very relevant to COP31 this year. Close colleagues are already on the ground in Antalya. As Ingrid Timboe has written recently, major negotiation topics around adaptation and resilience have been largely subsumed under the COP presidency’s priority of “implementation” — getting practical things financed/funded and completed at scale. Some adaptation and resilience issues are being handled through negotiations, but for the most part “our” work (i.e., AGWA’s water-climate policy work) is really happening with countries, provinces and states, and cities.
Are these issues present in the minds of voters when they consider their choices?
Right now, resilience seems like an embedded, perhaps even hidden political issue. In the US election, several states saw topics like data centers and artificial intelligence rise up, and politicians who had been actively supportive of expanding the number of data centers in states like Texas and Ohio overwhelmingly lost their elections, sometimes by spectacular margins. Of almost 40 ballot initiatives to create new regional regulatory systems for data centers, all but one passed with strong voter support. Water issues — water consumed directly to cool these centers, and water consumed indirectly to produce the large quantities of energy necessary to run them — were central concerns by voters. Regions where disasters hit over the past two years often had strong reactions to the defunding of national emergency management and recovery programs. A narrative of resilience fits all of these voting patterns, even if latently and indirectly.
Similarly, protests in France in advance of an election early in 2027 have half-hidden themes of resilience: Students protested buildings that reached unhealthy air temperatures because of inadequate or missing cooling systems. Rural communities protested the higher burdens of more frequent fires. Major politicians debated having more widespread air conditioning systems, especially in urban areas and for older buildings, to counteract the thousands of heat-related deaths and illnesses.
Similar debates about resilience in Brazil or Germany are also occurring, and again through a veil. But perhaps the most striking conversation around adaptation has been in Nepal, following two massive floods that occurred. The Bhote Koshi event in August killed thousands and displaced tens of thousands more. The country also saw extensive damage along the length of a major trade route to China through the Himalayas, which in turn will impede the recovery of both local communities and the 760 mw of hydropower damaged or destroyed through the valley (roughly 10 percent of the national hydro capacity).
Nepal faced intense political turmoil with a so-called Gen Z revolution a few months earlier, and by some accounts now has the youngest median age for national governance worldwide. Public and written comments from the government have naturally focused on the personal tragedy and the injustice of a country that has emitted few greenhouse gases but has already experienced some of the most extreme, even transformative climate impacts to date. The government has already been promised an early payout for the newly established Loss and Damage Fund, a kind of global climate insurance program for such events, though the fund remains underpowered and does not pay for adaptation and resilience projects. How will Nepal’s new political leaders articulate their vision for Nepal — in the affected valleys and across the country— in a climate that is very far from stable? As Santosh Nepal notes in a separate essay in this newsletter, a positive vision for the country remains both elusive and possible. The Water Resilience Tracker program in Nepal worked to support Nepal’s COP31 negotiation team, briefing them about potential entrypoints and context for Antalya. And AGWA’s team produced a video to outline our sense of the state of play in climate policy this year and to prompt additional discussion in the workshop.
Ingrid’s emphasis on implementation — making resilience tangible and real for actual voters and their daily lives — seems like the critical point of emphasis.
I get on a plane this Friday for Türkiye. It would be easy to see COP as working through a string of events, meetings, press conferences, and publication launches. It would also be easy to see COP as a group of diplomats arguing viciously over whether a particular sentence should be phrased “and” or “in addition to.” I can guarantee that I will also see a lot of people standing around with selfie sticks making short videos about how they are “fighting for the planet” by heading to Antalya this year. Perhaps in the most cynical way, it’s also possible to look at the global space for cooperation, peace building, and poverty alleviation and see UN processes fragmenting, even turning against themselves. The spirit of international love and support evaporating.
I have faith that an agenda of pragmatism and relevance can renew us, globally and in our home countries. Resilience fails as an ideology. It succeeds when we communicate ambition and hope and the ability to transform the lives of people around us.
John Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA