Across the planet, human settlements have been built as if rivers, oceans, and forests were mere backdrops to human stories rather than powerful forces with their own laws and rhythms. Building in flood zones and reshaping rivers for convenience are among the clearest examples of this folly. The land has been forced to serve human needs, instead of humans learning to live within the land’s limits and patterns.
Floodplains are not “vacant land.”
Floodplains exist because rivers regularly rise, spread, and deposit sediment, renewing soils and supporting rich ecosystems. When development paves, drains, and walls off these areas, two things happen at once: the land loses its capacity to absorb and slow water, and the people who move in inherit predictable risk. Subdivisions, highways, and industrial sites on floodplains in British Columbia and elsewhere have repeatedly suffered catastrophic damage during extreme rainfall and snowmelt, drowning farmlands, homes, and critical infrastructure.
Each socalled “natural disaster” becomes an expensive lesson paid in insurance claims, disaster assistance, and rebuilding costs, even though the river did what floodplains are meant to do: spread, move, and reclaim space. When homes and farms in interior B.C. flood, or when subway tunnels in Toronto fill with water during intense storms, it is not simply climate change striking at random; it is climate change colliding with decades of landuse decisions that pretended water had no right of way.
Dams and the broken lives of rivers
Dams are often framed as engineering triumphs, providing flood control, hydropower, and water storage. Yet every dam interrupts a river’s life systems: sediment transport, fish migration, nutrient flows, and seasonal flooding of wetlands and floodplains. Large dams have submerged valleys and Indigenous homelands, altered fish populations, and changed downstream flow regimes, undermining food security and cultural practices.
Their economic “benefits” frequently ignore these losses, as well as the costs of maintenance, aging infrastructure, and climatedriven changes in flows that can reduce power generation and increase safety risks. When dams fail or when extreme events exceed their design standards, the damage can be enormous: lives lost, communities evacuated, ecosystems damaged, and public funds poured into emergency response and repair. Each failure is a reminder that rivers have their own energies and attempts to control them permanently will always carry risk.
The planet is already saying “no.”
The future of infrastructure is being negotiated now, not only in boardrooms and design studios, but also in floodwaters, wildfires, coastal erosion, and heat waves. Coastal erosion and storm surge are claiming homes built too close to retreating shorelines, with houses collapsing into the sea in Atlantic Canada and other coastal regions. Increased wildfire frequency and intensity have led to devastating townlevel burns in communities like Lytton, B.C., and Jasper, AB, revealing how forestinterface development and fire suppression have amplified risk.
Urban flooding in cities like Toronto, where underpasses and transit systems are routinely overwhelmed, shows that stormwater systems designed for a gentler climate are no match for today’s extremes. In all of these cases, the planet is effectively setting new terms: specific forms of development, placement, and density are no longer viable. Engineering can delay consequences, but cannot cancel the underlying reality that water, fire, and wind will seek their own paths.
Responsive and adaptive infrastructure
The built environment of the future must move away from bruteforce control toward responsive, adaptive relationships with natural systems. Key shifts include:
Building with, not against, landforms
- Avoiding new development in highrisk floodplains, steep fireprone slopes, eroding coasts, and other hazard zones, while prioritizing retreat, relocation, and restoration.
- Using green infrastructure such as wetlands, permeable surfaces, and urban forests to absorb water, reduce heat, and buffer storms instead of relying solely on concrete and pipes.
Allowing rivers and coasts to move
- Restoring floodplains and riparian zones so rivers can expand safely during high flows, reducing downstream damage.
- Reconsidering and, where possible, removing or reoperating dams to restore ecological function while meeting human needs in less damaging ways.
Designing for failure and change
- Accepting that some infrastructure will be overtopped, burned, or inundated, and designing systems that fail safely with clear recovery pathways.
- Regularly updating risk assessments and landuse plans as climate patterns shift, rather than assuming static baselines.
These approaches require money, time, and political will, but rebuilding in the same vulnerable places again and again also carries immense financial and human costs.
Honouring land instead of abusing it
At the heart of this shift is a change in how land is understood:
- Not as an object of ownership and control, but as a place with its own history, rights, and patterns to be respected.
- Not as a blank slate for any project, but as a living system that will answer attempts at domination with erosion, flooding, fire, and instability.
For Indigenous Nations, this perspective is not new. Land, rivers, and other beings are understood as relatives with agency, not passive surfaces. Planning and building within this framework means asking whether a place can safely host a particular kind of development, not just whether it is technically feasible, and designing structures and communities that can adapt as conditions change instead of locking in rigid forms that will become liabilities.
A call to new generations
This is a moment for younger generations of planners, engineers, architects, and community leaders to refuse the old arrogance that assumed the land would adapt to human projects. The new work is to create infrastructure and communities that adapt to evolving land and climate realities. That means learning to read landscapes, waters, and fire histories as carefully as any technical manual; challenging developments that place people and ecosystems in predictable harm’s way; and innovating in ways that honour place, minimize disruption, and embrace reversible, flexible, ecologically grounded design.
The foolishness of building in flood zones and of damming rivers without regard for human life has been exposed by climate change. The question now is whether humanity will continue to abuse land as if it were inert or finally treat it with the dignity it has always deserved, recognizing that the planet will always have the final word.
Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Image Credit: Ries Bosch, Unsplash
The post Human Foolishness in Floodplains appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Electrification of transportation and the power grid all but require lithium to make batteries—but mining it takes a toll on delicate ecosystems. Still, there are reasons for hope.
From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Paloma Beltran with Thea Riofrancos, the author of “Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.”
A new panel of experts, bringing together some of the world’s top climate scientists, has called on governments to develop roadmaps for phasing out fossil fuels “anchored in science and justice”.
Launched on Friday in Santa Marta, Colombia, along with a set of 12 initial policy recommendations, the panel’s appeal came ahead of a key ministerial meeting on equitable ways to reduce dependence on coal, oil and gas during next week’s “First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels”.
Sixty countries head to Santa Marta to cement coalition for fossil fuel transition
Presenting the panel’s recommendations in a packed Santa Marta Theatre, Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), said the push for a global transition away from fossil fuels offers “a light in the tunnel” during a “very dark moment” of geopolitical conflict and climate extremes.
“Science is here to serve,” Rockström said. “We’re today launching the Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition (SPGET) as a service, as a global common good for all countries, all sectors, all regions to connect to the best science enabling a transition away from fossil fuels.”
The panel is urging countries to create “whole-of-government” plans to “dismantle legal, financial and political barriers” to the energy transition. Its insights are intended to inform top officials from 57 governments who will gather in Santa Marta for high-level discussions on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Draft roadmap for Colombia
Colombian Environment Minister Irene Vélez Torres said the panel “addresses a longstanding shortcoming” in international climate science, by creating a scientific body dedicated solely to overcoming the world’s reliance on fossil fuels.
“It’s a first-of-its-kind, designed to organise in the next five years the scientific evidence that allows cities, regions, countries and coalitions to take the big leap,” Vélez told the event in Santa Marta.
As an example of how countries can move forward – even when their economies are closely tied to the production and use of dirty energy – a group of European scientists presented a draft roadmap to phase out fossil fuels in Colombia, with inputs from the Colombian government. It will be used as a basis for further consultation in the Latin American nation to define the way forward.
To phase out fossil fuels, developing countries need exit route from “debt trap”
Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds and co‑author of the roadmap, said it shows “a clear pathway to economic and societal benefit”, with average annual investment of $10.6 billion producing net economic benefits of $23 billion per year by 2050.
The document says fossil fuels in Colombia can be phased out through energy efficiency measures, coupling renewable generation with energy storage, and switching to electrified transport. But, it adds, the government will need to plan for reduced revenue from fossil fuel exports, which roughly half by the mid-2030s.
“What matters now is moving beyond headline targets to create credible, policy-relevant roadmaps, enabling a just and effective transition,” Forster said in a statement. Brazil is also working on a national roadmap for its own economy, as well as leading a voluntary process to produce a global roadmap.
IPCC hobbled by politics
Currently, the world’s top climate science body – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – requires countries to sign off on each “summary for policymakers” of its flagship science reports. This has led to a politically fraught process that has increasingly seen some oil-producing governments making efforts to weaken its recommendations.
In a bid to focus scientific debates on the phase-out of fossil fuels, the new SPGET was created based on a mandate from last year’s COP30. It is also meant to come up with scientific recommendations at a faster pace than the IPCC’s seven-year cycle.
Natalie Jones, senior policy advisor at the International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD), called the new scientific panel “historic”, as it will be “more specific, more targeted and potentially more agile” with its advice on phasing out coal, oil and gas than the IPCC’s exhaustive scientific synthesis reports.
Why the transition beyond fossil fuels depends on cities and collective action
One of the SPGET members, Peter Newell of the UK’s University of Sussex, said “there are many different challenges along the way – and not all of them have to do with lack of evidence”, but the phasing out of fossil fuels “is one part of the story and it’s important to address it”.
The panel will be co-chaired by Cameroonian economist Vera Songwe, PIK’s chief economist Ottmar Edenhofer and Gilberto M. Jannuzzi, professor of energy systems at Brazil’s Universidade Estadual de Campinas. It will be composed of between 50 and 100 scientists divided into four working groups: transition pathways, technological solutions, policies and finance.
Under the 12 insights for the Santa Marta process, the panel recommended banning new fossil fuel infrastructure, mandating “deep cuts” in methane emissions, implementing carbon levies on imports, and de-risking clean energy investments via interventions from central banks, among others.
The post New panel of climate scientists calls for fossil fuel transition roadmaps appeared first on Climate Home News.
New panel of climate scientists calls for fossil fuel transition roadmaps
Despite not yet paying out any money, a UN-backed fund meant to address the loss and damage caused to developing countries by climate change could face “liquidity issues” by the end of next year, its head warned today.
With ten projects already requesting $166 million in total, the fund’s Executive Director Ibrahima Cheikh Diong warned a board meeting in Zambia that the fund was likely to be “oversubscribed” and should anticipate cashflow problems.
A framing paper prepared by the fund’s secretariat similarly warns that “given the current status of the capitalization of the Fund, there is a risk of the Fund exhausting its capital by the end of 2027, which could result in a loss of operational momentum and expose the FRLD to reputational risk”.
Since governments agreed to set up the fund at UN climate talks in Egypt in 2022, wealthy nations have promised $822 million, but delivered just $449 million.
The fund is expected to approve its first projects at its next board meeting in July. Early proposals submitted include strengthening responses to floods in Bangladesh and the Nigerian city of Lagos, and improving water infrastructure in Jamaica following Hurricane Melissa last year.
Millions not billions
ActionAid Zambia climate justice coordinator Michael Mwansa told the board meeting that he was concerned about “the failure of the Global North governments to deliver on their climate finance obligations, making it largely impossible to scale up [the fund’s initial stage] significantly, if at all”.
“Pledges remain nowhere near the billions and even the trillions needed to address loss and damage to the Global South”, Mwansa added, highlighting reports which found that financing loss and damage could cost developing countries up to $400 billion a year.
The fund’s board discussed its strategy for raising more money at its meeting this week while climate campaigners called, in an open letter, for it to aim to secure $50 billion a year from developed countries starting next year, rising to $100 billion a year by 2031 and $400 billion by 2035.
The World Bank-hosted fund aims to have revenue-raising rounds known as replenishments every four years, with the first in 2027.
Governments have agreed to “urge” developed countries to contribute but only to “encourage” other nations to do so and the fund’s secretariat wants to appoint a “high-level champion” to lead the replenishment team.
The fundraising strategy will be discussed further at the next board meeting in the Philipines in June.
Campaigners’ open letter calls for developed countries to contribute more and for them to introduce taxes on fossil fuel companies, financial transactions, luxury air travel and wealth to raise money for the fund.
“Rich countries must be held strictly accountable for the devastation they have caused,” said Climate Action Network International head Tasneem Essop. “Their failure to fulfil their responsibility to the Loss and Damage Fund is not just an oversight; it is a shameful betrayal of humanity.”
The post New loss and damage fund could run out of money next year appeared first on Climate Home News.
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