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.
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
Some leading policy-makers don’t think that matters too much. Speaking to journalists before the Antalya summit, COP30 CEO Ana Toni and Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said “coalitions of the willing” can move ahead without needing consensus from the COPs. This, they said, was evident this year at the first global conference on TAFF, co-chaired by van Veldhoven and attended by 60 countries.
“Consensus or no-consensus in the general COP doesn’t make a difference for the choices I have to make in my country to get my country to phase out fossil fuels,” said the Dutch minister. The Netherlands recently became one of the first to publish a national TAFF plan.
COP31 banks on flagship voluntary initiatives
This thinking has permeated the management and expected outcomes of this year’s COP too. Earlier this year, Türkiye, supported by international energy agencies, floated the idea of a voluntary goal to boost electrification to 35% of the world’s final energy consumption by 2035 – and this is now being touted as one of the main results to be expected from Antalya.
Türkiye is also championing a pledge on AI and climate, while co-host Australia is pushing to ease access to climate finance for least developed countries and small island states.
COP31 presidency announces AI pledge as UN climate chief says Big Tech ‘on thin ice’
None of these needs consensus. But with a political cover decision already in the works, as trailed by the COP presidents, they – and perhaps the fossil fuel roadmap – may find a home in the official text if language acceptable to most can be found, giving them them additional weight.
UNFCCC reform process in the shadows
Formal reform is underway too, if quietly. UN climate chief Simon Stiell is leading a review informed by ongoing consultations with a group of 15 well-respected climate policy experts, three of whom signed the open letter in 2024.
Among them is leading Swedish climate and sustainability scientist Johan Rockström who has strong ideas about how to make COPs function better, including a switch to majority voting. He told the same press briefing nothing stands in the way of this, because the rules of procedure for making decisions at COPs have never been formally agreed.
Still, to get away from the default setting of consensus would require agreement on a new system that may be impossible to achieve given the rise in bullying tactics by fossil fuel heavyweights.
Comment: The UN climate process was built for negotiation – now it must support implementation
The deliberations with the high-level policy gurus, as reflected in a summary of June’s session in Bonn, largely echo what’s already happening organically, calling for stronger partnerships and accountability both in and between the Action Agenda and negotiations. It doesn’t mention voting.
A general overview of the reform exercise says that “improving and optimizing the [UN climate] process over the medium to long term… will be critical to fostering trust, enhancing collaboration, and catalyzing increased ambition”.
In the short term, don’t hold your breath for anything concrete on reform at COP31 but watch for signs in what ends up dominating the headlines from Türkiye.
The post Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines appeared first on Climate Home News.
Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines
With the COP31 climate summit in Turkey looming, all eyes are on China to see what the country will push for in the negotiations.
At COP30 last year, China helped to secure a “dialogue” on climate-related “unilateral trade measures”, as well as a two-year “work programme” concerning climate finance.
The nation also championed south-south cooperation throughout the conference and co-led a summit on methane, alongside Brazil and the UK.
In a recent press conference, China’s environment vice-minister Li Gao noted the need to “uphold multilateralism” and send a “clear political signal” that the global community is united around climate action.