As extreme weather and its impacts worsen around the world, mitigation efforts continue to dominate the conversations, and adaptation efforts like funding, policies, and other actions take over global conversations. However, there’s one powerful resource in adaption to climate change that is typically overlooked and isn’t being leveraged and that resource is rivers.
Rivers are the elixir of life and they are becoming increasingly important as the climate crisis intensifies. Since the climate crisis manifests through droughts and floods which are increasing in frequency, it only makes sense to seek solutions from the water itself.
As we all know, rivers are powerful agents for ensuring healthy and resilient communities and wildlife via their natural functions of providing essential resources. Their systems are among the most productive and biologically diverse ecosystems on earth, as they have the ability to provide clean drinking water, support fertile agricultural lands, and provide protein like fish.
Beyond that, they have the potential to act as shock absorbers to climate change. The thing is, they protect coastal areas against rising sea levels. In addition, floodplains and wetlands along rivers act like sponges by providing a buffer for the rising and swelling of rivers, especially during flooding events.
From the role rivers play in helping communities mitigate as well as to adapt to the effects of climate change, one can see that it is crucial to protect rivers and their associated ecosystems and set an important precedent for incorporating river protection into climate action policy. However, human activities are severing the climate adaptation services that they provide.
Restoring floodplains and coastal wetlands, along with other interventions, is a critical preventative measure for climate change-exacerbated floods.
Governments and business leaders must prioritize climate adaptation actions that include rivers as part of the toolbox of nature-based solutions for solving the climate crisis and these actions must also prioritize strategic interventions that will keep the natural features of rivers intact or incorporate infrastructure that allows natural processes to occur.
Governments and businesses can also incorporate their preservation into their plans to enable the flow towards a climate-resilient future.
As communities become increasingly stressed by climate change, it is more important than ever to protect the basic needs that this life-giving source provides (primary resource and adapting to a changing climate).
