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Final Episode of BBC World’s “Hot Cities” Available
Editor’s note: To watch the entire eight-part series of this fine and informative documentary, please click here.
Surviving climate change, Los Angeles, Episode 8
Air date 12 December 2009
By Producer/Director Beth Jones
Los Angeles is one of the most polluting cities in the world thanks largely to its love affair with the car. It is a city built on consumption. Each person produces around 20 tonnes of emissions per year – twice as much as anyone else. Now they are about to reap what has been sown. In LA there has been a big increase in wildfires, water supplies are under threat, rising sea levels could have a massive impact on LA’s huge port and destroy thousands of homes. “Hot Cities” goes to LA just as the city launches its adaptation strategy.
It’s wildfire season in California and we are chasing flames. Outside the car window, all we can see are endless stretches of farmland reduced to scorched monochrome by a fire which has ravaged 17,500 acres north of Los Angeles in two days. As we drive through the charred black earth, a macabre army of skeleton trees stand to attention. Not a single colour breaks up the black. Ash drifts like snow, and when we step out of the car to film the devastation, it coats our clothes and fills our eyes and nose.
To our crew, fresh off a plane from London, it looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland. To Californians, this is part of the natural order of things: from June to October it is wildfire season. But as temperatures rise and a pronged drought dries vegetation, the fires are growing in intensity and frequency. Last year, wildfire destroyed one and a half million acres in California and from May to August the state experienced the greatest wildfire siege in its history. The governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, wrote to the president asking for a state of disaster to be declared due to severe drought conditions.
Drought and increased fire activity are just two of the signs that the climate is changing here. Seven inches of sea level rise over the last century is another. But, as one of our interviewees, Professor Stephen Schneider from Stanford University, points out, California is one of the wealthiest places on earth and better positioned financially to deal with climate change than most. Here, it’s going to cost them money. Elsewhere, its going to cost lives. But as we look out across the charred remains of tree limbs and homes burned to their foundations, it’s a somber thought that the billions of dollars spent fighting wildfire here still can’t prevent such scenes of devastation. What kind of havoc will climate change wreak on those without the financial resources to defend themselves?
