In a world marked by increasingly irregular weather systems, the United States will need to adopt a more flexible approach to disaster management, according to panelists at the 13th National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment.

"Our uncertainty about what the future holds is increasing," said Amy Luers, director of climate change at the Skoll Global Threats Fund. "That's a really hard message to communicate to the public."

She added, "Our instinct is, if you have a high and low projection of what the future will hold, the safe thing is to take the middle road. But with climate, our projections are too wide -- you can't just prepare to adapt to a specific scenario."

The contingency plans of many towns and cities are based on past experience and seasonal weather patterns, she said. As climate change pushes the world's weather systems outside their historical range of variability, new, unforeseen phenomena are likely to emerge with greater frequency.

"Looking at what has happened over the last few decades can't necessarily tell us what the future's going to look like," said Kristie Ebi, a consulting professor in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. "We have to think about changing our attitudes, our infrastructure, to live in a world that's fundamentally different."

Early warning systems can play a crucial role in that process, she said.

Preparing for the long term

Often, the most accurate warnings come from within effective communities themselves, panelists noted. In the hours before Hurricane Andrew touched land in Florida in 1992, residents in the south of the state had already received warning of the hurricane's path and severity from residents of islands off the coast.

The severe weather events of the past decade -- hurricanes Katrina and Andrew, severe droughts, and a widespread bark beetle epidemic, to name just a few -- have encouraged many communities to integrate the climate question into their disaster planning, said James Murley, executive director of the South Florida Regional Planning Council.

"After being hit by a couple different storms in 2005, we started to understand, to work through how you think about climate in relation to these events," he said. "We started at the state level, which provided the opportunity for other people down the line to start talking about these issues."

That state-level discussion fell apart in Congress, he said. That didn't stop local governments from continuing to pursue the problem, however.

One product of that ongoing discussion is that efforts to restore Florida's everglades, which are highly sensitive to changes in temperature and humidity, have taken on greater urgency, he said.

While the panel primarily focused on adaptive measures to climate change, participants noted that the question of mitigation -- of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to abate future climate impacts -- also has a place in the dialogue.

"For a long time, you couldn't talk about adaptation and mitigation at the same time -- people believed adaptation was a distraction," Luers said. "The fact is, even if we decide today we're going to make a big difference in reductions, it's going to take a while before that comes to bear as change to our weather systems. We need to face up to the reality of passing the 2 degree Celsius mark" that scientists consider a safe level of global warming.

"We do need to think about adaptation because it lets us think of this as a problem of today," she added.