CRI听力:Adapting to Nature is Better Way to Deal with Natural Disasters

With the presence of the Swedish King Carl. XVI Gustaf who is also the patron of the Stockholm Water Prize, the Laureates have discussed the challenges of dealing with large natural disasters such as floods and droughts. And the conclusion is that scientists need to work with the public and decision makers to build long term resilience in the way people organize landscapes and institutions.

Professor William Mitsch, Stockholm Water Prize Laureate in 2004 shared experiences and lessons in the United States.

"Catastrophy is a perfect example of the United States when we have gigantic floods in the lower Missisipi River and the Ohio River. And we found time and time again that cost much more of our money to put the safety grass in the place and maintain it and so on than let the nature take care of themselves by keeping the flood plain and allowing the flood to occur, allowing the flood to take out the nitrogen so that it doesn't cause the water pollution in the gulf of Mexico, and also allow it to build a delta in Louisiana so there wouldn't have another hurricane of Katrina."

Professor Mitsch explained that it doesn't mean we will go back to the cave period, but people should take the advantage to find out what nature still can do for mankind within its capacity.

Sunita Narain, Stockholm Water Prize Laureate in 2005 said urban culture should learn from the adapting capability of rural culture.

"The rural culture is built on its productivity and its economic system by learning how to do best and optimize from what nature can give, if you look at the way for instance Indians can live with the scarcity of water as well as its access of water, it is incredible."

Narain said Indian people survived with just 50 millimeter of water and created their own civilization. On the other hand, there is also a lot of flood in India where certain kinds of rice can survive with the floods too. Thus, she suggested that mankind should adapt the situation in stead of blindly copying western life style with huge projects which can cause huge vulnerability of the nature in India.

This year's water prize laureate Professor Stephen Carpenter said human beings should be humble a bit now.

"If we have a known specific kind of disturbance, it is possible to develop a specific kind of resilience to that disturbance, for example the cycle of the Monsoon, is something that one can adapt to, over a period of time, and humans have developed a huge capacity for this sort of resilience, we are now entering a time of uNPRecedented changes and that raises the issue of the general resilience, in other words, how can we become resilience to a set of changes that we don't really understand."

The experts pointed out that human beings did a lot of things which showed that we didn't learn from the past experience for example building houses in the river beds which sooner or later can be washed away by floods.

Professor Carl Folke from Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences and an expert in resilience said that mankind cannot afford to lose resilience because we simply don't have that many resources on earth.

"You probably are aware that the big fish elsewhere are not fantastic anyway all over the planet. Actually the big fish population has most likely reduced by almost 90 percent worldwide."

Thus, being humble, adapting to the nature, being cooperative, sharing best practices and learning from each other, not wasting water or other resources are some of the hopeful solutions for our future.

For CRI, this is Chen Xuefei reporting from Stockholm.