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The Atlantic Ocean topped a Winthrop, Mass., seawall during a massive, slowing-moving snowstorm that hit the Northeast in February 2013.

为正常天气条件建造的地铁隧道被超级风暴所淹没。用于历史温度手段的道路在极高的热量下屈曲。每隔几年就测试了为一十分之一的暴风雨制造的堤防，有时会失败。建立在现有建筑代码标准的基础架构不足以改变气候的未来和改变气候的未来。

"Clearly, we are not prepared," says Tom Wilbanks, a fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a coordinating lead chapter author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) fourth assessment report and other major papers on climate adaptation, including for the recent draft "National Climate Assessment" by a federal advisory committee.

Many engineers and builders are past the point of arguing about why these events are happening. Instead, they are focused on ways to rebuild or harden buildings, roads, power lines, water systems, military bases and other infrastructure to withstand increasingly frequent extreme weather events and the inevitable likelihood of sea-level rise and increased temperatures.

“这是新的常态，我们不能只是说我们可以通过这一方法来管理，” Black＆Veatch全球水业务总裁Cindy Wallis-Lage说。“您必须生活在一个盒子里，以免注意到我们已经看到变化。我们忽略它是疏忽的。”

所谓的气候适应是在设计基础架构和操作系统的人们中的一种日益增长的做法。缓解气候的兄弟是减少温室气体排放的努力，这通常是建筑商和工程师解决的困难话题，因为关于如何减少这些排放尚无明确的政策。

"It's very apparent that mitigation is a global issue, and it's going to take a long time for the global community to get a handle on mitigation," says Bill Goran, director of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Center for the Advancement of Sustainability Innovations. CASI is part of the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory in Champaign, Ill.

While mitigation may help reduce the intensity of the impact of climate change, adaptation helps avoid some of those impacts by building more-resilient infrastructure and operating more-flexible systems. Science shows that even if carbon-dioxide emissions were halted today, the increased greenhouse gases and their impacts will linger for about 100 years.

没有适应，政府和企业可能会受到大量未来法案的打击，在某些情况下，这些法案很容易超过适应性改善的成本。根据詹姆斯·诺伊曼（James Neumann）和杰森·普莱斯（Jason Price）的一份论文，气候变化可能导致基础设施维持和替代成本的增加，从而从10％上升到45新利18备用官网登录％。

Adaptation is such a crucial issue that, just last month, the federal Government Accountability Office listed climate change and its impacts as one of the greatest financial threats to the federal government. The U.S., it says, "needs a government-wide strategic approach with strong leadership to manage related risks."

Indeed, while there is a growing amount of discussion about adapting to a changing climate—especially after Superstorm Sandy—there is little in the way of action. New York City, often touted as the leader in planning for climate change, was hit with billions of dollars of damage from a storm that it expected but wasn't quite prepared for.

上个月发布的国家气候评估草案对气候适应性进行了可怕的警告：“社会及其基础设施是为过去的气候而设计的，而不是目前或未来的迅速变化的气候。”该报告在其他地方指出：“适应活动的步伐和程度与气候变化的人，财产，基础设施和生态系统的风险不符。”