At the Confluence of Two Oceans - Report-back from Adaptation Futures 2018, Cape Town

I started writing this post shortly after I returned to California from this conference in Cape Town, but now (in January 2019) the time is dragging on and I'm not sure I'm going to get back to developing this post more, so I'm going to publish it as a half-finished stub to commemorate the event and move on.
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In June 2018 I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the 5th International Climate Change Adaptation Conference Adaptation Futures. This time Adaptation Futures was held in Cape Town, South Africa.

The conference website has links to videos of the plenary sessions, presentation abstracts, and other content reflecting the activities of the conference.

For followers of this conference, the last one was in Rotterdam in 2016, and the next one is in 2020 at a location yet to be announced. Typically the conference rotates Southern Hemisphere to Northern, so I expect a northern location in 2020.

Stepping up on a soapbox for a second: I regret that I am hoping nobody is considering a site in the U.S. The last time it was held in the U.S. was in 2012 in Tucson (see a Jan. 2013 snapshot of the conference website). Since then, things have changed on the U.S. visa/immigration front. We want our Muslim colleagues to be able to attend. So we should not hold it here.

While I was in Cape Town, the thought kept occurring to me that the U.S. Earth science and political science thought-communities are impoverished by the policy barriers keeping foreign scholars and frontline practitioners from crossing easily and securely into our country. (Just sayin.')

But back to the 2018 International Adaptation Futures conference.

A highlight of the conference was the pre-conference field trip to Franschhoek, Western Cape wine country, to visit  the Water Hub water quality field research site and the adjacent Langrug informal settlement, where they are using biomimicry to try to improve the quality of runoff from the settlement (which was polluting nearby farmers' fields).

The Water Hub - https://www.thewaterhub.org.za/

Langrug informal settlement - https://www.flow.org.za/portfolios/genius-of-space-gos2/

The settlement, first formed in the early 1990's, is home to thousands of people and growing every week, with homes appearing further and further up the side of a mountain ridge. The ridge's streams provide clean water to those who harvest it sufficiently high up the slope. We were there in a steady rain and the roads were mostly holding their own thanks to anti-erosion improvements, but water run-off into the shacks looked like a persistent problem.

On the way back to Cape Town we stopped at the famous Theewaterskloof Dam to take in the low water level, recovering from an historic drought.

See its depletion and partial recovery through satellite imagery (July 2018): https://www.thesouthafrican.com/nasa-timelapse-theewaterskloof-dam-july-2018/

On the causes of the drought:

"Was the water shortage caused by farmers, city dwellers or drought?" Piotr Wolski    (19 July 2018)

TL,DR: "[T]he water shortage in 2015-2017 occurred mainly because rainfall was low."

The conference that followed this day of site visits presented fewer novel ideas or dispatches from the field than previous Adaptation Futures conferences I've attended, but that might speak to my growing experience in the field of adaptation more than anything else. The program was also poorly designed (spread out over two programs that were only accessible in PDF form), so it was hard to figure out what was going on much less be strategic in my choices of sessions. My schedule was dictated somewhat by word of mouth advice from friends I ran into in the hallways. The few sessions I found on scenario planning were worthwhile. I might write more on the projects I learned about in those sessions in a later post.

Weirdly, the 2020 conference hosts were not decided by the end of this conference. As of this post's publication (January 2019), there is still no news on the hosts for 2020.

I expect the news to be announced on the 2018 conference's Twitter feed.

Adaptation Futures - Rotterdam Report-Back

Earlier this month I was one of about 1,700 people from 102 countries attending Adaptation Futures 2016, touted as the biggest-yet climate change adaptation conference, in Rotterdam, Netherlands. It reportedly sold out to capacity each of its three days (May 10-13). The week ended with a day of trips (13 of them) to various flood control landmarks and projects. There were 155 sessions with daily plenaries that were simultaneously translated into French and Spanish. It featured an active Twitter feed, a LinkedIn group, and its own app to facilitate conference networking, Fuseami. There was a "Tool Shed" with its own parallel program of presentations, and a daily poster session after the end of the day's program. It was sponsored chiefly by the Global Programme of Research on Climate Change Vulnerability, Impacts and Adaptation (PROVIA) alongside the European Commission and the Government of the Netherlands.

There were seven sectoral themes and three cross-cutting issues, all what I would call standard issue except for one...

1. Cities and infrastructure
2. Food, forestry and rural livelihoods
3. Fresh water availability and access
4. Public health
5. Ecosystems and ecosystem based adaptation
6. Disaster risk reduction
7. The Arctic
8. Risk assessment, adaptation planning and evaluation [cross-cutting]
9. Institutions and governance [cross-cutting]
10. Finance, investment and business [cross-cutting]

The Arctic stood out as the only track with a geographical focus.

Poverty and inequality were addressed in sessions across all sectors and issues. The program was a mix of developing world and rich world topics, with some sessions touching on issues common to both, such as early warning systems for public health.

• See the conference "Results" page for access to plenary videos, photos, presentations, and posters.

Something unique in my experience for an adaptation conference is that it featured an address by local royalty: Queen Maxima of the Netherlands addressed the conference on the second day, followed by a panel on adaptation finance. She gave a well-informed speech about the need to provide financial instruments such as weather-indexed crop insurance to smallholder farmers in developing countries. (Unfortunately, she gave her well-informed speech wearing a safety-orange floral sleeveless sun dress that blew out my camera-phone's settings-- I was close enough for a good photo but it yielded me nothing.) The Q&A at the end of the plenary gave an opportunity for the other member of a royal family in the room to address a comment to the queen: Princess Abze Djigma of Burkina Faso (an engineer and CEO of her own solar company) pointed out that you need to build trust before expecting farmers, or anyone, to buy into an insurance scheme.

A hot topic at the conference was the the December 2015 Paris agreement, especially the new adaptation funding stream and how it can be managed so as to remain in alignment with economic development projects and goals (and not be a haven for projects that are actually just rejected economic development ideas). There was a session on how to make this funding stream "gender sensitive," a term I'll discuss further below.

A new-to-me term in currency at the conference was "climate services." I understood it to mean the disciplines of mitigation and adaptation combined, but another conference-goer pointed out that it could be applied to almost any project. Elsevier apparently had a launch event for a new journal called Climate Services at the conference. (Its first volume from March 2016 is available for free on Science Direct.)

A little Googling tells me that the Climate Services Partnership was founded in New York in 2011.

Check out some climate service projects featured by the Global Framework for Climate Services, which was founded in 2009 (or a decision was made to create it) at the World Climate Conference-3.

Another new-to-me term I encountered at the conference was "adaptation pathways," described in the program as "an emerging approach to decision-making accounting for future uncertainty,
resilience, complex systems and multiple stakeholders’ goals." I missed the CSIRO's presentation introducing the approach, but others were live-tweeting it and discussing it over the coffee breaks. One of its innovations (as I understood it second-hand) is to do an assessment of the collective capacity to act prior to any vulnerability assessment in order to generate more actionable information (e.g., instead of spending resources on an exhaustive examination of vulnerabilities, including those that logistically cannot be reduced).

Read more about it on the CSIRO's Enabling Adaptation Pathways initiative website.

Good questions that were brought up at the conference:

• Maladaptation and maldevelopment: where they intersect, where adaptation can be maldevelopment, and where development can be maladaptation. It was pointed out that this is a matter of your time horizon-- short-term versus long. The Green Revolution in India established food security, a good short-term success, but it created disparities that took away from resilience in the long-term.
• Ethics in the adaptation planning process: there are value judgments inherent in vulnerability assessments, stakeholder engagement, monitoring and evaluation, etc., and they all need to be made salient and examined. 
• NOAA's Roger Pulwarty brought up a few good questions at the opening plenary that were discussed throughout the conference, including:
• How much data do we need? We can pursue a lot more data and still make the wrong decision. He cautioned against producing data to support a pre-determined decision about action: "If we aren't careful we'll end up where we're going."
• Is the goal agreement on action or appropriate action? Riffing on the anecdote about six blind men and an elephant that's used to illustrate how silos make us stupid, he pointed out that six elephants can agree that a human is flat.
• Teleconnections: I heard not just the usual discussion of climate change affecting supply chains for private enterprise, but also how one government's decision about adaptation could have ripple effects in a world region. The common understanding that mitigation is global and adaptation is local needs to be revised: adaptation is also global.
• Insurance: while the role of insurance (especially micro-insurance, weather-indexed insurance, and other developing-world schemes) has been examined in the light of climate change for many years now, it is getting new attention. I heard discussion of its drawbacks and limitations, but also its importance. Governments are now widely recognized as not having sufficient capacity to address the impacts of climate change. Insurance companies and other private financial institutions need to be engaged to work with governments more actively.
• Should there be international standards for adaptation? Who should dictate them? There was only one session on global infrastructure standards, but I think it's an up-and-coming topic. Australia has adopted building standards for climate change. What can we learn from their experience? (Read a 2014 paper on Australian Standard AS 5334 ‘Climate change adaptation for settlements and infrastructure.’ to learn more.)

The conference brought up one old worry and one new worry for me. The old worry: why the short-schrifting of indigenous issues? At this point no climate change conference should treat indigenous adaptation as an afterthought. The only session explicitly addressing this was held in the conference venue's tiniest room with the poorest air circulation (and it was packed, standing room only). There were four speakers, and two of these were not indigenous people, but white people discussing projects they were documenting. The study of traditional environmental knowledge is a well-developed field, it can't be that hard to recruit people to talk about TEK and climate change from an indigenous perspective.

My new worry is what was discussed as the closing plenary as the "silofication" of adaptation. Adaptation is by its nature interdisciplinary: it will reduce its effectiveness to forge and require an adaptation brand. To some extent, it makes sense to create a silo insofar as it is a new profession and needs a silo to be identified as such, but to a large extent adaptation is a repackaging of a lot of different existing silos (public health, public safety/ disaster response, ecosystem restoration, etc.). There are new conferences springing up in the U.S. that are marketed using adaptation language, charging exorbitant fees, and featuring boutique trademarked tools and frameworks that seem to me to be aimed at generating income predicated on a sense of panic in the face of "the sky is falling" climate change reporting. I'm worried this will alienate the otherwise reasonable skeptics in government who need to start incorporating climate change into their government's planning processes but who don't want to fork over a pile of cash to an adaptation-branded consulting firm in order to do so.

Now for the surprises: things I'm still turning over in my mind that I learned at the conference.

1. Lightning is killing a lot of people in India. I noticed this in a talk about heat waves: there was a slide with a graph about deaths by natural events in India to illustrate the heat wave problem, but the tallest column was twice as tall as heat wave deaths, and it was labeled "lightning." I thought I couldn't be reading it right, but turns out over 24,700 have been killed by lightning in India in last 10 years, and its on the exponential rise. A little Googling tells me that some are attributing this to climate change (read Thousands of Lightning Deaths in India Highlight COP21’s Climate Change Challenge - WSJ, Dec. 4, 2015). One sad adaptation strategy is to increase payments to the families of those killed by lightning, apparently usually farmers out tending their fields during the monsoon season.


2. In some places a village will lose all its women in a flood, according to Robert Glasser, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction. Why? Because it is not considered culturally appropriate to teach women to swim, and because women won't take off culturally prescribed restrictive clothing. So they all drown. This insight is still haunting me.


3. DON'T TAKE AN ARCTIC CRUISE. Tell everyone you know: just say no to Arctic cruises. There is apparently an influx of cruise ships entering waters they once couldn't because of ice. I got to hear about the lack of response capacity in Iceland and Greenland (three helicopters!). Meanwhile, people are paying 21,000 USD for a berth on the Crystal Serenity to go through the Northwest Passage this fall. Apparently U.S. and Canadian rescue teams are going to -- coincidentally-- conduct training drills in the vicinity of the cruise's maiden voyage, just in case. Beyond the lack of emergency preparedness, there's also the small matter of the impact of these giant cruise ships on the local cultures and environment.


4. The Dutch don't talk about flooding. If they bring it up it is to say "this is something we don't worry about." A person working on retrofitting NYC public housing for the next Hurricane Sandy told me that Rotterdam is not retrofitting old housing stock for flooding: it's not even on the table for discussion. I thought there would be a whole track in the conference on flood preparedness, but no. One of our tour guides at the Delta Works (during the field trip day) complained that people laughed when someone tried to organize evacuation drills for flooding in Rotterdam. The Delta Works were built for a once-in-10,000-year flood event, but that is predicated on weather patterns not changing. The peat that the dikes are built on (or in some cases made of) becomes brittle in the summer. If there was an anomalous summer rain event that flooded the Rhine at the same time as a high tide with storm surge in the North Sea, there would be problems. At the closing plenary a young student playing the role of a  "flying reporter" was asked her conclusions from the conference, and one of her take-aways was the realization of how lucky they are in the Netherlands to have their seawalls. She wished everywhere in the world they could have the same protections. I thought, "yes, but..."

Some critical afterthoughts about Adaptation Futures:

There were too many sessions. I heard this from more than one experienced adaptation conference-goer. Some presentations were really repetitive of others, and some only tangentially related to adaptation. I'm looking at you, "Livelihood adaptation to long term exposure to volcanic ash."

Although the indigenous approach to adaptation only got one session, there was still a palpable attraction to the idea of traditional environmental knowledge being key to good adaptation. Also, ecosystem-based adaptation. In principle, I think that's fantastic. But I worry that there are unrealistic expectations, even a fetishization of TEK and EbA. I hope the next conference has some grounded-in-reality discussions of how best to combine TEK and EbA with other approaches, keeping an eye on effectiveness and efficiency.

I saw no sessions focusing on the question of how to define adaptation or how to set adaptation goals, but a lot on measurement, monitoring, and evaluation. Can we talk about the dangers of doing the second without the first?

I saw no sessions on ocean acidification. I wonder if it's because it's an ost-risk. -- That's a new adaptation pun I learned at the conference: a risk so terrible you have to stick your head in the sand (you know, like an ostrich).

Lastly, I have a futile complaint about the use of the term "gender" at Adaptation Futures and elsewhere in the international development context. A term like "gender-sensitivity," such as in the deployment of the Global Environment Fund's new adaptation funds, should really be "sensitivity to women's issues." Coming as I do first from an LGBT human rights background before working on environmental issues, I find the international development field's use of "gender" to mean "related to women" at best annoying. It is as though women are the "people of gender," and everyone else is genderless, or invisible (there are third-gendered people, such as India's hijras, who might experience climate impacts differently from cis-gendered women). Men also have gender, and it is salient in the context of climate change, particularly in the context of natural resource-scarcity-driven conflicts. Making "gender" a gloss for "women" weakens the entire gender analysis of climate vulnerability.

Let me end with a billboard that a bunch of us saw and darkly enjoyed while roving around looking for dinner one evening, just a few blocks from the conference site. It's not inspirational, but it has the ring of truth after you've dwelled a while in the world of climate change adaptation.

Onward toward the next Adaptation Futures: see you in Cape Town in 2018!

Bucket o' Miscellaneous News: Safeguarding California, Pending Law, the Next CAF, and Adaptation Futures 2016

Safeguarding California!

Last Tuesday the California Natural Resources Agency released its new adaptation guidance for the state, Safeguarding California: Implementation Action Plans -- the "how to" supplement to the 2014 report Safeguarding California: Reducing Climate Risk-- the update of the 2009 California Climate Adaptation Strategy. A draft third version of the adaptation strategy is mandated by law (AB 1482) to be completed by January 1, 2017.

Read some local coverage of the new guidance: California Government Prepares For Extreme Effects Of Climate Change (March 8, 2016, CBS SF Bay Area).

Update: see a longer article informed by interviews with some of the organizers/contributors: Central coast ag sector aims to thrive in dry spell (March 16, 2016, the Santa Maria Sun).

Pending Law

Some new climate change adaptation-related legislation is pending in California, introduced in mid-February:

• SB 1363 - Promoting eelgrass restoration in coastal habitats (by State Senator Bill Monning). It would encourage evidence-based approaches to restoring eelgrass habitat, which lessens harm from sea-level rise while benefiting salmon, other important commercial fish species, and migratory birds.
• AB 2413 - Sea-level rise preparation (by State Assembly member Tony Thurmond). It would require the California National Resource Agency to do "a study outlining the potential impact of sea level rise on low-income and at-risk communities and public projects and infrastructure" by January 1st, 2019.
• AB 1925 - Introducing a statewide goal for the volume of sea water desalinated (by State Assembly member Ling Ling Chang). This would give a boost to the state's pending coastal desalination projects.

The Next California Adaptation Forum (CAF)

The second CAF will be in Long Beach, California, September 7-8, 2016, and the deadline for proposals is April 3rd. The submission guidelines can be found here.

When the second CAF was announced I heard from a heavy-hitting lobbyist for nature-based adaptation that this forum is not as big a priority for their organization as the first one in August 2014, which was based in Sacramento and brought together a lot of supporters of the glut of climate adaptation legislation that passed last fall (read more about that: Red-Letter Day for California Adaptation Planning, October 9th, 2015). He may have even said he didn't see the point of it(?). So, we can look forward to having fewer lobbyists at this CAF! Hopefully we'll hear lots from local groups like Communities for a Better Environment, who just celebrated in February an announcement of new funds for a clean-up of toxic soil in East LA (read more: Governor Brown commits $176 million to clean up Exide mess in South East Los Angeles, February 18, 2016).

The Next International Adaptation Futures Conference

I am in the throes of logistics for a trip to the Fourth International Adaptation Futures Conference, this time in Rotterdam, Netherlands, May 10-13, 2016, who's program currently has 700 contributors from 69 countries. I loved the second one, held in Tucson, Arizona, in 2012. I missed the first and third conferences (in Queensland, Australia, in 2010, and Fortaleza, Brazil, in 2014). Tucson featured the highest level discussion of practical climate change adaptation I've yet seen, with the most international and multi-level attendance. Being in the Netherlands, I expect a big focus on sea-level rise. For the optional day of field trips I selected a trip to the fantastic Delta Works, one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Further reading:

• My blog post about the Second Adaptation Futures conference in Tucson
• The collection of posters and PPT presentations from the Second Adaptation Futures conference on Archive.org
• The archived version of the website for the First Adaptation Futures conference in Queensland 
• The website for the Third Adaptation Futures conference in Fortaleza
• The Adaptation Futures 2016 LinkedIn Group
• Read the 2016 conference Twitter account, @confAF2016
• The hashtag for the 2016 conference is  #confaf2016 (this handle I'm guessing was devised by an engineer, perhaps a committee of engineers, but at least they have a hashtag and a Twitter account (conferences run by natural resource managers never do)

"Adaptation Futures" is here!

This week hundreds of climate change adaptation planners and researchers are convening for Adaptation Futures, the second international climate change adaptation conference, being held in Tucson, Arizona. It's going to be 100 degrees F and the conference organizer has warned us to dress for the heat. He wrote, "Tucson is famously casual and hot. Not used to either of those? Take a cue from the conference – adapt!" (I think I'm going to enjoy this conference. They are using imperative verbs in the orientation e-mail telling us to leave our pretensions at home.)

Here's the current program. I'm scheduled to present about my scenario planning case study in a panel with robust decision-making folks from Rand on Thursday (2:45 - 4:00 PM, Session C, in Gallagher). After that I should be answering questions at my poster in the poster session room (4:00 - 4:45).

Watch the plenary sessions streaming online here.

Some of the adaptation researchers I'm looking forward to hearing speak are Saleemul Huq, someone who has been writing about adaptation in the developing world for a decade or more, now a Senior Fellow in the Climate Change Group at the International Institute for Environment and Development in the UK, Patrick McCarthy of the Southwest Climate Change Initiative, and, from the West Coast, Susi Moser, one of California's top climate change adaptation thinkers/researchers, and -- representing the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington -- Amy Snover  and Lara Whitley Binder, who brought us the famous 2007 guidebook used by governments all over the U.S. "Preparing for Climate Change, A Guidebook for Local, Regional and State Governments."

Right now it is 54 degrees F in Oakland, so packing for 100 degrees is an exercise in imagination. Truly, this is one of the biggest challenges in climate change adaptation planning-- trying to imagine and sufficiently prepare for a completely different climate from the one you know! I'm packing my bathing suit, sandals and a paper fan--  and a sweater just in case.