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.
~~~

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.

When Armageddon is Your Day Job: The Discussion Continues

I was invited to write an article as a result of the workshop "When Armageddon is Your Day Job: Coping Strategies" -- a workshop I coordinated/co-led at the National Adaptation Forum back in May -- and it has finally, after months of back and forth, gone live on Ensia, the independent publication supported by the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota:

Is Climate Change Driving You To Despair? Read This. (Sept. 19, 2017).

While my mind has since wandered to other things (the parade of deadly hurricanes competing for headlines with the current U.S. administration's exhausting parade of bad decisions), I still often wonder if people are taking this seriously, the question of how to cultivate hope. It turns out people are ready to dig in. In the last few days I've been invited to participate in a conversation on the podcast Warm Regards, meteorologist Eric Holthaus' biweekly production, co-hosted by paleoecologist Jacquelyn Gill and ProPublica journalist Andy Revkin. I've also been contacted by the host of the podcast America Adapts, conservation ecologist Doug Parsons (formerly of the NPS Climate Change Response Program and Society for Conservation Biology). I'm not sure where this will all lead, but hopefully the discussion will continue after the recording mics are turned off.

If you are on the West Coast and looking for places to talk about preparing our communities for the psychological shock of climate change, take a look at the two upcoming conferences being organized by the International Transformational Resilience Coalition:

• Nov. 15-16, 2017, in Portland Oregon:  Preparing People for Climate Change in the Pacific Northwest (registration is still open but it is expected to sell out).
• Jan. 24-25, 2018, in Oakland, California: Preparing People for Climate Change in California (early bird registration ends Oct. 15).

I am planning to attend both: look for my report-back summaries here!

The Aftermath of "Armageddon:" Reporting back from NAF

I want to give a report-back on my May 10, 2017, National Adaptation Forum session "When Armageddon is Your Day Job: Coping Strategies." I co-organized this with Amber Pairis (Climate Science Alliance) and Kristen Goodrich (Tijuana River NERR). We had about 33 people (with some people sneaking out the back early and some sneaking in late). We wanted to give people something to put on their badges so we could find each other to continue the discussion after the session, so Amber brought wonderful color-your-own-sticker stickers and colored pencils, which yielded some really lovely art. I was afraid everyone would be too professional to color stickers, but someone Tweeted from the session as it was starting "Join us in Sticker Club, Room 11!" People were way into coloring.

We started by stating our intention (to share coping strategies for adaptation professionals and frontline communities) and hearing more about Amber's work with her Climate Kids program, where she finds hope and inspiration in a new generation taking hold of environmental conservation and climate change. We were hoping to steer the workshop in the direction of ways to find hope and inspiration.

Then we reviewed some relevant concepts and research, including:

• "Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance," EcoAmerica's new report released March 29, 2017, authored by its Climate for Health staff working with the American Psychological Association, which outlines some of the acute and chronic ways climate change is affecting the mental health of both individuals and communities.
• The principles of "Presencing" and "Purposing," from Bob Doppelt's Transformational Resilience approach to climate change-induced trauma and toxic stress. In preparation for this session I listened in on a series of talks he gave over the month of April, and also watched the recording of the California Department of Public Health's Climate Action Team Public Health Working Group meeting held on Oct. 18, 2016, entirely dedicated to the theme of mental health and climate change, which included a talk by Mr. Doppelt. The recording is available here (IE browser recommended) and you can jump to Mr. Doppelt's talk at 1:20:00 (running to 1:37:38). See the PowerPoint presentation he shared with that talk.

The idea of "presencing" is to meet the basic human need of feeling safe and OK in your body (i.e., meditation, breathing exercises, taking walks), and "purposing" is to meet the basic human need of feeling like you are part of something bigger, that you matter (i.e., connecting with organizations and communities that support your core values). I've been thinking about these concepts almost every day since I learned about them. I think most self-help mechanisms fall into one or the other category. 

We also introduced the term "pre-traumatic stress disorder," coined by Harvard psychiatrist Lise van Sustern. (Read an article by Daniel Oberhaus that quotes her on this topic from Feb. 2017.)

Next, we elicited from participants some reactions to the questions:

• What keeps you up at night?
• How do you foster optimism?
• Where do you find opportunities for growth?
• Do you have any examples of where you found new meaning or opportunities in an adverse situation?

Then we asked participants to add their contributions to flip chart sheets posted in each corner titled respectively:

• Greatest fears
• How you are coping right now
• Ideas for coping that are working for you and can be maintained
• Greatest hopes

At the outset of the talk we had given everyone two index cards, and asked participants to write their greatest hope on one card and take it with them, and to write their greatest fear on the other card and leave it with us in a special box we brought to collect them (asking them to imagine they are leaving those fears behind, for someone else to carry and take care of). 13 people left cards in that box. I read them later. People are grappling with issues on the scale of being afraid we've killed God. This is not something that a garden-variety work-life balance workshop will treat.

I rang a bell every 5 minutes to cue people to move on to the next sheet. A lively discussion was in progress at each station every time I rang the bell. During this time a participant came up to me and suggested the next time we do this workshop we shouldn't ask people to look for hope, essentially saying there is no hope, the best we can look for is "peace." 

I've been sitting with that thought. 

An alternative view that I heard later from a friend who was sitting outside the session and overheard some of it was that we shouldn't despair, we should "fight harder." 

That's another thought with which I've been sitting.

I wonder which perspective is most helpful to whom and at what point in their struggle to make a difference.

Next we asked participants to return to their sticker coloring stations and I and my co-organizers read out some things that were written on the various lists. The "how I'm coping now" sheet included a fair range of different types of alcohol and other routes of escape. The sheet we intended to be for "sustainable" coping mechanisms had some interesting items like:

• Release the need to be right 
• Stay offline after work
• Talking to friends, hugging friends
• Humor
• EMDR
• Walking dogs for the Humane Society
• Contemplative practices (including ceremony, quiet retreats, chanting, lectio divina, walking, prayer)
• Outdoors activities like gardening, hiking
• Yoga
• Sleep

One person pointed to a healthier beverage for unwinding.

One person's response to how s/he's coping

I remarked that most of these things were solitary, more about "presencing," not necessarily connecting to a larger community, so I asked for some more suggestions in the "purposing" category, and someone said:

"My mom always said that if you're feeling bad go do something for someone else."

... I noted that this lined up with things I learned in the Science of Happiness, a MOOC run out of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center. (Read more here: Kindness Makes You Happy and Happiness Makes You Kind [2011].)

Lastly we discussed the possibilities for creating a community of practice around supporting climate change practitioners' mental health. More to come on that, I hope!

Further resources:

• Read more about Bob Doppelt's International Transformational Resilience Coalition (ITRC)
• Watch Dr. Susanne Moser's keynote address Hope: A Bridge Without Railing at the 2015 Conference on Communication and Environment" about the importance of active hope in the face of climate disruption and other threats to life on the Earth" (1:27). Susi starts speaking at 10:15.
• Read the article on which this lecture is based (Moser & Berzonsky 2015, still in peer review? apparently?)
• When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job by John Richardson, the 2015 Esquire article that inspired the title for my session at NAF.
• Is This How You Feel? - Letters from climate scientists about their fears.
• More Than Scientists - Video clips of climate scientists talking about why they do their work.
• The Art of Empathy: Honoring Your Emotional Ecosystem by Karla McLaren, M.Ed., a 2-page handout we gave to session participants.

...Even further resources (added 24 May 2017):

More reading

Beyond Storms and Droughts: the Psychological Impacts of Climate Change (51 pages, EcoAmerica 2014) - the report on which EcoAmerica based its 2017 report.

The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States: and Why the U.S. Mental Health Care System is Not Adequately Prepared (60 pages, National Wildlife Foundation 2012)

Climate Depression is for Real. Just Ask a Scientist. (Thomas 2014) - a short article in Grist about the emerging problem of climate scientists experiencing trauma from their work. It includes a link to Gillian Caldwell's 2010 Grist piece 16 tips for avoiding climate burnout, which goes more in depth into climate trauma survival tips from psychiatrist Lise van Sustern.

Resources associated with the book Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy (Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone 2012)

More on Bob Doppelt's "Transformational Resilience" Movement

Webinars & workshops - on the right-hand sidebar find links to webinar recordings.

Upcoming Workshops

• Lane County Resilience Summit, Eugene, Oregon, June 6, 2017 (registration is almost closed- 10 spots left)
• Pacific Northwest Conference on Building Human Resilience for Climate Change, November 15-16, 2017, Portland, Oregon (registration opens June 1, 2017)
• California Conference on Building Human Resilience for Climate Change, January 24-25, 2018, Oakland, California (registration opens July 1, 2017)

International Transformational Resilience Coalition Membership Application (free)

Order "Transformational Resilience: How Building Human Resilience to Climate Disruption Can Safeguard Society and Increase Wellbeing" (300 pages, Doppelt, 1st ed. 2016)

One more "resilient communities" resource 

Transition US - "Growing a Movement for Resilient Communities" - this is an organization recommended by one of our workshop participants. It is an NGO that works closely with the UK-based Transition Network. It "seeks to build community resilience in the face of such challenges as peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis."

One week until NAF! Join me in my session "When Armageddon is Your Day Job"

The third biannual National Adaptation Forum (NAF) is starting next Tuesday in St. Paul, Minnesota. I'm excited to see colleagues and friends from around the country!

There will be a American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP) daily digest covering the NAF and I *believe* I'll be writing for it: click here to subscribe.

Find out more about the ASAP member meeting - Mon. May 8 in St. Paul (2:45 - 5:15 PM) - we've met up at the previous NAFs but this time we have an agenda.

Follow me on Twitter (@stripeygirlcat) - I will be Tweeting the conference as usual.

While I've presented or facilitated at the California Adaptation Forum and the International Adaptation Futures conferences, this will be my first time organizing a session at NAF! I'm putting this together with two colleagues who have a lot of experience with practitioner training and climate change communication - Amber Pairis (Climate Science Alliance) and Kristen Goodrich (Tijuana River NERR):

When Armageddon is Your Day Job: Coping Strategies
Wednesday, 2:30pm to 4:20pm, Meeting Room 11

We'll be talking through some of the research on primary climate trauma (e.g., from watching your house fall into the ocean) and secondary trauma for practitioners (e.g., from mapping out the erosion projections for that coast but not being able to get the government to do managed retreat in time). We'll walk participants through some exercises to help us suss out good coping strategies. Look, we made a flier for it!

I'll do a separate blog post with the interesting research links from our prep work for this session.

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!

George Wright Society 2015 Proceedings Now Online

Last year (March 29-April 3, 2015) the George Wright Society met in Oakland, California, my home. It was great. I walked 20 minutes downtown and saw many people I've known from various projects regarding climate change and public open space lands presenting about their research. The proceedings are now available for download.

Get free downloads of PDFs of some the papers and attendee reflections from the 2015 conference here.

The George Wright Society is -- for the uninitiated-- "a nonprofit association of researchers, managers, administrators, educators, and other professionals who work in, or on behalf of, parks, protected areas, and cultural/historic sites" (per Wikipedia's article). I did not realize until I looked it up after the conference that George Wright--George Melendez Wright-- was born in 1904 and died in a tragic car accident on the job at age 31 in 1936, and was (a) from San Francisco, (b) El Salvadoran-American, son of an immigrant, (c) like me a graduate from UC Berkeley, and (d) the first scientist employed by the U.S. National Park Service. A cool-sounding dude.

The 2015 conference held by the non-profit named after him was titled "Engagement, Education, and Expectations: The Future of Parks and Protected Areas." You can download a 203-page book, edited by Samantha Weber, with 49 papers and reflection statements from the conference.

Climate change was all over this conference. Here's the one scientific paper on the topic that made it to this collection:

Monitoring Landbirds in National Parks: Understanding Populations, Migratory Connectivity, and Climate Change (Albert et al.) - 7 pages

I saw a great presentation at GWS 2015 by Mark Schwartz (UC Davis) on assisted migration-- a cautious and rational approach to the quintessential hot-button topic in natural resource management. He was in the climate change "Focus Session" provocatively titled  "Climate Change Adaptation isn't for Sissies," moderated by NPS climate change luminary Leigh Welling, and featuring, besides Mark, other big names in the adaptation field UW's Josh Lawler and NPS climate scientist Patrick Gonzalez. Unfortunately, the research presented by them isn't in the free downloadable materials.

Read "A Framework for Debate of Assisted Migration in an Era of Climate Change" -- Mark Schwartz's influential 2007 article, authored with Jason McLachlan and Jessican Hellmann-- free on CAKEx.

The California Adaptation Forum - Session Proposal Deadline Extended

Today was the deadline for California Adaptation Forum session proposals, but this afternoon the Local Government Commission extended the deadline to next Friday, April 15. Submit your proposal here.

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)

California’s Adaptation Clarion Call (the re-post, with updates)

The following was published Sept. 2, 2014, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.

Two updates on the content of this article:

First: the California Adaptation Forum that I am reporting on below is scheduled to be held again September 7-8, 2016, in Long Beach, California. To subscribe to get updates on the conference go here. Find the presentations from the 2014 conference here.

Second, Alicia Torregrosa (USGS), the convener of the panel that I moderated at the 2014 California Adaptation Forum, and our two other panelists, Travis O'Brien (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and Ian Faloona (UC Davis), have since published an article encapsulating the topic of our panel: Coastal Fog, Climate Change, and the Environment (Dec. 2014, Eos Earth and Space Science News). Not behind a paywall!
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"Decision makers must expect to be surprised with increasing frequency."

- National Research Council 2009 report, Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate, as paraphrased by Alice Hill, Senior Advisor for Preparedness and Resilience, White House National Security Council.

“Plan for surprises” is a sentiment I’ve seen expressed in various contexts regarding climate change, and it was repeated last week at the California Adaptation Forum’s second day opening plenary by Obama adviser Alice Hill. It was a laugh-line. Surprises, by definition, can’t be planned for.

In a graduate seminar on climate change adaptation in 2010—amid complaints about the popular denial of climate change—I asked my classmates: who has an earthquake kit at home? Two out of ten. I would revise the National Research Council’s order: “decision makers must expect human denial of the element of surprise.”

The California Adaptation Forum (CAF) was a clarion call organized in Sacramento (Aug. 19-20, 2014) to shake California’s political decision makers out of denial and into action.

California has been a world leader on climate change mitigation, aggressively regulating and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a push initiated by State Senator Fran Pavley with her landmark bills in the Assembly, AB 32 (2006) and AB 1493 (2009). I visited Senator Pavley in her office in 2012 to ask her if she had heard anything from her constituents about climate change impacts or was otherwise aware of these impacts and considering any legislative responses. From her response, I got the impression she is still at square one fighting the “climate change is real” battle in her political circles.

So, two years later at the CAF, a few blocks from Senator Pavley’s office, I was pleased to hear eminent state leaders on greenhouse gas reduction like the California Air Resources Board’s Chair, Mary Nichols, and the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research Director, Ken Alex, talk about the importance of preparing for climate threats. The 816 registrants from a breadth of sectors and local to international-level organizations attended 38 sessions and four plenary panels over two days, organized by the Local Government Commission, a private non-profit, in partnership with the State of California. One third of the attendees represented either local or state government offices. Another third represented nonprofit organizations, many of which work closely with local government. Academic representatives came in at 5% of the attendees.

Of the four large adaptation-specific conferences I’ve attended in recent years this was the first emphasizing local solutions at every opportunity. The others I’ve attended (Three Degrees in 2009; the Second International Climate Change Adaptation Conference in 2012; the first U.S. National Adaptation Forum in 2013) all featured an initial presentation of the scariest, latest scientific findings with the bottom line “Did you think we were screwed? Well now you know we are.” We dwelt in the shadow of those projections through the rest of the conference.  Rightly or wrongly, the CAF downplayed the role of climate science.

An aside: there was one science-focused session in the program— I was proud to be the moderator of a panel on the connection between fog and climate change, focusing on its importance as a source of water and cooling. The four scientists on the panel were determined to keep the mood light and positive, featuring fog special effects from a block of dry ice and carafes of hot water, but still got down to the question of whether winds driving upwelling and intensifying fog will outrun climate warming, which may be reducing fog (a trend that has been traced over the past 50 years on the California coast by Johnstone and Dawson, 2010).

Mainly, the CAF sessions presented stories from the field—active projects, lessons learned. The sessions I attended were accessible and interactive, all allowing between 10-30 minutes for questions. Colleagues echoed my impression that attendees had their ears open, were using their beginner-mind (not expert-mind), and didn’t push individual agendas. Their attitude was “I’m here to learn if I can. I’m here to help if I can.”

The California Secretary for Natural Resources John Laird’s morning address on day two was the highlight of the conference for me. Secretary Laird described specific situations from his past as a local politician when he had to push back against angry constituents to make the right decision for the long-term health and safety of his community, such as closing a structurally vulnerable community services center in anticipation of a storm despite strong protests; the storm caused the roof to collapse and his constituents thanked him for not backing down. Laird also communicated a vivid framework for organizing in anticipation of climate change by talking about his time as executive director of the Santa Cruz AIDS Project in the early 1990s, having to assemble resources in advance of things getting worse. Think about it: what did community organizers do in the AIDS crisis? They did mass, urgent, public education targeted to the most vulnerable; created a professional specialization to push research to the edge; made community art—like the AIDS Quilt—displaying visible, clear, accessible representations of the losses already happening, warning against complacence; and aggressively raised funds to create institutions to support the victims and their loved ones. What if we did the same for climate change? What would our quilt look like?

As for what’s next for California, Michael McCormick from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, one of the state partners who developed the CAF with the Local Government Commission, reports:

…[t]he State will be working with the Local Government Commission to distill what we heard into some near term actions that focus on cross-sector/cross-organizational strategies. We’ll also continue working together to ensure the momentum started here will continue towards the 2015 National Adaptation Forum and the 2016 California Adaptation Forum.

Read the Twitter stream from the CAF (#CAF14), and check out the CAF presentation PowerPoint slides. The presentations are listed in alphabetical order, so you’ll find the California Coastal Fog presentation under “C.”

Feature photo by TD Tillman - the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta at flood stage (2009). © Creative Commons

California Climate Change Symposium Parking Lot

I was unable to attend the California Climate Change Symposium (#CCCS15) in Sacramento on Aug. 24-25, 2015, so I'm creating a parking lot here for links that can help a non-attendee get acquainted with what happened there.

It was put together by the Governor's Office of Planning and Research (OPR), the California Natural Resources Agency (CNRA), the California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal-EPA), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The main topic of the event was the state of climate science in California (the URL for the event is "californiascience.org"). The Daily Breeze (LA County) does a nice, quick, accessible summary of the take-aways of the science presented at the CCCS15, if you can get past the demotivating headline: California climate researchers sound the alarm at symposium: ‘There’s no way out’ (Aug. 25, 2015).

That "no way out" quote is attributed to the wise and esteemed Susanne Moser, who I greatly admire, but who definitely tends towards the "stick" more than "carrot" approach to delivering climate change information, at least when she is talking to her peers-- scientists and climate change planners. Another stick-upside-the-head pronouncement I wrote down once while listening to her speak is "we can't save everything we love." She's good at "stick" delivery. Another So-Cal journalist who appears to be repacking the Daily Breeze take-aways but with maps, seized on the "no way out" quote, putting it in bold under another "stick"-y headline: The Many Terrifying Ways Global Warming Will Soon Be Ravaging California (Aug. 26, 2015).

FYI -- if you, like me, missed the event because you didn't find out it was happening in time to attend, the event was first announced May 21, 2015, by the CNRA via its climate change list-serve (which you can join here). The call for posters only went out on July 8. Since the short lead-time on the event probably excluded a lot of people who have to plan ahead more than a few weeks at a time, it's nice that the event was live-webcast. However, I don't think the videos are available online (or, aren't yet online).

Despite the short notice, it was a sold-out 600+ crowd, from one friend's account. I'm skimming through the Twitter feed of top tweets on the event for other insights.

If that's too much heavy lifting, LA-based Climate Resolve has just published a curated selection of CCCS15 tweets.

If you are looking for MORE heavy lifting here's the "live" feed for #CCCS15, the whole slough of tweets with that tag, uncurated.

California's Adaptation Clarion Call - the California Adaptation Forum

Check out my new contribution to the WWF ClimatePrep blog:
California's Adaptation Clarion Call - about my experience at the California Adaptation Forum (CAF), held Aug. 19-20, 2014, in Sacramento.

For more vicarious enjoyment of the CAF:

Check out the PowerPoint presentations from the Forum.

You can also buy the audio recordings of all the Forum sessions - $200 for all the recordings, otherwise $10 a pop. Audio clip #CAF14-204 will get you the recording of the session I moderated,
"California Coastal Fog: An Untapped and Little-Known Water Resource?" although it can't be fully appreciated by audio - we had fog special effects and fog collectors. But you can see our 124-slide fog presentation here.

Here are the video recordings of the four plenary sessions (free!):

Aug. 19 Morning Welcome - various state officials and representatives
Kate Meis - Local Government Commission and state government representatives Mike McCormick and Ken Alex - Office of Planning and Research, Mary Nichols - Air Resources Board, Ken Pimlott - CalFire, and Fran Spivy-Weber - State Water Board.

Aug. 19 Lunch - the role of the for-profit private sector in climate change
Kish Rajan - Office of Business Development, John Makower - GreenBiz Group, Christopher Benjamin - PG&E, Kathy Gerwig - Kaiser Permanente, Stephanie Rico - Wells Fargo.

Aug. 20 Morning  (the best of the bunch) - on partnerships
The inimitable Jack Mackenzie from the City Council of Rohnert Park moderating a discussion including: Salud Carbajal - Santa Barbara County Supervisor, Rick Cole - City of Los Angeles Deputy Mayor for Budget and Innovation, Nicola Hedge - Alliance of Regional Collaboratives for Climate Adaptation (ARCCA) Vice Chair and Director of the San Diego Foundation's Climate Initiative, Alice Hill - Senior Advisor for Preparedness and Resilience to the President's Assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (White House National Security Council). John Laird, the head of the state's Natural Resources Agency, finished off the morning plenary with a moving speech about the lessons he's learned on making the right - if unpopular - decision in a position of political leadership.

This is the one plenary I would like to re-watch, especially for the contributions of Rick Cole, Alice Hill, and John Laird. And the antics of Jack Mackenzie, with his warm Scottish humor.

Aug. 20 Closing - Keynote by Mayor Rex Parris
Featuring Wade Crowfoot - Deputy Cabinet Secretary and Senior Advisor to the Governor introducing the keynote speaker R. Rex Parris, the Mayor of the City of Lancaster, a Republican who believes in climate change preparedness.

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Update: WWF's ClimatePrep blog apparently went defunct in 2018 and may not be revived.  I'm updating this blog's links to ClimatePrep to snapshots on Archive.org (where available). Some articles look OK there, some not so OK. For a readable version with images intact, see my ClimatePrep articles as reconstructed on this blog:

• Head in the Clouds: The Dream of Harvesting Water from Fog
June 08, 2017

• Story Maps: A Rising Star of Climate Change Communication
April 10, 2017

• The Sea Level Rise Solution that is as Charismatic as Mud
February 17, 2017

• The Internet of Water - October 31, 2016

• Sea Level Rise Seen with New Eyes: the OWLs of San Mateo
August 30, 2016

• California: The Rebeavering
May 22, 2015

• Government Folly in the Face of Climate Change
March 19, 2015

• In the Heat of the Moment
December 02, 2014

• California’s Adaptation Clarion Call
September 02, 2014

• Farmland in Flux
July 8, 2014

• Honest Conversations: Climate Change and Uncertainty
December 12, 2013

Climate Readiness Institute launch at UC Berkeley today

I am tweeting as @stripeygirlcat at the launch of the Climate Readiness Institute at the Brower Center at UC Berkeley today-- follow me! (I only use that account for climate change-related posts, no live-tweeting the Oscars will ever occur there.)

There is quite a brain trust here today. Inspiring.

Packing for Denver - the Inaugural National Adaptation Forum

I'm very pleased to be heading to Denver tomorrow for the inaugural National Adaptation Forum from April 2-4, where I'll see many colleagues from around the country. Unfortunately (and confusingly), I won't see my colleagues working for the federal U.S. government, thanks to the sequester. (Read the March 1, 2013, Environmental News Service article on some of the environmental costs of the sequester.) Way to shoot yourselves in the collective foot, Congress. When one of the key people working on adaptation through the landscape conservation cooperatives here in California said she couldn't go to the NAF because of the sequester, an NGO offered to help pay for her trip, and she said she couldn't even be SEEN there, presumably because there are regulations preventing her from accepting the funding to send her there. Our federal employees are not just not being funded to go, they aren't allowed to go! Luckily, conference organizers say, there was time to find replacement speakers for most of the victims of the sequester.

Those of you who will be there, look for me on Tuesday (Day 1) during breaks and between 5 PM and 7 PM by my poster on scenarios for natural resource adaptation planning that I put together for last year's international adaptation conference in Tucson.

I would list the sessions that I'm looking forward to attending, but there really are too many to list. I'm choosing between appealing options in every session. Here's the agenda as of March 29, 2013.

Now, back to watching the astonishing take-down that Louisville's women's basketball team is presently executing on the legendary Baylor team.

"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.

Not climate-change specific, but still important: 8th Environmental Justice Symposium at Berkeley Law

Check it out-- the UC Berkeley School of Law is hosting the 8th Annual Environmental Justice Symposium, sponsored by the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE). The theme this year is "Overcoming Invisibility: Environmental Justice in Rural America."

I was born and raised in a rural, isolated, economically depressed area in Northern New York, and I am always mentally testing proposals for climate change adaptation as to whether they are designed only for city-dwellers, or whether they might be adopted to benefit rural populations. Laurel Firestone from the Community Water Center in the Central Valley is someone I respect greatly as someone thinking beyond city-oriented interventions for access to water under climate change in California. She is presenting at this conference on March 1.

I'm not sure why the schedule of events isn't posted on CLEE's site, but it was circulated by means of a semi-private mailing list I'm on, so here you go (note that the closing talk on March 2 is already full, though a wait list has been started):

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-- This EJ Symposium at the Berkeley Law School is free, including food. --

WHAT: THE 8TH ANNUAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE SYMPOSIUM
WHEN: February 27th - March 2nd, 12:45-2:00pm each day
WHY: Rural communities and the environmental justice issues that impact these areas are often overlooked. We are bringing together organizers, attorneys, and community members who work in these areas to drop some knowledge, share their experiences, and kick off what we hope will be great ongoing discussions.

Save the date for SEEJ's upcoming Environmental Justice Symposium! The topic this year is "Overcoming Invisibility: Environmental Justice in Rural America." Join us for a week of lunchtime panel discussions on important environmental justice issues impacting rural communities. Lunch will be provided each day and all events are free and open to the public. See below for a description of events and speakers each day. We look forward to seeing you there and please pass on the information to your networks!

Schedule for the Week:

*Monday, February 27, 2012. 12:45-2:00pm. Room 105.*
KEYNOTE EVENT: THE STRUGGLE FOR CLEAN ENERGY ON TRIBAL LANDS
Leaders from the Navajo Nation-- Anna Rondon (New Energy Economy), Wahleah Jones (Black Mesa Water Coalition), Brad Bartlett (Western Energy Justice Project), and Caitlin Sislin (Women's Earth Alliance)—will discuss the struggle against mining and towards clean energy alternatives on tribal lands.
~~~Lunch provided from Cafe Gratitude~~~

*Tuesday, February 28, 2012. 12:45-2:00pm. Room 295.*
GENDER, RACE, AND POWER IN THE EJ MOVEMENT
This event brings together female attorneys, advocates and organizers of color to explore ways gender and race have impacted women's experiences and strategies leading struggles for environmental and economic justice in rural America. Come participate in a conversation with Anna Rondon (New Energy Economy) and Felicia Espinosa (California Rural Legal Assistance), moderated by Tracy Perkins (U.C. Santa Cruz).
~~~Lunch provided from Cheeseboard~~~

*Wednesday, February 29, 2012. 12:45-2:00pm. Room 105.*
WASTING THE VALLEY: DISCRIMINATORY SITING OF HAZARDOUS WASTE DISPOSAL
While cities produce most of California's waste, rural areas bear the brunt of it. All three of the state's Class I hazardous waste dumps are sited near low-income, unincorporated communities. Ingrid Brostrom, an attorney with the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, and Maricela Mares-Alatorre, a community activist and organizer, will discuss the ongoing struggle in Kettleman City, a rural community near a 1,600-acre hazardous and municipal solid waste dump that has experienced a rash of severe birth defects and infant deaths over the past several years.
~~~Lunch provided from Mandela Food Cooperative~~~

*Thursday, March 1, 2012. 12:45-2:00pm. Room 105*
NOT A DROP TO DRINK: THE STRUGGLE FOR POTABLE WATER IN THE CENTRAL VALLEY
Veronica & Joanna Mendoza, a mother and daughter from Cutler, who are also representing the AGUA Coalition and Vecinos Unidos will join Laurel Firestone and Carolina Balazs from the Community Water Center on a panel to discuss disparities in access to clean drinking water in the Central Valley.
~~~Lunch provided from Sunrise Deli Falafel~~~

*Friday, March 2, 2012. 12:45-2:00pm. Dean’s Conf. Rm.*
A CALL TO ACTION IN RURAL AMERICA
Leaders from major organizations in the Central Valley such as California Rural Legal Assistance and Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment will engage in a dialogue with students and professors about Boalt’s current and future commitment to rural issues. Lisa Pruitt from UC Davis Law will moderate.
[LIMITED SEATING. PLEASE RSVP TO: shainahyder-- at --fulbrightmail.org]
~~~Lunch provided from Gregiore~~~

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13 Days Until Abstracts Due! -- 2nd International Climate Change Adaptation Conference 2012

I wasn't able to attend the first International Climate Change Adaptation Conference held in Queensland, Australia, in 2010.

But I have hopes to make it to the second one, due to be held in Tucson, Arizona, USA, May 29-31, 2012.

The conference is being called "Adaptation Futures" and will be held at the University of Arizona, organized by the Institute of the Environment. They extended the deadline for abstracts to Feb. 15, 2012.

Here's a two-page summary about the conference, including a confirmed list of plenary speakers:
Climate Adaptation Futures: Second International Climate Change Adaptation Conference 2012.

I'm glad to see that "[s]tudents/early-career scholars and participants from developing countries have an opportunity to apply for financial assistance." Full price early (by March 31) registration is $500.