My Writings About Adaptation on the Bay Area Open Space Council's Blog, Part 1

I've been asked to write a series of posts for the Bay Area Open Space Council's blog about climate change adaptation, and Monday was the launch of the series.

Read my first post "Be Our Guest: Planning for Climate Change, Part One," wherein I tell the story of how I got involved in adaptation work back in 2008.

Part two will talk about my scenario planning case study in Marin County, the Futures of Wild Marin.

Part three will discuss the conflict between planning for adaptation for human and natural systems, and the theory of "ecosystem-based" adaptation.

Part four will present some of the new California-based adaptation initiatives.

Water security alarm bells sound in Canada

On Oct. 4, 2011, the Adaptation to Climate Change Team (ACT) think tank at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver-- "the only university-based think tank initiative in North America dedicated to climate change adaptation" -- released a set of water security reports: Climate Change Adaptation and Water Governance.

Last year I interviewed the executive director of ACT, Deborah Harford, for my thesis on North Pacific adaptation, to get her critique of the British Columbia province-level plan. She was clearly passionate about trying to provoke the government into further action, and I am excited to see this new set of reports coming from her team.

The lead author of the reports, Bob Sandford, is quoted in the Vancouver Sun, directing comments at the government of British Columbia:

"You manage groundwater like a country would in the 18th century!"

Read more in L. Pynn's Oct. 5, 2011, article SFU study calls for coordinated water conservation policies: Surface and groundwater should be managed together.

ITEP's Treasure Trove of Planning Resources for Tribal Climate Change Response

The Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals (ITEP) is about to hold two workshops in the U.S. Southwest to support the climate change planning of Native American (American Indian) tribes, the Southwest Tribal Climate Change Workshop, September 13-14, 2011, Flagstaff, AZ, and a course on climate change impacts, Climate Change on Tribal Lands, October 11-14, 2011, Flagstaff, AZ.

ITEP appears to be primarily focused on Southwest U.S. tribes (being based at Northern Arizona University), but it also has a great set of links to reference materials on climate change policy broadly relevant for tribal climate change planning (local, national U.S., Canadian, and international references).

One of the reference documents linked there is a set of recommendations on funds allocations for the Fiscal Year 2012 Department of the Interior (DOI) Climate Change Adaptation Initiative (PDF). The recommendations start off with brief, clear language the basis for why climate change planning is important to tribes, how climate change is disproportionately affecting tribes, and why the DOI should fund planning for climate change on tribal lands. The document makes this excellent point:

Due to a lack of financial resources, only a few of the 565 federally recognized tribes, such as the Swinomish Tribe, have developed or are developing adaptation plans, calculating their carbon footprints, and collaborating with states, local governments and federal agencies in joint climate adaptation efforts. By comparison, at least 36 of the 50 states have climate action plans.

The document is authored by a broad coalition of tribal organizations, including ITEP and twelve other groups: the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, the Intertribal Agriculture Council, the Intertribal Timber Council, the National Congress of American Indians, the National Tribal Environmental Council, the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society, the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, the Swinomish Tribe, the Tulalip Tribes, and one non-tribal organization-- the National Wildlife Federation. (See the National Wildlife Federation’s Tribal Lands Conservation Program website: Tribalclimate.org)

The quote above brings up for me the question-- how far has the Pacific Northwest's Swinomish Tribe gotten with their climate change adaptation planning?

It appears, from the ITEP pertaining web page, that the Swinomish began planning in 2007, published the Swinomish Climate Change Initiative Climate Adaptation Action Plan (PDF, 144 pages) in October 2010, and are moving on to implementation. Read more here:

• ITEP's summary of the Snohomish adaptation planning process, dated Feb. 2011.

• The Swinomish Climate Change Initiative Web Site, maintained by the Swinomish Office of Planning & Community Development (based in Washington State, just south of the U.S./Canadian border, across the strait from Vancouver Island, British Columbia)

Now on the California DWR Climate Change Blog - A Summary of the "Futures of Wild Marin" Climate Change Scenario Planning Case Study

California's Department of Water Resources decided to start a climate change blog at the beginning of this year, and provisionally called it a "Clog," i.e., short for climate change blog. I wasn't alone in thinking it needed a new name, and now it is live under the title "Climate Change Current Perspectives," with the word "current" in a watery font.

Meanwhile, Erin Chappell, the staff scientist who is the climate change point person for Northern California, asked me to write a summary of the case study workshop I did using scenario planning to develop a resource management action plan in West Marin, California. I wrote it up and submitted a final version in May 2011. By now I'd decided they probably weren't going to post it. But no! Today I got notice that it was live!

See the California DWR climate change blog

See the archived form of my article "Preparing for Climate Change with Scenarios: A Marin County Case Study" (just a PDF of the post)

One correction to the post: I'm no longer employed by Erika Zavaleta's lab at UC Santa Cruz. The funding ran out in July, and so I'm just a freelance consultant. I let DWR know and told them they can either correct my title or insert the original May date of the article in the blog header. Or, leave it as-is, since Erika certainly won't mind me being erroneously assigned to her lab again. Especially since I'm still working on the project as a volunteer. :->

The Russian Far East Sees its First Shark Attacks: Warmer Waters Blamed

Overfishing together with warming offshore waters are cited as possible causes of the first known shark attacks in the Russian Far East according to this Aug. 18, 2011, NYT article "Shark Attacks Shock Russian East." Two or three (with the third unconfirmed) shark attacks took place over the past few days off the shore of the Russian coastal province of Primorsky Krai, where beaches are crowded this time of year.

For US West Coasters, the beaches of Primorsky Krai on the Sea of Japan are relatively more swimmer-friendly than the East Pacific coast, with warmer waters and more sandy shores. The footage they are showing in conjunction with the shark attacks looks like Shamora, a famous beach near Vladivostok where I hung out on at least one occasion back in my Russian environmental activism days, though I don't believe any of the attacks took place there.

For Russian-readers, here's a decent article from Lenta.ru, Aug. 18, 2011, covering the two confirmed attacks of a 25 year old man and a 16 year old boy. Both the NYT and Lenta.ru articles quote WWF's Konstantin Zgurovsky mentioning the role of climate change in the changing migration patterns of the shark.

The U.S. GAO to the Fed: Get Your Adaptation Funding Ducks in a Row

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a new report: Climate Change Adaptation: Aligning Funding with Strategic Priorities (July 28, 2011). This 14-page report suggests that the U.S. government can't align funding with climate change adaptation priorities for two main reasons: officials across agencies lack a shared understanding of climate change adaptation priorities, and mechanisms intended to align funding with priorities are nonbinding. One suggested way to ameliorate the problem is a government-wide strategic planning process to coordinate a federal adaptation response.

I haven't had a chance to digest the report enough to comment on it, but I always expect to like GAO reports, and this one looks typically plain-spoken and action-oriented.

"Green Helmets" Get a Red Light at the UN Security Council

Today's New York Times reports that a special meeting at the UN Security Council did not result in agreement on action to address security threats caused by climate change. (The article was published online yesterday - U.N. Deadlock on Addressing Climate Shift by N. MacFarquhar, July 20, 2011)

The Guardian's advance coverage of the meeting (UN security council to consider climate change peacekeeping, S. Goldenberg, July 20, 2011) describes the backdrop for the meeting as discussions proposing introduction of "green helmets – which could step into conflicts caused by shrinking resources."

The idea of climate change as a threat to the security of sovereign states is not at all new. The U.S. National Intelligence Council issued an alert back in 2000 about how infectious disease, propelled in new ways by climate change, threatens U.S. security (The Global Infectious Disease Threat and Its Implications for the United States) - though soon after eclipsed by more immediate security threats in 2001.

The idea of the UN acting to address climate change as a global security threat-- that is relatively new. Russia, China, developing nations and climate change denialists argued against this action. The NYT article quotes a government representative of China, Wang Min: "The Security Council does not have the expertise in climate change and does not have the necessary means and resources." He has a point.

The other problem I see with a "green helmet" campaign- what threshold event would trigger deployment? Where does the line between one human-generated crisis and another get drawn? Would the Security Council deploy the theoretical green helmets to evacuate a drowning island nation, where the crisis is clearly caused by climate-driven sea level rise, but perhaps not deploy them to help alleviate the famine in Somalia, where climate change plays a role but less definitively so?

I can't help think about Cyclone Nargis, which devastated Burma/Myanmar right as I was transitioning from a study of the human rights impacts of sanctions on that country to a study of the concept of human security. I was reading strong statements from advocates working within the UN to create a team that would deploy in "human security" crises, as in, crises exactly like Cyclone Nargis, where a population was under massive threat and the government was unequipped (and in this case just reluctant) to help its own people. In that storm in 2008, about 138,000 people died, and the UN stood by, talking about intervention - but not intervening - to help a people devastated by violent weather of the sort we will see more often under climate change.

I presume the "green helmet" promoters are the same people who make the human security argument at the UN (that the UN should intervene if a government can't protect its own people against threats to individual security, such as organized crime, domestic violence, droughts and violent weather, etc., differentiated from national security threats, such as international terrorism, which the military addresses).

I wish it were so that the UN could ever be that organized and well-resourced to take into account climate change threats to security. The reality is that there will be climate refugees, they will look like economic refugees and will be treated as such (badly), and-- like those lost in Cyclone Nargis, living under military dictatorship-- many more will not be able to escape their life-threatening climatic conditions.

Read more about what the International Organization for Migration paper has to say about these climate refugees:
Brown, O. (2008). Migration and Climate Change. Geneva: International Organization for Migration.

Here's a newer IOM report (2011): Climate change, migration and critical international security
considerations.