My Writings about Adaptation on the Bay Area Open Space Council's Blog, Part 3

Here is my post "Be Our Guest: When the Levee Breaks, Mama You Got to Go"on the issue of human versus natural system adaptation, and "ecosystem-based" adaptation, written for the Bay Area Open Space blog.

Part four, coming out next week, talks about California adaptation initiatives.

I love that the blog editor linked my title "When the Levee Breaks, Mama You Got to Go" to a recording of the Led Zeppelin song. I didn't explain in my post that the song is actually relevant-- written about the Great Mississippi Flood in 1927, which was as much an engineering disaster as a natural disaster. Read more about the 1927 flood in John Barry's book on the matter, Rising Tide, written well before Katrina. I loan that book out but make sure to get it back, because I feel like it's a really important cautionary tale that I never want to forget. You can preview it on Google Books.

Congratulations RISE on a great media piece!

Yesterday I heard a wonderfully evocative radio program on KALW radio about the San Francisco Bay and sea level rise, featuring our local climate change science/ planning heavy-hitters Will Travis of BCDC and Healy Hamilton of the California Academy of Sciences.

Congratulations to radio producer/director Claire Schoen, and to Travis and Healy (and the others who appeared in the segment) on a great piece of media exposure!

One of my favorite quotes was from Healy, said with such calm force, as though her life depended on you, the listener, grasping her every word and believing:

We are headed right now on a path to an ice-free planet. And once we are there this planet will look nothing like it does today, and the human infrastructure that we all depend upon will not be able to adapt to those kinds of changes.

Listen to the one-hour program RISE: Part I: Sounding the Waters streaming here.

My Writings About Adaptation on the Bay Area Open Space Council's Blog, Part 2

Here's "Be Our Guest: Planning for Climate Change, Part Two (A Case Study of Impact Scenarios in Marin County)" -- the next installment in my four-part series being posted on the Bay Area Open Space Council Blog. This one is about the Futures of Wild Marin workshop that I organized with 35 resource managers and scientists in Marin in January 2011.

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. :->