Guest Blog: An Urgent Update and Message on Waxman-Markey


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Lou Leonard is a policy specialist with WWF-US, based in Washington, DC, who has been very actively involved in lobbying for the current Waxman-Markey climate change bill now in the U.S. Congress. His message goes out to all of us in the US who have been trying to reignite positive action by the US federal government for climate adaptation and mitigation in the past decade, which will mark a major shift in engagement by the US with the global debate about how to reduce the rate of climate change and begin to temper the worst impacts. Read More...
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Guest Blog: Reflections from the Sundarbans: Short-Term Progress, Long-Term Strategies?

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In this entry, Anurag Danda, the program coordinator for the Sundarbans Adaptation Center, discusses recent relief efforts and the possibilities for long-term solutions to the ongoing climate-driven crises for people and species in the Sundarbans. Can the escalating problem of tropical storms and cyclones such as May 2009’s Alia be prevented or mitigated? Is there even a future for the Sundarbans as inhabited islands? Read More...
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Guest Blog: A National "Climate Service"?

Paul Fleming works on freshwater climate adaptation issues for the US City of Seattle, Washington. Seattle obtains much of its water from large rivers, and much of that water during the summer and fall is derived from the melting of annual snowpack — a process that is shifting rapidly as a result of climate change.
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Among his other responsibilities, Paul helps the city’s water supply utility think about how to manage their water resources in fiscally prudent, flexible ways, given that Seattle’s “normal” climate is altering rapidly. In early May, Paul spoke before the U.S. Congress in regard to the Waxman/Markey bill (discussed in several previous blogs here, most recently here) about the need for a National Climate Service — modeled in part on the existing National Weather Service. Such a group would likely focus on delivering analytical services for how climate is changing in critical parameters in particular regions — an excellent idea, which would be a great boon for facilitating and groundtruthing climate adaptation efforts. Below is his statement, as well as the statement of marine biologist Jane Lubchenco, who is now the head of NOAA, which is the agency that would host both the Weather Service and the Climate Service. Many thanks to Paul for supplying his remarks!
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NEWS: Tabs for Sundarbans, Events Updates


I’ve made two changes to the site today. First, given the large number of emails I receive listing events, courses, and grant RFPs relating to climate adaptation, I’ve created a
tab that lists these links. I make no promises, but hopefully some of the leads prove useful. Also, given the high level of interest on climate issues around the Sundarbans islands off of India and Bangladesh, particularly in light of tropical storm Alia in late May, I’ve created another tab that collects these stories and updates, including a set of photos from some relief efforts that immediately followed the aftermath. Read More...
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The Road to Copenhagen 1: Setting the Agenda in Bonn


The next stage in the process leading up to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Copenhagen meeting (usually referred to as a “cop” or council or consultation of the signatory parties) began this week in Bonn, Germany. I’m not able to attend, but the process is important and I’ve been receiving almost hourly updates from colleagues there. You can see some of their progress and concerns on a
video blog in order to get an idea of what being there is like. The most obvious issues are US climate mitigation policy, such as the Waxman/Markey bill (discussed in previous entries). But climate adaptation finance — the “adaptation fund” — is showing up a big second topic as well. Some background on adaptation finance was covered as well in previous entries here indirectly and here for more general issues. However, a “side event” has been planned to continue the process associated with the Nairobi Guiding Principles for freshwater adaptation and the water sector. What are those goals? And why does Bonn matter? Read More...
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News: Climate Adaptation Webcast

The Wilson Center is a policy thinktank in Washington, DC. They’ve got a webinar planned on climate adaptation, presumably from a policy perspective, scheduled for 10 June. I’m not familiar with the speakers or their organization, so I can’t comment on any more on the presentation itself. Their notice below.
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News: SEI's Adaptation School

There are only a handful of climate change adaptation training programs I’ve ever run across. Columbia University’s Earth Institute occasionally offers workshops and seminars (and the link to their education and outreach section is on the new Education section of this site). WWF has run many of these, sometimes focused on particular biomes or occasionally set up as more general “climate camps” (I have t-shirts). I gather that EcoAdapt.org also runs adaptation workshops. No doubt many other groups do too. This morning I got a notice about a two-week session in South Africa, sponsored in part by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), which has some very good staff members working on adaptation issues and is the sponsor for the weADAPT wiki. Their course announcement is below. Read More...
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From Climate Crisis to Weather Disaster: Tropical Storm Alia Strikes the Sundarbans

The Sundarbans are a chain of islands spanning the mouths of the Ganges-Brahmaputra rivers off the shores of India and Bangladesh. They’ve been the subject of several entries here, including some of their human, species, and ecosystem-based vulnerabilities to climate change, disaster risk reduction, and the founding of a regional climate adaptation center. A major tropical storm has hit the region. The regional WWF director for the Sundarbans is Anurag Danda, where he focuses on community-based adaptation and assists with the Bengal tiger program. He emailed me this morning with an update, which I have edited here. Please read his update, see the images he’s sent of the damage, and consider his request for assistance. Contact information included.
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Memes in Action: Climate Mitigation vs. Climate Adaptation

Meme is one of those odd words that rarely strays from the rarefied world of academia, especially in the humanities and social sciences. A meme is an idea or term (or metaphor) that, like an organism, takes on a kind of life of its own from its creator and begins to evolve and shift through a community of users. For instance, the right-wing view in the US that President Obama is a socialist is a recent meme that has been evolving and shifting for the past few months, accruing new layers and images on a weekly basis. But the word occurred to me this week while I was listening to someone at an informal scientific meeting. The speaker was distinguishing between climate mitigation and climate adaptation and he used a metaphor I had invented about a year ago to describe the difference between climate mitigation and climate adaptation. The weird part for me was that he had never heard me use this metaphor or been to any of my talks, as far as either of us was aware. Immediately, I thought: a meme in action! To spread the meme around a little, I will provide the image here. The metaphor goes like this:
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NEWS: Crypto-Adaptation Legislation Leaves Committee


Late last night, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Energy Committee (the so-called Waxman committee, named after Henry Waxman, the current chair) managed to push an important climate change bill (usually referred to as the Waxman/Markey bill, after the sponsors of the legislation) out of the committee so the rest of the House can vote on it. This particular bill, discussed in an earlier entry
here, is exclusively discussed in the media as a carbon cap and trade bill, but I believe it’s most noteworthy as the first climate adaptation bill to be considered in the U.S. Given the almost complete lack of coverage of this aspect of the bill’s language (representing roughly a fifth of the original bill’s word count), I can only imagine that the media doesn’t understand the implications of an adaptation bill. Getting out of committee is a critical step and was full of a lot of political drama. To those of you unfamiliar with U.S. federal legislative procedures (happy people that you are), a piece of legislation (a “bill”) has to get out of its designated committee before it can be considered by the whole of the House. And getting approved by the House is not final either: the US Senate has to move bills through committees before reaching the floor of the Senate too. Then there is a joining process to merge the House and Senate versions. And then the president has to sign the bill. Many a slip remains, but this move shows some progress in pushing the U.S. towards engaging in a serious conversation about climate adaptation. Read More...
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