Guest Blog: An Urgent Update and Message on Waxman-Markey
24/06/09 14:38
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Guest Blog: Reflections from the Sundarbans: Short-Term Progress, Long-Term Strategies?
23/06/09 11:57
Guest Blog: A National "Climate Service"?
19/06/09 18:08
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.
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
15/06/09 16:31
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...
The Road to Copenhagen 1: Setting the Agenda in Bonn
03/06/09 09:50
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...
News: Climate Adaptation Webcast
03/06/09 09:24
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
01/06/09 09:24
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...
From Climate Crisis to Weather Disaster: Tropical Storm Alia Strikes the Sundarbans
29/05/09 07:17
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
28/05/09 10:32
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
22/05/09 11:31
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...
