Meet the Press
23/08/08 05:12
World Water Week in Stockholm is very policy oriented. This year, much of the focus was on sanitation, but two days were spent in a series of linked symposia on water and climate. Talks ranged from more details on emerging climate impacts with the IPCC’s new technical report on water and climate to regional and local adaptation strategies and tactics. Easily two of the most novel experiences for me as a scientist were interacting with the press as an “adaptation expert” and holding some introductory climate adaptation conversations with two international development banks. I’ll write more about the banks later, but the media interaction was a good if difficult experience. Read More...
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Water, North and South
23/08/08 05:08
Roughly 30 hours ago, I was rushing to the Stockholm airport. As I boarded the plane, I passed a small window used when guiding the walkway between the plane and the gate. A little sign a few feet in front of the nose of the plane stated the airport name, the city, and the latitude and longitude. Fifty-nine degrees north latitude, I thought. That’s the farthest north I’ve ever stood, at least on the ground. Then I laughed: this flight would carry me in 10 hours to Chicago, where I’d catch an 11-hour flight to Sao Paolo, Brazil, and then a last plane headed to the southwest for two hours to Cuiaba, Brazil, near the Bolivian border. From there, I drive straight south several hours to roughly 25 degrees south latitude, the southern-most point of my life. In basically a day and a half, I’d be spanning 85 degrees of latitude and pushing the extremities of my experience.But the contrasts were not merely of hemisphere and geography. My time in Stockholm was largely spent at a 2,500-person conference where water was only visible on PowerPoint slides and drinking fountains, while the Pantanal is a wetland the size of England and Scotland filled with jaguars, hyacinth macaws, and capybaras. The night sky is bright with stars and is one of the few places with essentially no planes visible in the sky. It has a great deal of water and very few people. Read More...
NEWS: climate adaptation case studies
22/08/08 13:31
A colleague closely affiliated with WWF who is now at Australian National University has just written an excellent series of climate adaptation case studies. Read More...
UPDATE: Kids and Climate Paranoia
22/08/08 11:40
UPDATE: You can see a short video of these kids from the week as described below. A marketing piece, but a very nice one.
Originally posted: 25 June 2008
I’m old enough that I was among the last generation to grow up with serious, warranted nightmares about massive nuclear exchanges between the U.S. and Soviet Union. I can remember being about six or seven and first learning about total nuclear annihilation; I had nightmares for a while, and I felt a consistent sense of fear and unease, certainly well into Bush 41’s presidency. I never had to deal with duck and cover drills like the generation before me, but I always felt aware of this potential doom, which felt completely out of my hands. The undercurrent of that time is hard to explain to people who haven’t lived through it.
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Originally posted: 25 June 2008
I’m old enough that I was among the last generation to grow up with serious, warranted nightmares about massive nuclear exchanges between the U.S. and Soviet Union. I can remember being about six or seven and first learning about total nuclear annihilation; I had nightmares for a while, and I felt a consistent sense of fear and unease, certainly well into Bush 41’s presidency. I never had to deal with duck and cover drills like the generation before me, but I always felt aware of this potential doom, which felt completely out of my hands. The undercurrent of that time is hard to explain to people who haven’t lived through it.
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Action in the Air Conditioning
19/08/08 19:42
I’m in Stockholm for World Water Week. I speak tomorrow with some colleagues as part of a larger series of talks on water and climate, though I’ve been here for several days. This is an unusual meeting for me: heavy on policy and programs, light on science and what I am used to thinking of as analysis. And being here captures some of the tension that a lot of us involved in climate adaptation work feel on a regular basis: How do we balance between being in a clean, well-appointed convention center, somewhere in the over-developed (even post-developed) world, talking about “issues” with people that are often several steps removed from where the action is -- places in the developing world, out of the air conditioning and the people sampling the smorgasboard of ideas and recommendations in the cold light of energy-efficient bulbs.
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News: Change Comes to the Thames
18/08/08 00:18
The Thames is a great world river because of its connection to England for millennia, to London and the City as agents of modern history, and to its special chalk landscape. Read More...
A Cheap Room in the Hotel Talk: Science as an Agent of Change
16/08/08 09:25
My hotel in Stockholm is called the “Talk.” I assume this is because it joins a big convention center in the city, but the name also suggests the process of conversation, discourse, and discussion. From my perspective, that suggests making policy out of the science. After all, across the sea a little to the south stands Prussia, where Bismarck suggested that the making of politics and sausage were best left out of sight. Here in Sweden, I am trying to make a little sausage. Read More...
NEWS: Freshwater Climate Adaptation Primer
15/08/08 08:02
Just published online today, the ides of August, is a flyer for policymakers and water resource managers that I wrote with a good friend and colleague. Intended as a primer on climate change and freshwater conservation and economic development, it’s an introduction to some of the basic of my work. Read More...
Islands on the Edge: Climate Resilience and the Sundarbans of South Asia
14/08/08 11:41
April 2009: Note that some progress has been made — after reading the entry below, read the update here.
When I was an academic biologist, I certainly felt passionately about climate change, but (a) no one really listened to me, (b) I could say pretty much anything I wanted without fear of repercussion (or hope for influence), and (c) most of the impacts seemed -- ultimately -- rather theoretical. That’s no longer the case. I frequently give talks where I have to fight the urge to suppress strong feelings, usually anger or grief. Normally I do a pretty good job. But the feelings are there, whether or not they’re visible. Perhaps the most moving climate-related conversation occurred last April in New Delhi, about a place that I knew almost nothing about before a year ago: the network of islands off the Bangladeshi and eastern Indian coasts called the Sundarbans. They are arguaby among the most important and threatened ecosystems on the planet today. Read More...
When I was an academic biologist, I certainly felt passionately about climate change, but (a) no one really listened to me, (b) I could say pretty much anything I wanted without fear of repercussion (or hope for influence), and (c) most of the impacts seemed -- ultimately -- rather theoretical. That’s no longer the case. I frequently give talks where I have to fight the urge to suppress strong feelings, usually anger or grief. Normally I do a pretty good job. But the feelings are there, whether or not they’re visible. Perhaps the most moving climate-related conversation occurred last April in New Delhi, about a place that I knew almost nothing about before a year ago: the network of islands off the Bangladeshi and eastern Indian coasts called the Sundarbans. They are arguaby among the most important and threatened ecosystems on the planet today. Read More...
Nine Challeges to Freshwater Management from Climate Change
10/08/08 11:21
One of my key hunches is that climate change alters the framework of economic development and conservation. My proprietary and parochial interest is in freshwater ecosystems, but the insight (if insight it be) extends more broadly. Here, I propose a list of some of the climate-related elements I think we should be debating in regard to freshwater management. It is not complete, but these cover many of the big points we should probably be resolving now and over the next few years. Read More...
The End of the Beginning
10/08/08 11:20
I am nearing the end of about 10 months of climate adaptation work. In terms of travel, that amounts to the equivalent of flying roughly five or six times around the equator over that period. And during that time I have developed a reasonable sense of what my job involves, met most of the people I will work closely with, and begun to develop some of the basic skills I need to shift from being an academic and government scientist to being a conservation biologist with a non-profit organization (also known as an NGO or, in many countries, a civil-society organization). Most of my intiial goals have been effectively met, and now I am starting to think about what tasks lay head now. In the words of Churchhill, I am at the end of the beginning. The hinge must needs turn. But where and how? How to begin the middle? Read More...
Conservation Redemption
10/08/08 08:09
Although I am an agnostic in fine standing today, I am certainly betraying my childhood as a Protestant and a man bound to the U.S. South when I use the word redemption — one of the signal ideas in the European Protestant tradition. This is the prodigal son, the slaver who was once lost but has now been found, the sheep who has returned to the flock and her relieved shepherd. It’s the second chance, with hope rekindled and fanned into open flame. The language of redemption drives many of us in conservation. Most of us seem daily aware that this point in history is special, pregnant with special losses and opportunities. Some of us in more extreme forms see the outlines of Armageddon and apocalpyse — an end of what we have known and the press of imminent and ultimate battle — but that’s not my personal sense of time. I am more keen to see struggle, even if manichean in form. That struggle has largely seen defeats for “our” side. But the victories are notable too. Read More...
The Direction of Adaptation: Is E.O. Wilson Wrong?
09/08/08 15:31
E. O. Wilson is arguably the most famous living ecologist and conservation biologist of our time. He’s notable for many reasons, but here I am concerned about his recent move into discussing the approach we should take for climate adaptation work. I fear Wilson has just done a lot of damage to conservation policy. Read More...
Managing Water Managers
08/08/08 12:19
In London in late July, I met a several people who represent government and private bodies that “manage”’ the river Thames. The UK government owns the water, at least in theory, and this ownership devolves onto private businesses that manage portions of the watershed, including treating river water and sewage and moving water to houses. It’s an old an complex process, and there are a lot legacy (i.e., inherited and old fashioned) components to the systems. For instance, not many homes or businesses in the UK have water meters, so usage rates are often estimated. Many much less developed countries have much better metering systems simply because they have newer water distribution systems. Also, many of the facilities and pipes themselve are well over a century old, designed for quite different times and usage levels. Read More...
