A Chinese colleague turned to me when we were alone after a meeting. John: Do you truly believe that humans have caused climate change? I was shocked by the question. As a scientist working on climate change issues, I have seen and read many lines of evidence that the climate is changing rapidly, that humans have caused these changes, and that we must (and can) actively respond to these shifts. Almost as strange as being asked the question was having the question come from a colleague whom I believe to be one of the most effective members of our organization’s climate adaptation staff.
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Tags: climate mitigation, china, skepticism, communications

The Association of State Wetlands Managers (ASWM) is a great North American group that has been collating some resources on climate change and wetlands, both from climate mitigation and adaptation perspectives. I’m posting some of their material verbatim here, including a set of recommendations for managing wetlands they compiled recently. I have some issues with using wetlands as a carbon sequestration mechanism in some cases, but I’ve included those links as well. Read More...

Tags: wetlands, climate mitigation, climate adaptation

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. — JM Read More...

Tags: united states, unfccc, climate adaptation, climate mitigation, waxman bill

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...

Tags: climate adaptation, climate mitigation, nairobi statement, finance, policy, unfccc, Development

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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Tags: climate adaptation, climate mitigation

So many critical issues surround climate change adaptation (and so much bad news keeps popping up from climate impacts science), I sometimes find knowing where to focus very difficult. But sometimes there is good news. I’ve just returned from a very fast meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, at the United Nations compound. Under the sponsorship of the Danish government, a new global framework and set of guiding principles for climate adaptation has been created (available as a PDF download). These principles are aimed at three distinct audiences: participants in and observers of the big UNFCCC CoP meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009, those institutions that are funding climate adaptation work right now, and the international movement to define climate adaptation theory, policy, and practice in coming decades. Here, I will provide personal reflections on my attendance on the discussions leading up to, at, and beyond the Nairobi meeting.

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Tags: climate adaptation, funding, climate mitigation, kenya, policy, africa, nairobi statement, unep

Climate adaptation is finally entering the consciousness of important policymakers, trickling up and through organizations. But these shifts are not occurring smoothly or without controversy and a lot of injured fingers and toes. And we seem to be moving towards two views of how to adjust to our emerging climate: “adaptation” and “Adaptation.” The state of conflict between these two views in the U.S. is globally important right now because the U.S. has been the silent watcher on climate issues for the last decade. The U.S. government has not substantively participated in climate talks, and because the U.S. economy is so large, competing economies must keep par — for good or ill. This rule is widely understood for climate mitigation issues (regulation of greenhouse gas concentrations), but it’s also true for climate adaptation costs as well, which will also become an increasingly major element of economic spending. Finally, U.S. policymakers are going to have this debate, probably as a result of the climate change bill introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives last fall.
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Tags: climate adaptation, policy, climate mitigation, north america, united states, united states

The past ten days in the U.S. have been quite dramatic politically, even by the standard of being near the end of a very long and tight presidential campaign. A financial crisis on a scale with the the beginning of the Great Depression of 1929 looms, our once-close ally Pakistan has exchanged shots with U.S. troops in a border skirmish, and the two presidential candidates have had their first and quite volatile debate. But climate change issues have not gone away, and we’ve seen important statements that carbon dioxide emissions are speeding up particularly in the developing world, and several articles (and an excellent editorial) in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (arguably in the highest tier of general-science journals) review the latest analyses of realistic paths and rates of climate change and suggest that we may need to “start panicking.” Unfortunately, all of these pieces of news are not isolated from one another. Read More...

Tags: climate adaptation, climate mitigation, policy, news

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...

Tags: climate adaptation, philosophy, policy, climate mitigation

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...

Tags: united kingdom, thames, climate mitigation, policy, water management, climate adaptation

The BBC has a disturbing article on a big jump in methane emissions over the past year. I discuss this topic as well on the CCW Blog side of things. The U.S. National Science Foundation has just done a short press release on the subject as well that goes into more details about the implications to global trends. Read More...

Tags: news, wetlands, climate mitigation

A study late last week suggested that atmospheric methane emissions are way up. This is disturbing on a number of levels that should have a lot of people very worried. Read More...

Tags: wetlands, climate mitigation, impacts, species, climate adaptation

My favorite means of explaining the difference between climate adaptation and climate mitigation in talks for the past few months is a simple metaphor. Imagine, I begin, that you are in a car, and you realize that you will inevitably be hitting a solid object — a wall, a major obstruction on the highway, anything. You know you are going to hit it, and you know it will hurt you and your car.

That obstruction is a changed climate. You have two basic responses you can rely on. First, you press your brake as hard as you can to reduce the rate of impact. You want to hit the obstruction at a slower speed. That's climate mitigation — the process of trying to lower the rate of greenhouse gas emissions and the concentration of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Both are essentially attempts to slow down the pace of climate change. But you will still hit the obstruction, even if you hit it less hard. Climate adaptation is the second type of response: Read More...

Tags: policy, climate adaptation, climate mitigation