news
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...
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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...
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...
Ozy(mandias)fest 2008: Political v. Climate Change
27/09/08 08:05
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...
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. Jamie Pittock, the author,
is in the highest tier of international
freshwater conservation and policy advocates. I
highly recommend downloading the 6.5 mb file. A
major recommendation behind this and a
companion overview
of climate
adaptation that I wrote with another colleague,
Tom LeQuesne, is maintaining healthy freshwater
species and ecosystems is the key to keeping
reliable and high-quality freshwater resources
for societies, economies, and livelihoods
Read
More...
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.
I first saw the Thames last February, late on a
cold and windy night when I was full of sherry and
dragging a lot of luggage on a tour of the City. I
smiled into the thick, churning waters from a
bridge. “That’s one of your rivers,” my friend T
said to me as we looked down. I now smile since
we’ve just launched a climate vulnerability
assessment of the Thames. The report comes
in three versions. The best place to begin is a
glossy and very accessible summary. Also available
are a technical summary and the full technical
report.
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. On
some level, it’s a crystallization of a series of
talks I’ve given to a wide range of scientific,
policy, and lay audiences now 40 or more times in
the past eight months. Be forewarned: the
download is about 3 mb. Download it
yourself, read it onscreen, and save some
trees. Read
More...
NEWS: IPCC freshwater climate change report
25/06/08 04:28
The IPCC has recently
put together a separate report on freshwater and
climate change. Read
More...
NEWS: streaming freshwater adaptation talk
24/06/08 19:50
A symposium from the
Western Division of the American Fisheries Society
focused on climate change and bull trout has been
posted online for live streaming.
Read
More...
NEWS: Watery Feet & Conserving Water
14/06/08 10:43
Saving water in daily
practice is not a big issue in regions that are not
drought stressed. The trendy term du jour about
reducing clean water consumption is water footprint
— something like the concept of a carbon
footprint. Read
More...
NEWS: polar bears, the endangered species act, and climate change
29/05/08 09:44
DC is very hot this
week — it was 97 degrees F when I landed on Monday,
and yesterday was much hotter. And very humid. On
landing, I needed to get to my B & B quickly
and decided to opt for a cab. Taxis are a little
out of favor in the climate change world,
especially in cities with a decent mass transit
system like DC. But I didn’t see an alternative.
Popping out of the terminal, I took the first cab
in line. The small man in the front seat turned to
me and said in a thick accent, Hello. Where are you
going? Seventeenth and Lanier, near Adams-Morgan, I
said. Where’s that? I leaned back, suddenly very
hot and very tired.
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NEWS: wetlands & methane emissions
28/05/08 09:42
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...
Rush & climate change
14/05/08 09:41
Yesterday news of
Senator John McCain's very public stand with Oregon
governor Ted Kulongoski at a wind generation site
was all over the news. McCain of course is the
Republican candidate for president, and he has a
remarkable record of pushing climate change in the
U.S. senate for many years now. He is almost as
credible on this issue as former senator and
vice-president Al Gore. McCain made a strong
statement with Kulongoski for reducing U.S.
emissions and for the U.S. taking responsibility
for our role in current levels of greenhouse gases.
His speech was apparently very passionate and
seemingly heartfelt, and most commentators believe
the speech was very directed to western moderates
and progressives — such as myself — who are worried
about climate change issues. Some sections of the
speech were interpreted as attacks on Bush. And he
was roundly attacked today by some conservatives,
such as Rush Limbaugh:
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NEWS: Death of Philip Corbet
31/03/08 09:39
