Today the sky is blue. Does the future matter?

Today, I see a brilliant blue sky out my window. I can't tell that there' s more carbon dioxide up there then there was last year. It's tempting to think, "Why worry? Why change anything?"

I focus on local preparation for adaptation to a changing climate because I know, based on assurances by a preponderance of scientific investigation, that the impacts of climate change will come, probably sooner than we'd like to think. Most of us, it seems, choose to not think about it. And that spurs me further to do what I can to advance adaptation planning.

Who is responsible for educating and motivating the public about this stuff? There are countless other climate/green organizations, agencies and web sites. Al Gore got his Academy Award and Nobel Prize. The IPCC shared the Nobel and is now known worldwide for having substantiated the evidence of big problems ahead.

I have automatic web searches dumping more climate-related articleson my desktop every day than I can possibly read. The information to lead our actions is available and plentiful.

So why aren't things moving as they must to prevent catastrophic impacts in our future? You'll notice that none of the presidential candidates even mention climate change. Today's NY Times editorial urges Clinton and Obama to elevate their campaigns "to a serious debate about major issues," none of which happens to be climate related. This is absurd.

I'm thinking that the best way to penetrate the average U.S. citizen's crisis fatigue is to make the climate change threat a local one - to describe it in terms of what might happen in each person's back yard. The prospect of having to abandon one's lush landscaping or of upsetting one's ability to commute to work or of having high tide covering the local high school's athletic fields is a lot less abstract than presenting the threats as "global." Which is not to say that the global perspective deserves to be ignored; billions of lives are at stake.

And who should be bringing the challenge back home? I propose that it's our local elected leaders and public servants. Here in Marin, the local government has been very visible in promoting its Get Ready Marin initiative, which is aimed at elevating disaster preparedness across the county. Hundreds of weatherproof banners were produced and hung in high visibility locations, resulting in the training and recruiting of hundreds of neighborhood volunteers.

Marin should expand beyond emergency planning and bring the same level of urgency to long range planning. The future matters and for the first time in human history we have forecasting abilities that can warn us about emergencies long before they happen.

New San Francisco planner, no mention of climate

The only reason I point to this story in the San Francisco Chronicle is its lack of any mention of environmental concerns in the list of urgent issues the new hire will need to tackle. This in spite of the fact the the Chronicle just launched its online Green publication.

Yes, that's one of the points of Climate Frog - we'd better begin our adaptation planning now because every place has a long list of important issues already on the table. If adaptation has to wait in line until the impacts are upon us, we may find that most of today's big zoning and housing debates were lacking some key considerations.

USA Today on Climate Changes

Our national daily newspaper calls its section "Weather and Climate Science," and on the Feb 17 page from that section it provides two interesting features.

First is an animated map of the Northeast U.S. that illustrates how scientific projections see local climate changing over the course of this century under reduced emissions and constant emissions scenarios. Worst case for Massachusetts: its climate toward the end of the century will be like South Carolina's climate today. Imaging adapting to THAT! The original version of the map can be found in this report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Second is an article inspired by the latest update from the Pew Center for Global Climate Change (PDF), which surveys cities, states and counties that have begun pursuing adaptation planning. All of these places are, in turn, inspired by their membership in ICLEI, which has focused for years on sustainability planning but has begun to emphasize adaptation planning.

The clear leader in local sustainability and adaptation planning is King County, WA, whose Executive, Ron Sims, has launched these initiatives and was just named to the board of ICLEI-USA.

Good language - Center for Climate Strategies

If new civic space is going to open up around climate change issues, an open process for making decisions and setting priorities is going to be essential. The Center's web site does a good job of describing the process it uses in working with state-level governments on climate mitigation planning. Often working through the governor's office, they convene teams of stakeholders who meet for a year in meetings open to the public.

Here's how answer the question Why was CSS created?

Many governors and other state leaders are addressing the problem of climate change by planning and implementing proactive solutions to the pollution caused by greenhouse gases (GHGs). CCS was formed to help these leaders develop effective, consensus based policy solutions through analysis, planning and collaboration with stakeholders, state agencies and other institutions. CCS has provided assistance to 18 US states involved in state or regional climate action planning, as well as Canadian Provinces and the border states of Mexico.

And What does CSS do?

The CCS team provides a forum for advanced learning and joint decision-making on climate strategies and solutions in an open, inclusive, non-partisan, fact-based, and collaborative environment. We provide impartial and expert analysis, planning, facilitation and technical assistance toward development of highly customized, consensus-based policies and plans to reduce GHG emissions. CCS works jointly with state officials, agency staff, and stakeholders to develop actions that meet or exceed state or regional GHG emission reduction goals and targets through a “portfolio” of coordinated actions, developed through the consensus building process. CCS provides similar assistance for the development of response actions and plans for adaptation to climate change impacts.

Stakeholders Help Plan Florida's Survival

Most of Florida has an elevation not much above sea level, and I've seen more than a few maps illustrating a largely submerged peninsula. Not surprisingly, the state government is trying to do something to help slow the warming, the melting, the resultant rise of sea level. This article describes the two-phase project that aims toward reducing the state's greenhouse gas emissions. Now beginning its Stage Two, the governor has assigned a 21-member Action Team to come up with a list of recommended actions.

The process will be facilitated by the Center for Climate Strategies, which is "working in 16 states to build consensus and develop comprehensive action plans."

The Center was quoted about its role in the process of helping the Action Team make the most worthy recommendations:

"We are not advocates for particular approaches with vested interests, and we do not take positions on policy or legislative issues. We assemble and facilitate complex decisions among diverse stakeholder groups."

Climate risk management training in Asia

The Asian Disaster Preparedness Center is offering a course (pdf) "to build the capacity of professionals to manage risks associated with climate variability, change, and extremes. " The announcement, which I found on Reuters' Alertnet, describes the course as follows:

It builds upon the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center's two decades of experience in disaster management, facilitating regional cooperation and building capacities of disaster management institutions at all government levels, disaster management practitioners and communities, and a decade of experience in institutionalizing climate information applications for disaster mitigation. It incorporates case studies and sectoral examples from ADPC's climate risk management programs and projects all over Asia. Upon completing the course, participants will be able to: 1) design early warning systems for climate-related risks; 2) design community-based climate risk management, climate forecast applications, and climate change adaptation projects, and 3) develop tools to mainstream climate risk management practices into development programs and policies.

If there is such a training course in the U.S.A. I haven't heard of it. Please tell me if you know of one. I doubt that local planners have been brought up to speed on this stuff.

Maptation

Maps will prove to be one of the most powerful tools for local adaptation. Here in Marin, MarinMap is a membership supported business for integrating GIS data into special purpose maps. As they describe themselves:

MarinMap is a consortium of public agencies (local governments, special districts) organized under the legal authority of the Marin General Services Agency. The Executive Director is Paul Berlant. The Program Director for MarinMap is Wayne Bush. He also serves as the Chair of the Steering Committee.

MarinMap is dedicated to building and sharing a geographic information system (GIS), cooperating to improve each agency's business processes, improving public service and providing a forum for collaborative decision making. MarinMap has built an Internet-accessible GIS, bringing the best available information to the Internet.

Here's WildMap, which can show you where different kinds of wildlife are reported to live in the county. Mostly, everything lives everywhere because we have so much open space and wildlife corridors crossing the county.

So, it's a collaborative service and the County of Marin is using it to provide a range of maps to its agencies. Cool and all, but I can picture using Google maps to provide much more useful information for identifying key locations that adaptive planning would need to identify. Floodplains, slide risk areas, fire danger paths - these are all contained in separate maps and databases now. Citizens could help mark up a very useful Google map and could integrate some of the GIS database if MarinMaps let them.

The Adaptation "Aha" Moment?

At the Framework Convention on Climate Change, taking place on Bali, there have been calls for having the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - which recently released its latest report and has normally convened to update its report every 5 or 6 years - convene to update its current report next year...and pretty much to continue operating continuously from now on.

As reported by Andy Revkin on DotEarth:

The discussions in Bali about more frequent climate assessments echo a growing call within the scientific community for the climate panel and other big climate-research institutions to shift more from basic science to real-world forecasting, helping communities exploit or withstand changes for the better or worse.

Such forecasts need to be improved because significant warming is unavoidable for decades to come even if countries begin to trim greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the climate panel’s latest studies.

Kevin Trenberth, a longtime contributor to the U.N. panel’s reports and senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., put it this way early this year:

“For me the issue is that the climate is changing and we cannot stop it. We can slow it down, and should, but realistically I don’t believe that we will ever get to level emissions, let alone reduced ones. So climate change will continue and we must adapt. But adapt to what?”

Adapt to what, indeed? Getting more specific local forecasts would help localities set proper directions for preparations for climate change. But such forecasts are not simple to make. As the Pew Center for Global Climate Change says in its paper, "Coping With Global Climate Change: The Role of Adaptation in the United States,"

The processes of adaptation to climate change in both human and natural systems are highly complex and dynamic, often entailing many feedbacks and dependencies on existing local and temporal conditions. The uncertainties introduced by the complexity, scale and limited experience with respect to anthropogenic climate change explains the limited level of applied research conducted thus far on adaptation, the reliance on mechanistic assumptions, and widespread use of scenarios and historical analogues.

But it's not too early to begin improving the local communications infrastructure and habits that communities will need when their forecasts become more concrete and reliable. Some places are already thick into adaptation - to what may become annual flooding, chronic drought, frequent storms, more extreme temperatures and all of the indirect consequences of these weather effects.

A new guidebook for preparing for climate change

Longtime environmental writer Ted Wolf turned me on to a very useful new book produced through a collaboration between a county government and a university. I immediately alerted my local supervisor in Marin County who will (according to his grateful aide) take the book with him into the upcoming meetings to update the Countywide Plan.

Preparing for Climate Change: a Guidebook for Local, Regional and State Governments was written by a collaboration the Center for Science in the Earth System (Climate Impacts Group of King County, Washington) and the Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington. The Guidebook is being distributed to 250 member cities, towns and counties of the ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability. As it turns out, Marin County is a member of this organization and will be receiving a copy through that route as well.

As the Web site describes it:

Within a handful of decades, climate in many parts of the United States is expected to be significantly warmer than even the warmest years of the 20th century, increasing the risk of drought, flooding, forest fires, disease, and other impacts across many regions.

Public decision makers have a critical opportunity – and a need – to start preparing today for the impacts of climate change. Preparing for climate change is not a “one size fits all” process, however. Just as the impacts of climate change will vary from place to place, the combination of institutions and legal and political tools available to public decision-makers are unique from region to region. Preparedness actions will need to be tailored to the circumstances of different communities.

The Guidebook is full of recommendations for motivating and mobilizing the local community, for conducting risk assessment, for preparing for identified risks, and for building resilience into local planning. This is a wonderful addition to the local planning toolkit. It remains to be seen how many of its recommendations will be put into action here, but I'll certainly be involved in promoting it.