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."

Virtual Civic Centers for Local Resilience and Climate Adaptation

Why aren't we doing more to get ready for climate impacts? We know they're coming. They may already be here. We've seen from Katrina how lack of adequate preparation can leave a place vulnerable to even the most obvious risks. We know these impacts won't just come through once and be over. Sure, we need to slash carbon emissions, but we can do that and learn to adapt at the same time. In fact, they should go together.

Having been following the news and the science so closely over the past year in my research for Climate Frog I've learned a few things that are calling me to action:

• The timeframe for many key forecasts has been compressing; the pace of change seems to be accelerating
  
• Many locations have had - and are still having - extreme weather that may as well be climate change impacts even if they're not referred to as such
• We're not going to reverse the climate change process and impacts for a long, long time
• We're going to go through at least a decades-long period of "unstable" and extreme weather
• Adaptation is defined by the location where climate impacts take place
  
• Local is where the rubber meets the road in terms of government involvement with its constituents
  
• Local governments have yet to begin addressing adaptation planning for their local conditions and populations
• The Web is being underused as a local information and collaboration medium on climate
  

I'm proposing that we begin building a global network of local civic center sites that operate through enlightened (or at least willing) local government agencies to:

1. inform their citizens about the latest science, news and commentary on climate change
   
2. involve them in risk assessment and civic deliberation on planning issues
   
3. support collaborative activities among citizens, businesses, groups and government
   

At the same time, these local sites will be networked to share knowledge and experience about risks and situations they have in common. All sites will contribute knowledge to a global knowledge base that anyone can draw from.

Yes, this is actually a serious business proposition. I'm taking the unorthodox path of announcing it here for anyone who might be interested in helping to get it off the ground. I'm calling it AdaptLocal, and here's a short version of the proposition.

Please circulate. Contact info is on the site or just comment here. Ciao.

Green attitudes: same old action

The good news from a USA Today article reporting on a recent poll, is that a majority of Americans considers global warming to be "a very serious problem. The bad news is that it's a slim majority (62%) and that a very small percentage of those who support taking "green" action to mitigate global warming are taking the actions they advocate.

The author of the study, Edward Maibach - head of the climate center at George Mason University - observed that there's a strong need to raise more awareness of the situation and cited growing concern among behavior experts that "there has been too much fear-mongering and not enough emphasis on what people can do." Unfortunately, the acknowledgement of the problem reflects the political divide in the country.

Democrats are about three times more likely than Republicans to see high danger in global warming and think they can do something about it. But Democrats are living only slightly more green than Republicans.

Hey, folks, the climate is non-partisan!

This is where I'm convinced that local focus on the potential impacts of climate change on the places where people live and work is the most direct route to getting them to engage in the issue. It's not abstract when you look at global warming through the lens of your own experience. If you can visualize dramatic change in terms of how it may affect your daily life, it's that much more real to you. And it frames the answer to the question, "what can people do?"

Adaptation Discussion in the City of Toronto - Take 1

This description in a column by Dale Duncan in EyeWeekly.com provides a good example of the complexities we face in addressing "adaptation" in a civic context. Duncan attended a meeting of Toronto's Parks and Environment committee where presentations were given, including two by representatives of the insurance industry and public health. Duncan's takeway from it?

Is the City of Toronto ready to adapt to a new normal of increased floods and droughts, new pests and vector-borne illnesses, and a possible influx of environmental refugees? After sitting in on a series of presentation on climate change adaptation given to the Parks and Environment Committee yesterday, I can tell you that the answer to this question is a resounding "no." Toronto may have a plan to help mitigate climate change, but there’s no plan for how the city will adapt to it, and the consequences of that could mean severe economic, social and health problems in the years to come.

So, in a nutshell, what's the problem? Let's start with insurance. I've blogged about that topic numerous times. They're the ones, after all, whose whole business model relies on accurate risk assessment. One of the municipal councillors brought up infrastructure, which Duncan reminded readers was already a sore point, with a backlog of $123 billion (Canadian) in repair to roads, bridges and pipes. Adaptation of the infrastructure would involve not only making those repairs, but also strengthening those facilities to endure more extreme weather. The insurance guy responds:

“We need to be ready for more severe weather more frequently, which means greater risks due to weather-related events than we have ever faced before,” said Mark Yakabuski, president of the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

He reminds the council that the 1998 ice storm in Quebec consumed 20 percent of all insurance premiums paid that year. Ouch. Will climate change bring more ice storms? The insurance guy continues:

“It is not good enough to simply say we’ll maintain pieces of infrastructure at the standard for which they were built. It’s not going to be adequate,” argued Yakabuski. “We need to rebuild our infrastructure at a significantly higher standard in order to try to deal with a threat that’s higher than we’ve ever faced before. We have to review building codes and be as strict as possible in enforcing land use decisions. We don’t have the luxury to take our time to get it done. We need to find innovative ways to fund these investments now.”

Another councillor tries to turn the dilemma on its head by proposing that the national government provide the money to upgrade the infrastructure to avoid prohibitive insurance premiums in the future. This assumes, of course, that the national government has that money. But beyond infrastructure there were health threats to consider.

Dr. Monica Campbell, manager for Toronto Public Health, spoke about preparing for heat waves like the one in Europe in 2003 that killed nearly 70,000 people. In Toronto, heat-related mortality will double by 2050 and triple by 2080, she said. Furthermore, air pollution mortality will increase by 20 per cent by 2050 and 25 per cent by 2080. Campbell also reminded the committee that vulnerable populations are more likely to be negatively affected by climate change. In California, she said, research has been conducted to construct a Social Vulnerability Index to help ensure these populations don’t get left behind.

The potential of growing masses of climate refugees arriving on Canada's doorstep was brought up. But at least they held such a meeting and at least they've begun to consider these imposing issues. And - as a good example to all localities - they have provided a Climate Change Adaptation page on the city's Web site. Bravo to that!

Australia's Department of Climate Change

Yes, you read that right. Under the new leadership of a liberal government, Australia has jumped well ahead of the U.S. in establishing a government entity focused on climate change. Perhaps not surprising, given the exceptional drought that has afflicted a large area of the continent, but leaving me wondering, "What about the Southeastern U.S.? What about the Southwest? Don't we deserve such a department at the federal level, too?"

Using the domain "greenhouse.gov.au" the Department of Climate Change provides, through its Web site, consideration of agriculture, business and industry, community and household, emissions monitoring, energy, impacts and adaptation, national resources and science.

Under Impacts and Adaptation, the site includes Projections - Future Climate Changes, which includes a section on how projections are currently done, regional projections for Australia, and an "online projections tool" called Ozclim.net, which allows the user to "generate your own climate change projections using different emissions scenarios and the outputs of various global climate models (GCMs)."

Pew Center Paper on Adaptation Planning

Reinforcing my focus on local adaptation, the Pew Center released this new report: Adaptation Planning – What U.S. States and Localities are Doing. First, the report reinforces the need for adaptation, beyond mere mitigation.

While governments act to mitigate future climate change, they must also plan and act to address the impacts. This preparation includes risk assessments, prioritization of projects, funding and allocation of both financial and human resources, solution development and implementation, and rapid deployment of information sharing and decision support tools. Corresponding to the size of the challenge, impacts span entire communities and regions. As such, adaptation is dependent on numerous stakeholders from federal, state and local government, science and academia, the private sector, and community residents to develop solutions to complex problems for which prior solutions may not exist. Adaptation will require creativity, compromise, and collaboration across agencies, sectors and traditional geographic
boundaries.

It then emphasizes the importance of more localized approaches to adaptation, at the state and local levels, and reveals how little has been done at these levels to put adaptation planning into action.

This paper focuses on adaptation plans and actions in progress by state and local
governments. Many of these efforts are in their earliest stages. Some states are including adaptation planning within the scope of their state Climate Action Plans to address GHG emissions. A few others have recognized the need for separate and comprehensive adaptation commissions to parallel their mitigation efforts. Many are simply responding to climate impacts
as they occur, without necessarily attributing the impact to climate change.

And validating another of my beliefs - that local entities need to be networked to learn from one another, the reporting team writes:

Regardless of the basis for the adaptive response, states have much they can learn from each other, and from localities where adaptation is already occurring. While comprehensive and proactive adaptation planning is still in the early stages, as states complete their GHG mitigation plans, adaptation planning is gaining greater attention and resources from states and localities.

Cities - far more than counties - are beginning to adopt the adaptive approach to planning, but there are few examples cited in the report. King County, Washington, is one great exception that has been blogged here.

One county in particular, King County, Washington is a leader in the United States for adaptation planning. In 2006, King County formed an inter-departmental climate change adaptation team, building scientific expertise within their county departments to ensure climate change factors were considered in policy, planning and capital investment decisions. Partnering with the Climate Impacts Group,1 the county has already begun many adaptation efforts, including the development of water quality and quantity models and monitoring programs. The 2007 King County Climate Plan lays out detailed goals and actions for six (6) “Strategic Focus Areas” for adaptation efforts going forward.

Leading adaptive planning is clearly one of the reasons we have local government. That is the closest we citizens get to the people we elect to represent us and to work for our interests. It is also the most practicable level on which we citizens can converse with our government. We can show up at our local civic centers and speak directly to our planners and supervisors. We should also be able to communicate through the Web much more than we do. If there was ever a need for an effective Web-based interface between government and citizen, it is right here in the present, around local climate adaptation.

How our government keeps us blind

No wonder so many people remain uninformed and unconvinced.

A Federal District Judge has "busted" Bush's White House for withholding a report on global warming that was supposed to have been revised, reassessed and released to the public two years ago. Even so, the punishment amounted to less than a slap on the wrist.

The Bush administration violated federal law by missing deadlines to produce a study on the impact of global warming, now as much as two years overdue, and must issue a summary by March, a federal judge ruled. Judge Saundra B. Armstrong of Federal District Court in Oakland, Calif., said the United States government “unlawfully withheld action” required under the Global Change Research Act of 1990 to update a research plan and scientific assessment of climate change. The law mandates that the research plan be revised every three years and the assessment every four years; the last research plan was in 2003 and the last assessment was published in 2000.

Ask your local officials

Curious to see if anyone at the Marin County offices of Planning and Community Development had any inside knowledge about preparation for climate change, I entered the Frank Lloyd Wright designed edifice and acted like the curious but concerned citizen that I am. I'd already reviewed what was on the County's Web site as the Sustainability Team portal. Some people, at least, had read the 1998 IPCC report, and there are programs in place meant to reduce the County's overall ecological footprint (currently at about 21 acres per capita - slightly lower than the U.S. national average of about 23) but there was no mention of sea level rise in spite of our having over 50 miles of coastline and segments of our main highway lying just above today's sea level.

I had conversations with managers in both the Planning and Community Development offices. The fellow in Planning expressed a little embarrassment that nothing was included in the most recent County Plan dealing with the future potential of flooding from a rising SF Bay. He felt some confidence that the issue would soon be addressed in some way.

"Would the initiative be most likely to come down from the state government, seeing as how all of California's coast would be at risk?" I asked.

Probably more likely the opposite, was his guess. That the counties would have to bring the issue up to the state and put it in their laps.

In the Community Development office, I engaged a nice young guy who wanted to assure me that there were green building codes and efforts to reduce emissions at the county level. It took me a while to get the point made that I wasn't looking for mitigation actions, but for preparedness. He had no idea. Right now, approval for building a house at 2 feet above sea level would not be affected at all by future projections of sea level rise. It's just not in the computer yet.

Let's talk Accountability

Here's another story that illustrates why I believe we're going to suffer some serious impacts before people get serious about preparing for them. Just look at all the other messes we're entagled with.

This story just appeared in the Financial Times: Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned.

Surely this comes from someone outside the U.S. Government, probably some outspoken politician in Europe, right?

Nope, it's the comptroller general of the U.S. - the head of the Government Accountability Office, trying to get the attention of the president and congress about the awful straits our national budget is in.

The US government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned.

David Walker, comptroller general of the US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country’s future in a report that lays out what he called “chilling long-term simulations”.

These include “dramatic” tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt.

Even without the needs to transform industry, automobiles, energy generation, flood defenses, water supplies, etc. to reduce the risks of future climate change, we've got a full plate of neglected crises that will come with boomer retirement, expiring infrastructure, shifting demographics, immigration....the list goes on. And we've got a government that ties itself in knots rather than make any progress.

Pot Warming, King Frog Settling

As the extended drought conditions continue to fuel the 200,000-acre burn in Florida and Georgia, self-styled king, George W. Bush, is responding to the Supreme Court's rebuke of his administration's de-clawed EPA.

President Bush responded Monday to the Supreme Court's rebuke of his administration for refusing to regulate greenhouse gases by rehashing a plan from his State of the Union speech to boost ethanol and tinker with fuel efficiency standards.

In essence, though, the Prez is stalling for time and could end up doing nothing through the remaining 18 months of his term.

"In effect, the president asked his agency heads to share ideas and come up with a plan that is due three weeks before he leaves office," said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming

So the remarkable granite-hard denial at the top of the most well-endowed government in the world continues. For the rest of those 18 months, at least, it appears that we won't have much - if any - leadership in realistic action from the White House.

As to the wildfires in the Southeast, they're another example of how our human settlement patterns fail to accomodate the realities of the natural world and the probable effects of climate change.

Florida in particular has undergone an explosion in population – a growth of about 13 percent between 2000 and 2006. This has meant that more and more people are pushing into rural areas. In dry weather conditions, such regions can be rife with dry, crackling brush – ideal kindling for a wildfire sparked by a bolt of lightning, discarded cigarette butt, or another trigger.

In years past, foresters worked hard to clear this brush with controlled burns. Now, however, with more homes in these areas, the options for intentional burns are more limited.

Melting Ice. Can we afford to take our time?

Thanks to the excellentClimate Progress blog for calling my attention to the following.

Though it's not by any means the only serious impact of climate change, rising sea levels are probably the impact most directly linked to that change. Only the most hardened skeptic would refuse to connect global warming with melting ice caps. And only a boob would refuse to admit that those melting ice caps contribute to rising seas and the damage they will cause to human habitation.

Scientists have been following the freezing and thawing of the Arctic ice and lately it's been bothering them a lot because of the seemingly accelerated pace of thawing and the shrinking size of the winter freeze. Until recently, most scientists felt comfortable with a forecast that the ice cap would exist at least until 2040, but doubts have arisen and more money is now being allocated for deeper study.

From now until March 2009, as part of the International Polar Year, 63 nations will funnel $1.7 billion into polar research, aiming to determine which changes in the frozen landscape are natural, which are man-made and which, if any, are preventable. "There's been a rallying cry," says Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado. "We have to figure out how to tell policymakers, and the public, where and when to expect a big change."

So far, the studies don't look good. In mid-March, the journal Science devoted a section to the polar regions that was uniformly depressing: lower latitudes pollute pristine pole, read one headline. Another paper warned that Greenland and Antarctica are shedding 125 gigatons of ice per year, and though the southern continent has picked up some new ice from increased snowfall, it's not enough.

Hopefully, some of that $1.7B will help get scientists the equipment they need to keep up with the changes that are so swiftly happening. Compared to spending for, oh let's say the military, expenditures on the tools for measuring and forecasting worldwide flooding is pitifully small.

Despite the publicity around the IPY, scientists still have limited access to the technology they need. The U.S. Arctic Research Commission recently published a wish list of monitoring equipment, topped by icebreakers (America rents some ships from Russia and Sweden), a better sensor network of buoys and river gauges, and satellites.

And here's a boondoggle: the US did not contribute funding to the launch of the radarsat-2 satellite that will be necessary to analyze the changes in the ice cap in the coming years, and as one scientist claims, he's "not aware that any federal agency has a budget to buy" its data after 2009.

Why do I get the feeling that governments are gonna screw things up again?

U.S. Military getting on board?

The WaPo today reports, in Military Sharpens Focus on Climate Change, that 11 senior generals are releasing a report admitting that

global warming "presents significant national security challenges to the United States," which it must address or face serious consequences.

It seems that, based on their study, the military should be highly motivated to support any preventative or mitigating activities related to climate change because they recognize that threats to stability are likely to resolve into threats to the U.S. Drought in poor countries could be expected to "drive a flood of migrants to richer countries."

"Many developing nations do not have the government and social infrastructures in place to cope with the type of stressors that could be brought about by global climate change," the report states. "When a government can no longer deliver services to its people, ensure domestic order, and protect the nation's borders from invasion, conditions are ripe for turmoil, extremism and terrorism to fill the vacuum."

CNN's account of the report includes this quote by General Anthony Zinni:

"We will pay for this one way or another," writes Zinni, former commander of U.S. Central Command. "We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we'll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll."

Stanford scientist Terry Root, a co-author of the report agreed, in this somewhat awkward statement, that the water-based instability was sure to come eventually.

"We're going to have a war over water," Root said. "There's just not going to be enough water around for us to have for us to need to live with and to provide for the natural environment."

The IPCC has hit the fan

As expected, the reaction to the release of the report on "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" ranged from the responsible scientific to the politically expedient. The wording had been modified over the past few days to soothe the fears of those (like the U.S. and China) who feared that people would become so alarmed as to curtail the means of production and wealth generation. We are being told by the more purely scientific sources that the language of the release was watered down.

Nevertheless, the warnings do come across strongly and nations ignore them at their peril. We'll be visiting the particulars of the report over the next few days. There's more press about climate change this week than I've ever seen in such a short period of time. For a while, at least, we can expect to feel the affects of such concentrated attention. But again, we'll be looking for evidence of actual action toward mitigation, not just concern and hand-wringing.

Why this blog focuses on action

I'm convinced that climate change is happening now and will have impacts that force us humans to take action to save our asses. Those actions must be brought into focus as they are taken so that (1) they emphasize the in-your-face reality of the impact and (2) others can learn from the vanguard - the early jumpers - how to organize, plan and collaborate effectively in their own locations.

As much as they are needed, I choose not to report much on efforts to slow climate change or convince people that it's important because I have no patience with silly arguments. In Climate Frog's world, definitive action is the only real news.

IPCC plays the poor role model

For an example of how public servants invent ways to waste time, look at the IPCC itself, on the eve of releasing its highly anticipated second report on climate change. With global motivation at stake, the IPCC has allowed itself to get hung up on language and semantics. Just swell, people. Way to go.

"There is wrangling happening," said Hans Verolme, director of the global climate change programme at WWF, an environmental group that is an observer to the meeting.

"There are some who are questioning the scientific basis ... of some of the summary statements, which is leading the authors to have to go back to the underlying document." The U.N. panel's report is the most authoritative study since 2001 on the regional impact of climate change. Verolme said the fact world leaders would read the report's summary had added pressure for consensus on the wording.

"There is discussion whether something is 'likely' or 'very likely', and my sense is that is because people are aware here that heads of state are paying attention," he said.

"If the text says this is very likely, the response (from governments) has to be very significant."

As Washington Post staff writer Juliet Eilperin explains it:

The draft report makes distinctions between changes it considered significant with "high confidence" -- at least 80 percent certainty -- and those to which it assigned "very high confidence," which means 90 percent certainty. While it says with "very high confidence" that earlier bird migrations and a shift of species toward the poles are results of warmer temperatures, it said satellite data gave it only "high confidence" that "there has been a trend in many regions towards earlier greening of vegetation in the spring and increased net primary production linked to longer growing seasons and increasing atmospheric CO2concentrations."

It's interesting to me that no one previewing the report has mentioned the impacts of dislocation - the social and economic forces that climate change will unleash, even where direct threats to health and life are not present. The secondary and tertiary impacts of disasters and catastrophic breakdowns in already vulnerable places are likely to be more a punch to humanity's gut than the relatively straightforward effects of drought and flood. But maybe that would be considered too alarmist by the IPCC...at least this year.

The Supremes allow EPA to Do Something About It

Climate Progress provides a good explanation of the impact the recent Supreme Court ruling will have on states that want to limit auto emmissions.

How does this translate into action? Well, it doesn’t necessarily. It means that states wanting automobile emission standards more strict than those set by the federal government are allowed to pursue them. So it removes an obstacle. They have to receive a waiver from the EPA, but are now more likely to be granted one. States do not have to act, but ones that want to, will (and have).

The ruling removes one roadblock from localities using the EPA to support their own determinations of how their environments can be better protected. As Climate Progress puts it, "Slowly but surely, the climate is finally manuveuring its way through Washington, DC."

"Catastrophes are not democratic"

As we get closer to the release of the IPCC report and some of its findings are leaking out, we find - not surprisingly - that richer countries, who contribute unproportionately to greenhouse gases, are spending increasing amounts of money on mitigating the effects of climate change within their borders, and skimping on support to help poor countries mitigate their local risk.

This NY Times article (registration required) tells us that

...Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning since 1900, yet its 840 million people face some of the biggest risks from drought and disrupted water supplies...

Not much justice in those figures.

“Like the sinking of the Titanic, catastrophes are not democratic,” said Henry I. Miller, a fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “A much higher fraction of passengers from the cheaper decks were lost. We’ll see the same phenomenon with global warming.”

Africa Takes the Brunt

One of the effects of climate change that's becoming clear even now is that precipitation is increasing toward the poles and decreasing at the equator. Crop yields my increase tremendously in Canada while central Africa suffers drought spreading to areas that are currently covered in jungle. Water shortages in Africa and India won't be relieved by massive desalination plants as are being planned for Texas, California and Australia. Sea level areas like Bangladesh won't have the advantage of engineering design and construction that will help protect the European lowlands.

Technology as Defense

In terms of farming support, the term "resilience" is being used to decribe technologically-driven adaptation to deal with the risk of drought, including new genetic hybrids and new mechanized planting techniques. These kinds of benefits are not being delivered to poor countries who appear to be shit-out-o' luck.

Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale focused on climate, said that in the face of warming, it might be necessary to abandon the longstanding notion that all places might someday feed themselves. Poor regions reliant on unpredictable rainfall, he said, should be encouraged to shift people out of farming and into urban areas and import their food from northern countries.

Worry Not for The Rich

Rich countries are just beginning to cop to the reality of the rising risk to their own. And like the upper crust passengers on the Titanic, they're looking to save themselves first. Hopefully, once they (we) feel satisfied that risks have been mitigated sufficiently, they will contribute money and expertise to saving the lives of the countless millions in poor countries. Not that I'd bet on this happening. Like the rich Titanic passengers, wealthy governments may not want to endanger their own safety by letting more people into the lifeboats. It's up to those of us with a conscience to change such attitudes.