ClimateChangeWater Blog

Climate adaptation, water, and governance: An emerging nexus

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-08-27T00:39:56+02:00

In a session during World Water Week on Monday, 6 September, a group of more than 10 governmental and non-governmental organizations will focus on climate change as a challenge to the institutional basis for managing water resources across temporal and spatial scales. In many cases, the tools for developing effective approaches to manage water resources more effectively under a stationary climate are well known and appreciated. IWRM, IRBM, basin-level planning, stakeholder cooperation, EIA, and environmental flows analyses have all been developed as strategies or tools for stabilizing freshwater systems that are already stressed by unsustainable use and rapid growth. The barriers to implementing these approaches are largely those of institutional inertia and governance efficacy. However, the climate is not fixed, and therefore these approaches will be increasingly inadequate in future in most regions with intensive water use unless they are sufficiently adaptive. Under a shifting climate, policies and management regimes must be regularly “updated” as climate variability alters and mean climate conditions create a moving target for water managers. The management of water resources must be flexible, span multiple possible futures, and focus on risk assessment. Hence, water governance institutions will have to be able to learn and evolve in pace with the climate. How do we in the water community begin to incorporate models, and their associated uncertainty, to anticipate emerging aspects of climate that directly impact freshwater availability and quality? ... Given the centrality of water to climate change adaptation, the implications are that water institutions must themselves become the instruments of climate adaptation, which is a novel role. The session will also be webcast at this site if you are unable to attend.

Guest Blog: Communicating impacts and adaptation: Scientific guidelines

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-08-26T01:21:31+02:00

While a given extreme event MAY have some portion of it attributable to climate change, such attribution is VERY difficult and requires direct access to running the climate change models. ... In time we may see a paper or papers in the peer-reviewed literature discussing how likely particular events such as the fires in Russia or the floods in China and Pakistan may have been with and without human-induced climate change (and even then, this research will be presented in terms of probabilities). ...The extremes we are seeing are in precipitation, temperature, sea-surface temperature and hurricane/typhoon strength, rather than in the economic or ecological damage these events cause (e.g., drought, flood, fire); the former is the cause, the latter is an effect. We can discuss whether this is an extreme rainfall event, as we could use actual data and calculate the probabilities of such an event (not easy, but it can be done by many in the network if the data are available). ...Likewise, while an extended period of hot, dry weather can easily contribute to the severity of fires, there are many other factors, like the source of ignition, fuel loads, wind and suppression capabilities, which all play a role in the severity of the damages. ...Separate the weather (e.g., rainfall) from the weather-related event (e.g., flood), and discuss how poor decisions now will make it difficult to adapt or respond to climate change in the future. ... b) Continuing to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will increase the severity and frequency of many extreme events; and, as we are observing, we are often ill-equipped and unprepared to cope with the extreme events we are experiencing now. ...A very good primer on communicating weather events versus climate change was recently posted on the climate central website – “Why Can’t Scientists Say the Recent Extreme Weather Events Are ‘Proof’ of Climate Change?” ...Even so, there are some impacts to which we might even have to be careful of saying this with high confidence at this juncture. ... So, discussing an event as a proxy for future conditions might be acceptable (i.e., this is the type of thing we expect to be more common as the climate changes). ...We could discuss how reducing vulnerability to these sorts of events now (e.g., not living in the typical floodplain, being more than 1 m above mean high tide line) actually helps us be better prepared for the changes coming with climate change.

Global Strategy Forum: Water Policy in a Shifting Climate

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-08-24T22:06:26+02:00

With increasing demand and growth in depleted or degraded water supplies, water security is becoming equally important as energy security. Water scarcity can exacerbate existing political rivalries or promote cooperation for management of cross-boundary water resources. While global action to address water issues is important, regional cooperation and local solutions are essential to deliver results. ...• How can global discussion on water governance be promoted as a link between human security, economic development and environmental sustainability? • How can awareness be raised of the importance of water resource management in adapting to climate change? ...How can we combine water policy-making at the global level with regional, national and local strategies? • What is the role of new technologies in reducing water stress, e.g. carbon neutral desalination of seawater, wastewater recycling? ...• Mr Jorge Borges, State Secretary of Foreign Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Co-operation and Communities of Cape Verde (confirmed)  ...State Department's Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, United States of America (confirmed)  • Prof Dr Francisco Nunes Correia, Former Minister of Environment and Spatial Planning of the Portugal and Full Professor at IST - DECivil, Portugal (confirmed) ...• Dr John Matthews, Director, Freshwater Climate Adaptation Program, at World Wildlife Fund, United States of America (confirmed)

Guest Blog: Pakistan Flooding: Impacts, Attribution, & Adaptation Solutions

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-08-21T17:03:41+02:00

I also strongly believe that this particular event in Pakistan is largely human-caused due to following reasons: · Weak management of watershed and catchment areas — a lot of deforestation has been going on for years, which alters runoff patterns. ...Farmers were suffering and not enough water was released in early summer with a fear that less water will be available in winter, despite the met forecasts of above-average monsoons. · Poor land-use and water resource management planning, particularly in floodplain (Katcha) areas and along northern Pakistani rivers. ... Now, one can see encroachments, human settlements, villages and huge area under agriculture in this floodplain due to long-term management that has ignored the historic flood regime. · Failure of irrigation infrastructure due to natural reasons (because of heavy rainfall, farmers were not using water from the huge canal network, which resulted in breaches and overflows in some areas) and poor planning and corruption (millions of US$ World Bank–funded headworks and barrage rehabilitation projects failed as floodwaters bypassed these structures). Another development is that all the politicians and technocrats from Punjab province are saying that we could have saved “all the damages” if only had we built large dams on Indus. WWF-Pakistan does not agree with this assessment and advocates a scientific assessment of the need to have small and check dams on the Indus and its tributaries, including additional storage capacity as the existing storage capacity has been reduced due to heavy siltation. We plan to carry out an assessment of ecological damage of these “super floods” and the reasons for the failure of our existing institutional water management framework. We fully support the development of a comprehensive scientific study on rivers originating from the whole of the Tibetan plateau (which was span Pakistan, India, Nepal, China, Bhutan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia) to investigate shifting patterns in rainfall patterns and the linkages with climate change and shifting land and water management patterns. We must develop effective intervention strategies to reduce the likelihood of events of a similar magnitude affecting such large areas, so many people, and such important ecosystems and species.

Pakistan flooding: live webcast from the Asia Society

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-08-18T20:28:09+02:00

ONE THIRD OF PAKISTAN IS UNDER WATER AS A RESULT OF THE WORST FLOODS IN THE COUNTRY’S HISTORY. ...Join Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah, and other international figures in an exclusive discussion just prior to the United Nations Special Session on Pakistan. Leaders of critical international humanitarian relief organizations will also discuss ways to help. ...WHEN: THURSDAY, AUGUST 19; 8:30 am ET (GMT - 5) ...WHERE: The Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, New York NY 10021 ...SPEAKERS: Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah. ...More information on relief efforts can be found at www.state.gov/pakistanflooding. Community members interested in giving immediate assistance can text the word “SWAT” to 50555 to contribute $10 to UNHCR’s life-saving flood relief efforts on the ground. ...Please note: this event will be a free live video webcast at AsiaSociety.org/live from 8:30 to 9:30 am ET (5:30 pm Islamabad time) on Thursday, August 19.

Madonna and Child, with Climate Change

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-08-02T18:02:46+02:00

One night we had driven particularly high, close to about 4500 meters (over 15,000 feet) — the little tributary of the Mekong we were following was two meters wide and about mid-calf in depth. ...Though it was July, we huddled around the great steel stove in the main living tent and shoveled yak dung chips — our fuel — as we sat in our winter coats, drinking yak-butter tea and then eating a stir-friend dinner. ...In the clear morning, I looked more closely at the traditional black yak-felt tent, which stood a little apart, its prayer flags flapping like a sailboat tacking into a hard wind. All of the family — several siblings, at least three generations and a number of adult couples — went inside the black tent for brief periods before tending to their chores. ...Many herders of the plateau have shifted from the traditional yak-felt tents to the white canvas tents we occupied in recent years. ...I thought, this stream is carrying the blood of this man’s future away from him, even as he sits here talking to us. ...They rip apart and wash away from the same storms that drove us to shelter with the herders, though they themselves have few options for shelter from the larger shifts in their climate. A few questions to my Tibetan speaking colleagues confirmed that we could enter the dark tent, and I waited until I thought it was empty. ...The traditional tents are about the same size as the canvas tents — around three meters wide and six meters long — but are not as high and, lacking a place for stovepipe, many have a section of cloth on the top that can be opened to allow smoke to vent more easily. ...The transition from black tents to white marks a larger change to enter a world where income is increasingly important and old patterns are shifting, in both subtle and dramatic ways. Their environmental buffer in particular is far thinner and more marginal than just a few years ago — not much more than the lifespan of the mute girl.

Green Glaciers: The Melting Grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-07-31T21:18:17+02:00

I’ve just returned from two weeks on the Tibetan plateau, mostly in Qinghai province of western China, with a team from the China Program Office of WWF, WWF-US, and a colleague from the Qinghai State Forestry Administration. ...The Tibetan plateau is especially sensitive to shifts in the timing of precipitation and the onset of spring, as well as the volume of frozen rain and snow that builds up over each winter. ... The majority of the people who live on the plateau practice an ancient livelihood of pastoral nomadism, centered on moving their herds of yak, sheep, and horses from low altitude (winter) pastures to high altitude (summer) pastures each year, a pattern called transhumance. ...In some counties, as many as three out of every five years are now called “snow disasters,” meaning no accumulation of frozen water before the onset of spring. Water in streams and rivers and in the soil does not freeze during these years but continues to flow downstream and away from upland slopes. ...Understandably, the people living on the plateau are extremely concerned about seeing pastures that were fertile and productive, full of high grass in recent decades, degrade to low lawns or dissolve to bare rock and soil. ... In some cases, however, these fences actually intensify grazing pressures, quickening erosion with additional trampling and browsing grasses down to their roots. In effect, we are losing the grasslands of the Tibetan plateau as the vegetation and soil dissolve into the great rivers of the region — the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Yellow. ... The community of wild species is responding in strange ways across the region, too, with populations of grass-eating pikas and caterpillars exploding in some areas. ... Even predators such as snow leopards and bear feel the pressure of reduced prey species such as blue sheep, and thus turn more often to domesticated species or invade the winter quarters of the herders. ...The green glaciers — the Tibetan plateau’s grasslands — and the livelihoods and species that depend on them can adjust, but this process will require time and careful thought.

For US readers: action requested on legislation

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-06-16T02:21:40+02:00

Currently, there is a discussion draft of a bill being circulated in the Senate authored by Senators Kerry and Lieberman (the American Power Act). I'm sure that many of you have heard varying responses to the draft and there are many organizations that are focusing on improving different sections ranging from Clean Air Act authority to preemption of state regional greenhouse gas programs. Now is the time to improve this bill as it is our best chance of seeing a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. ...Here at Defenders of Wildlife we have long focused on safeguarding wildlife and natural resources from the impacts of climate change and continue to do so by working on the adaptation provision of this bill. This draft contains excellent policy language that creates a national adaptation strategy, state plans and, most importantly, increased scientific capacity. Unfortunately the funding provided to enact this provision is woefully inadequate. Moreover, the funding does not kick in until 2019 — far too late to provide scientists and land managers with the necessary tools to protect fragile ecosystems from the impacts of climate change. ...In order to show Congress that this issue is critical and that there is support for protecting our natural resources in a warming world we are asking scientists to join Dr Thomas Lovejoy, Dr. Barry Noon, and myself on to this letter to lawmakers who are working on this draft now. If you are interested in signing on to this letter, please send Robb Krehbiel rkrehbiel@defenders.org your name and contact information and how you would like to be listed on the letter by June 25. If you have any questions about the letter, also please contact Robb and he can make sure your questions get answered as I will be out on travel for the next two weeks.

Briefing paper: the road to COP16

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-06-13T21:50:35+02:00

http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/climate_carbon_energy/climate_deal/publications/? 193613/What-roads-from-Copenhagen-to-Cancun

Guest Blog: U.S. National Adaptation Summit results

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-06-08T04:19:03+02:00

The Administration of President Barack Obama took an important step toward national climate change preparedness when it convened on 25-27 May 2010 a National Climate Adaptation Summit in Washington, DC. The stated purpose of the meeting was to "to provide insight into what is needed for effective climate adaptation and vulnerability assessment and how we should be organized to do that (public and private sectors – federal to local levels)." ...Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico, said on the second day that "too often, adapting to climate change takes a back seat" to curbing emissions (i.e. climate change "mitigation). ..."While nations negotiate at international conferences about future global commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, and while Congress talks but continues to delay adoption of a strong greenhouse gas reduction program for the country, we're already seeing the effects of the pollution we put into the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution. ...The Inter-American Development Bank hosted the summit and the bank's president, Luis Alberto Moreno, addressed the participants on the second day (see his remarks at 3:06 in Webcast). ...Moreno said that the countries "are increasingly aware that adaptation to climate change is a strategic imperative that could determine their ability to feed their people, power their industries and compete economically. ... As a result many of our member governments have been asking for technical assistance and financing to make climate change adaptation and mitigation and integral part of their development plans." On the final day, the international keynote address was presented by Juan Pablo Bonilla, Chief of the Sustainable Energy and Climate Change Unit at the Inter-American Development Bank. ...In a country such as Columbia where 80% of the generating capacity is hydro-electric, he said there is great concern about vulnerability to altered precipitation regimes. "That's where adaptation and mitigation come together," he said, adding that the "natural adaptation measure" right now for countries heavily dependent on hydro is to diversify power generation by increasing dependence on coal. ...For a quick summary of the summit, see the wrap-up session by Rosina Bierbaum, a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan.

Where People Are: Hope and Fear

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-06-02T14:01:34+02:00

Given two trips to China in the past month, I’ve been wondering in particular about how to reach people in a nation with 1.4 billion humans. ...Although I’ve traveled to China only five or six times over the past three years, I have a few good friends in China — as good as I have anywhere else. ...He also travels frequently, and I was afraid that this visit to China would mark the third trip I’ve made in a year where I would miss seeing him. ...I had to make a trip the following day for some medical treatment and would have about two hours where I was just sitting — would you like to come along, Y? ...He had left for a non-profit where he runs field sessions in a beautiful, wild region of China, helping them to reconnect with nature and envision more positive impacts on our environment. ...Three or four days earlier, I had been in another city in China running a workshop with colleagues, and the issue of communicating climate adaptation had come up there as well. A key topic was how we talk about the future: should we try to frighten people about avoiding terrible dangers, or should we motivate people to change through hope? ...He effectively typifies the approach of fear to environmental issues, which to me often sounds like the message of a punishing god: repent now, or be damned forever! ...As the only other westerner at the table, during quiet parts of the dinner I described the work of many of the people around the table — positive, hopeful, powerful work. ... One came over to toast him, and he said, Keep up the good work — John has been telling me about you. ...I wondered if like many people he believes that climate change is not having strong impacts now and was mostly about shifts for the future.

Climate of Doubt

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-06-02T13:59:18+02:00

The gist of the final part of the presentation was that humans have not caused the current period of climate change. ... Thus, while humans should adapt to shifts in climate, we need not structure our economies so that they emit much less carbon into the atmosphere. ...Should we begin talking about the causes of climate change at the same time that we talk about climate adaptation? ...I began giving high-level talks about climate impacts and adaptation strategies about three years ago, and for the first year or so I would begin each presentation with a brief overview of climate science and the evidence for the human “fingerprints” for our current period of climate change. ... Moreover, I felt like most of the questions I was getting were about the human causation of climate change — did we really do it? ...As a result, I made a conscious shift: I would drop the “fingerprints” part of the talk, and I would emphasize that reducing greenhouse gas emissions (“climate mitigation”) is actually a form of climate adaptation since it slows down the rate of climate change. ... But more than 95 percent of my talks shifted to climate adaptation, with the implicit assumption that climate change is proceeding rapidly and that humans have caused it. All of the questions shifted to climate adaptation — what should we do, how can we do it better, and so on. ...He said, I also talk about climate adaptation very often, and I feel strongly that the human role in climate change is too controversial. ... We often have only a limited amount of time, and to raise these issues makes people defensive and unresponsive to the message of climate adaptation. There is a major problem in how people respond to the causes of climate change, but that is not our problem — it is an issue in the larger culture, and we cannot solve that problem and deliver the message of climate adaptation as well.

Friends in High Places

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-05-20T01:18:15+02:00

Upstairs, I looked at a large poster of showing a photo of me giving a talk (apparently very passionately) with a lot of Chinese text, except for the occasional reference to John Matthews in English letters (ie, my name). ...My talk began with a brief overview of why climate is important to humans, and how human institutions have to shift sometimes when they are transferred to new climate conditions. ...In the nineteenth century as settlers moved west from the Atlantic coast in search of cheap, productive land, they noted that the 100th meridian corresponded to a where a farm could reliably depend on precipitation (to the east of that line) and irrigation was critical for reliable row-crops (to the west of that line). ...We should make sure that everyone within a basin has access to water, and that it is managed in an equitable way for both small and large farmers. ...In a sense, we are all entering a period where we are beyond the 100th meridian — the meridian is moving as the climate shifts, altering our hydrological and ecological boundaries. ... It is as if we were moving into the dry west of North America from the east without changing position. ...And my final message to this audience of scientists was that our science had to be translated into the language of policy and finance so that they could shape our findings into a more sustainable world. ...A lot of students came to talk with me afterwards, so I must have seemed relatively harmless in the end. ...The central government had teamed up with WWF and a big private energy producer in China to hold a high-level conference on climate mitigation (greenhouse gases — where they come from, how to reduce their concentration and emissions rate) and climate adaptation (how to adjust human and natural systems to climate impacts). ...As I went back to my seat, I thought, Well, I hope we weren’t looking to build a long-term relationship with his company, since I had in very polite, indirect language just undermined the basis for some of his company’s goals. ...I often feel that global lessons and examples of the challenges and opportunities of climate adaptation are better received abroad than in North America, where there is a strong willingness to listen and engage in rich discussion.

The Bright Red Line of Faith

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-05-20T01:16:47+02:00

In many cities, rivers are referred to as “drains,” places where all kinds of waste flows openly and noisomely — industrial, household, even from tanneries or butchers. ...The Indian people and government know they have a problem with water supply, treatment, and management, and they know that climate change is making their water problems worse. ... Delhi alone has more than 15 million inhabitants, in a city largely created by the British in the nineteenth century as an administrative center and home for a few thousand residents. In fact, the growth of an Indian middle class has led to a more assertive move by India’s citizens for more water security. Even rural, arid Rajasthan state, just to the west of Delhi, is facing national attention to manage water in ways that match the existing climate — and the climate we are entering. ...Although I have been to India four times in the past two years, most of my river experiences have been more like drain experiences. But from Delhi I was invited by colleagues to visit a village a few hundred kilometers downstream, on the mainstem of the Ganges. ...With a group of colleagues, we caravaned to one of the villages and went down to the river and crossed to a small island in zodiacs, where we met our Gangetic dolphin team leader. ... Our local team has worked hard with the network of local villages to reduce the many pressures on this area by creating low-tech water treatment stations and working with villagers to help them understand that the dolphins are the sign of clean and safe water. ...The only sounds came from the snores of my good Indian colleagues and a boy minding his family’s fields for the night, calling to his father across the water every quarter of the hour: I am here. ...As the priest spoke and sang from sacred verses about blessing all living things, the need for the protection of life, and our grounding and connection to nature, we threw rice, milk, cotton cloth, and flower petals into the river.

A month of War and Peace

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-03-21T16:48:30+01:00

When it’s not actually raining, being in a cloud forest is usually like walking through the shower room in a gym, very humid, usually full of mist. ... A completely different group of birds, mammals, insects, and plants live across this mountain archipelago that contrasts greatly with the areas just a little lower in elevation, which aren’t bathed in 100 percent humidity all the time. ...A low dam or barrage pushes some of the water from the river into a tunnel bored into the side of the valley. ...Ideally, RoR dams don’t take that much water from their river; they divert a portion of the water, leaving at least 20 or 30 percent of the water for the stretch of river that runs parallel to the tunnel. ...They were getting political pressure because they were only operating at 30 or 40 percent of their capacity, and they said if they let any of the water go through the intermediate part of the river they’d hardly make any electricity. ... And restaurants looked really charming with their candles on each table until you realized that this was in preparation for a blackout. ... Nepal was already one of the poorest countries in the world, so having that much less food to eat or sell meant that rural communities were much more likely to chuck it all and head for the grinding poverty of one of Nepal’s cities. Even worse, those three- or four-kilometer stretches of river that are dry below each RoR dam are basically dead zones for the freshwater species in the area. ...Reading about the upper class of Russia in the early nineteenth century while I was curled up in some in some truck driver’s hotel in rural Nepal or while camping on an island in the middle of the Ganges in northern India (worrying about jackals in the night) completely changed the novel. ... Those serfs were not that far from many of these rural areas around me, except that these people had mobile phones and diesel water groundwater pumps and Chicago Bulls t-shirts. ...My mind switched to the image of a boy sitting near the Nepal-China border with a baby goat in his lap, both of whom stared at the weird white guy in the wildly pitching car passing by and wondered where they heck he was going.

Video: Conservation portfolios for climate adaptation - Daniel Schindler, University of Washington

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-01-08T01:38:05+01:00

Schindler’s work has documented shifts in aquatic seasonal behavior in lakes and rivers in fish and species such as copepods as well as relative changes in the richness of fish stocks (i.e., the same species of fish but from different populations), and he’s woven a compelling story about how these observations are connected to shifts in climate over a multi-decade scale and how we should respond to these changes. He is a great example of how to connect great science with solid climate-resilient policy implications. This footage was captured directly after Schindler spoke in early November 2009 at the 4th annual WWF Kathryn Fuller Science for Nature Symposium. This event was titled “Securing Water for Nature and People in a Changing Climate,” and the goal was to provide a state-of-the-science review of climate impacts on freshwater systems, challenges to freshwater ecosystem conservation, the role of adaptation in water management, and build a platform for the development of an adaptation based conservation agenda. A brief video on this site of Jim Jarvie with Mercy Corps is also taken from the Fuller Symposium.

Daniel Schindler at the 2009 Fuller Symposium from John Matthews on Vimeo.

Wetlands and climate change compendium

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-01-07T00:17:41+01:00

ASWM has posted the “Recommendations for a National Wetlands and Climate Change Initiative” based on Wetlands 2008: Wetlands and Global Climate Change, held on September 16-18, 2008 in Portland, Oregon. ASWM is recommending that federal agencies and Congress create a cooperative National Wetlands and Climate Change Initiative with the states, tribes, local governments, and the private sector. ...http://www.aswm.org/calendar/wetlands2008/recommendations_2008_112008.pdf Wetlands and Global Climate Change, by Leah Stetson (February 2007) ...In response to global climate change, wetland scientists and decision-makers have posed the questions: How do we manage wetlands with added understanding about climate change and its direct, indirect and long-range effects? Are there ways to mitigate the effects of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere in order to protect wetlands? What are the effects of rising sea levels on coastal wetlands? What other climate change factors will have an impact on wetlands? ...Wetlands and Climate Change: Management Options, by Jon Kusler, ASWM (2007) (PDF) Common Questions: Wetland, Climate Change, and Carbon Sequestering by Jon Kusler,, Association of State Wetland Managers, Inc.

A Cold Controversy: Himalayan Glaciers

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2010-01-06T01:17:20+01:00

A strong negative reaction to the India report came from Rajenda Pachauri, who is the head of the IPCC, the UN scientific and technical branch charged with delivering the best available research on how climate change is affecting the planet. ... He’s very famous and widely respected in climate change circles, and on behalf of the IPCC he received a Nobel Peace Price a few years ago (and I made a video in December 2009 that includes Pachauri). ...His reaction was strong and vociferous and covered by a number of major media outlets, several of which picked up on a major 2007 IPCC report (Working Group 2, Fourth Assessment Report) that stated that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. I’ve long thought that this was an extreme and alarmist date, but several media outlets are now reporting that this reference is probably a typographical error, and that original paper referred to the Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2350, or 315 years after 2035. ...They did not see evidence of an acceleration in mass loss as has been seen in Alaska and Greenland over the past 20 years, but those glaciers are quite different regionally and latitudinally. ...And a video report from WWF-Nepal shows very significant impacts that are occurring on their side of the Himalayas and some powerful responses to adapt to the emerging conditions in the Gokyo region. ...Using some very clever techniques to date particular layers to radioactive debris from old nuclear bomb explosions, the authors were able to show that the top layers for a lot of glaciers have disappeared — the outer wrapping, in effect, may date back to the 1950s, the 1930s, or even older. ... This is a scary trend because it suggests that we’ve been watching the wrong parts of glaciers for the past century — the snouts — and missed the loss of the bulk of the ice. ...They are sublimating, which means that more frozen water may be disappearing directly into the atmosphere as water vapor rather than going through a transition to liquid water, which would presumably cause flooding — or at least enter the network of rivers and streams throughout South Asia. ... This distinction is important because it implies that the bulk of the glacial mass may not be lost in a way that would be of even temporary benefit to farmers or cities in what is actually the semi-arid region South Asia. I have heard anecdotal reports of extreme surface wasting occurring in the Sierra Nevada of California in recent years, which would affect the urban water supply of many important US cities.

Video: Red Eyes in Copenhagen: Adaptation at COP15

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-27T17:26:56+01:00

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Video: Jim Jarvie from Mercy Corps on Development and Ecosystem-based Adaptation

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-26T15:04:30+01:00

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Guest Blog: Farming with the Titimangsa: Losing Weather (and Water) in Time

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-24T02:02:20+01:00

Based on this titimangsa, the farmer made decisions about when to start land preparation, sowing, harvesting, and other parts of the agricultural cycle in order to support the traditional rate of two to three rice harvests per year. By the late 1990s, farmers had already observed how traditional agricultural decision making was changing to more centrally planned modern irrigation systems, but each village still maintained a traditional water diversion and distribution networks as well. ...However, a large part of the world’s population still does have this linked concept of time and weather, and these people are often the ones in closest contact with our natural resources, such as farmers, fishers, herders and ranchers, or pastoral nomads. ...A titimangsa would therefore be a more effective way to get a grip on structural change than any wobbly statistical data set of temperature or rainfall, for a titimangsa gets at the very subtleties on which agricultural practices depend. ...Water professionals who talk about “increasing water use efficiencies” or “increasing crop per drop” are either underestimating the marginal conditions under which water is often being managed already, or are referring to systems that knowingly waste too much water. ... While it is true that the amount of diverted water can be much more than the officially allowed amounts, in many occasions downstream people and ecosystems actually depend on the non-designated “extra” amounts for sanitation, irrigation, recharge, or for the required flexibility in water use that provides them with the necessary water security. ...This man also made me realize that the crux of any water crisis cannot be expressed in the volume of water only, but should always include the number of people who depend on the reliability of a water system. Water efficiency discussions that do not explicitly take into account the number of people per drop will not solve water crises, and may threaten the viability of natural river functions in the longer term. ...Second, when proposing any water development, it should be evaluated by how many local people the water system supports (or limits) and the extent to which they are dependent on its future reliability. ... Almost by definition, a river system that has most of its natural functions intact is better able to provide water security and benefits to a wider range of people than an overexploited or degraded river system can. ...I do understand that this is a challenge and not a solution, but it explains why WWF is working on a whole river basin assessment of the Mekong’s water development that, apart from freshwater habitats and biodiversity, also includes food security in relation to water-based livelihoods such as fisheries, rice farming, and domestic water supply.

The Future of Climate-Water Talk: WWW's Conclusions

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-22T03:59:10+01:00

If water is indeed the medium through which climate change will be felt by humans, the water community must find more effective ways of making climate-resilient water management relevant to vulnerable groups such as women, young people, farmers, and consumers. The importance of water must be articulated from many audiences in order for decision makers to act, not just from those directly involved in water resource management. ...While these terms were raised repeatedly in 2009, they remained largely in the abstract, with few case studies or examples of the positive roles that national and international institutions should be playing. ...In most instances where mitigation and adaptation were both mentioned, there was little discussion of how these could be integrated or where the limits of integration lay. ...While the research and advocacy on climate change is showing that women are major victims in agricultural communities, there was little explicit discussion what gender-relevant adaptation interventions might look like, such as a gender policy in the water sector. ...Most discussions of CCA techniques described building resilience to climate variability and resisting ecological tipping points, which in effect is about buffering impacts or reducing rates of change. ...A number of regions such the Himalayas and the Andes are experiencing very rapid rates of climate change, particularly in their water resources. ...Only a handful of speakers mentioned climate services, a topic that is gaining traction in some scientific and policy circles. Climate services are roughly comparable to ecosystem services, such that regions like the Amazon “provide” climate services such as large quantities of airborne moisture. ...In many regions, groundwater is a very significant portion of water for irrigation, domestic, and industrial use, while monitoring of usage and recharge processes or regulation of groundwater resources are extremely limited. ...Water footprint has become a powerful means of articulating how economic processes can transfer good and bad water resource management within goods and services.

A Final COP Postcard: The Longest Day

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-21T17:07:40+01:00

Perhaps you’ve seen reports about delegates including my friends and colleagues stuck inside of the Bella Center for almost two days, of forcible evictions, and the helpless rage and fruitless sympathy those of us outside tried to lend to our colleagues by email and phone. ...Apparently the city’s contribution of free public transportation passes to all registered delegates left the taxis empty and drove away the seasonal tourists from Sweden and Germany, who could find no place to stay and felt frightened of the reports of demonstrations and strikes. ...A set of documents, equally nonbinding, was also produced on a wide range of more narrow and technical topics, such as the role of forest carbon and how to provide compensation money for the most vulnerable nations. ...Key statements declared that the least-developed countries of the world were the most vulnerable to climate change, and that the historical polluters — that is, those of us have benefited the longest from high rates of carbon emissions — should bear the financial responsibility for funding adaptation. ... However, Saudi Arabia and a few other wealthy oil-producing export countries insisted on adding language on “response measures,” which are intended to recompense them for the loss of income they expect when they lose their oil revenue. ...Their very reasonable expectation was that at a minimum we would have a decent climate mitigation treaty, or a document that seemed like it could easily become one. Much was spent and sacrificed with this assumption — what else could we do? — but in the end the decisions were made by a small number of world leaders in a cloistered room in the Bella Center in the early morning hours. ...As a result, as the leaders of NGOs return to the planning sessions, their boards, and their media teams, I expect many groups to refocus away from climate mitigation, or at least to look more closely at issues they are more likely to win. ...I have suspected since at least May or June that the work of climate change after Copenhagen would vigorously shift to adaptation come January 2010, but I thought this was because we would have a firm climate mitigation agreement focusing on greenhouse gases by now. ... Instead, I think the effective irrelevance of the UNFCCC for now means that in absence of a global UN voice on adaptation, NGOs will have to create an alternative structure to enable adaptation across borders and institutions. ...I chose not to attend the funeral a few days later to grieve with my family but stood in a high window on a cold day and watched the water for a long time.

Video: More Water Asks at the COP

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-17T15:47:19+01:00

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Joining the Strands at the COP

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-16T18:15:41+01:00

Although I have mixed feelings about having been here for two weeks now, I am pleased that I registered and got my UNFCCC pass early on. ...As the COP has moved from last week’s focus on blocking out positions has turned to serious negotiations, the number of government attendees has grown substantially. ...So there are large lines near the Bella Center in what is cold, wet, and very windy weather to wait for six hours for a chance to squeeze into the building. ...I was supposed to be involved in two side events today, but if I go in I take the WWF slot for one of our negotiators. ...I’ve received about 900 emails, more or less, on our official COP mailing list in the past 10 days, most in the past 48 hours. ...Out of perhaps 1,000 NGOs that registered, the number of NGO delegates drops tomorrow to 1,000 as well — one per NGO. ...And if we’re aren’t there, then the delegates can mostly tell whatever story they want about whatever deal they put together. ...And that presence is very important in the next few days, since we are trying to provide some witness for the voiceless: the most poor and vulnerable people of the world, and for all of the silent ecosystems. ... I’ve yet to find a negotiators for the Sundarbans as a viable ecosystem (perhaps the COP organizers have a rule against registering Bengal tigers as speakers?). So I can’t report very much of what’s really going on inside since I am far, far away. ...I hope some of that calm can spread to the Bella Center, and that the negotiators make something functional and beautiful as well.

Video: The Language of Climate Change Is the Language of Water

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-14T13:04:09+01:00

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Video: Voices on water, biodiversity, and COP15

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-14T09:35:13+01:00

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Teenage Angst at the COP: At the Hinge

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-14T09:02:28+01:00

And yet… if Hamlet were a water manager and alive in Denmark today, perhaps he would be suffering a different kind of stress. I kept wondering: if Hamlet was involved in the process of negotiating the climate adaptation policy language at the COP, he’d find a lot to distract him from worrying about his mother and uncle conspiring to murder his father and then getting hitched immediately afterwards. I’m guessing he’d be concerned about the lack of substantive, clear language about what good adaptation looks like to help humans prepare for our emerging climate and the low sense of concern about getting money to the most vulnerable nations quickly. ...I was at Kronborg listening to several important groups talk about the importance of water to climate adaptation for humans. Senior executives from major global businesses were there, as well as internationally famous climate scientists (such as Rajenda Pachauri, head of the IPCC) and major academic and research institutions like TERI and Yale. ... Holding about 50 people, I was quite aware that the cut of my clothes put me in a class closer to the janitorial staff than most of the audience. ...Most of the speakers clearly viewed economic development as a task in competition with sustainable resource management, much less the unrecognized ethics of “conservation” and “biodiversity.” ...If you were to ask most urban four year olds from the US or Europe where milk came from, they’d say … the refrigerator. ... Much less that climate adaptation is actually a viable practice, awaiting funding and institutional recognition from groups like the UNFCCC and the COP process to really become large scale and widespread. ...These final days, the negotiations around climate adaptation have the threat of rigid positions that lead to continued lack of progress and ultimately failure, or they lead to rapid progress and success with people who are prepared to make progress. ...On Saturday while I was at Kronborg, the real stress and angst was in Ian Fry, delegate from the small Pacific island nation of Tuvalu.

Asks for the COP: More Water, Please!

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-08T13:06:39+01:00

Conservation, development and economic growth groups must be united around the pursuit of sustainable management and utilization of our water resources and work together with scientists to address the practical issues of our time. Adapting to climate change will largely require implementation of existing and emerging practices of good water management. While the challenge of climate change requires us to adopt important new perspectives, the majority of responses will be drawn from currently known and evolving policies and approaches. Addressing existing unsustainable utilization of, and impacts on, water resources will be central to the adaptation challenge. ...The most significant impacts of climate change will occur where these impacts combine with the immense pressures being placed on freshwater systems by rapid social and economic development. ...Also key to information sharing is building robust national, transnational, and local monitoring networks that can define trends in ecosystems, livelihoods, and target species, as well as provide early alerts to crises such as droughts and floods. ...Environmental flows are a critical aspect of building climate resilience for freshwater ecosystems and their services. The problem of climate change and water is not simply water supply and demand; it is also water quality and flow regime. ...Good governance is critical to implementing both sound water management and the equitable allocation of freshwater resources, especially in regions where poverty, gender, race, religion, or ethnicity are used as a basis for discrimination of access. ...The threats and challenges from climate change are not simply within ecosystems and individuals; institutions must also embody the ability to maintain flexibility. ...The bulk of this funding will need to be directed into strengthening existing and emerging water management policies and institutions rather than the through creation of new or parallel institutions.

Trust: Why We're Here in Copenhagen

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-08T12:55:18+01:00

There are lots of men and women in suits running between meetings, but there are also lots of official “stunts” and activities and events that are meant to demonstrate the longing to reach some kind of strong outcome here. ...My particular focus here is on climate adaptation, and especially the role of ecosystems and water resources as cross-cutting issues for adaptation. ...This money would come from the countries like the US and western Europe that have emitted most of the greenhouse gases over the past 300 years to the most affected countries that also have the fewest resources to facilitate adaptation. ... This issue is called adaptation finance, and most of the debate focuses on creating a pool of money for short-term funding (for countries already feeling dire impacts) and a long-term mechanism for facilitate more gradual change. ...As someone who works in many countries on climate adaptation, I’m concerned that adaptation as it is now described doesn’t really describe actions that are environmentally sustainable. And it ignores much of what we know already about the vision for adaptation that is most appropriate: we must be holistic, we must think of people and ecosystems together, and sustainable water management is critical for helping all nations adjust to most of the impacts of climate change we face now and will face in the future. ...If we don’t manage water in a sustainable way, then we will lost our basis for agriculture, energy production, industrial water uses, and not least domestic water supply and sanitation. And the way that we know we are managing water sustainably is to watch ecosystems and species and see how we’re doing. ...The G77 and China — a group of 77 developing nations — has put forward a pretty good proposal for linking adaptation to ecosystems, and there are some useful mentions of water. ... Saudi Arabia, for instance, wants it’s own special form of adaptation — an economic adaptation to compensate for the loss of economic revenue if less oil is consumed globally. ... And places like Australia in the Murray-Darling basin are already dealing with very severe droughts and economic restructuring as a result of climate change.

Arrivals: The Beginning of Copenhagen

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-07T09:04:48+01:00

But we are dealing with some strange issues here: almost nonexistent internet access, very tight living quarters (I have two official roommates in a small space, and (for an unlucky few) bedbugs. Space is actually very constricted across the Copenhagen, which has about 1.7 million residents and some 35,000 people here for the conference. That’s a measure of how important the meeting is viewed globally. But it also means a lot of discomfort for those of us traveling here on a budget. The lack of light is actually interesting in itself. We’re quite far north in latitude here — around 50 degrees north or so — and though I landed about 4 pm it might as well have been midnight. It’s 8 am now, and sun won’t rise for another hour. ...It’s quite large — 16 stories, more than a thousand beds — and by Sunday night the building was already stuffed with people attending the conference (or Conference of the Parties, usually referred to simply as the COP), mostly from non-governmental organizations like WWF. ... And WWF has something like 200 people scattered over the city, with about 60 or 70 in this hostel. The rooms are so small and basic, that most people linger in the crowded lobby area, which is also a bar. ... And fills the room with light and energy, even if outside there is darkness.

New adaptation blog: ClimatePrep.org

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-12-07T08:57:40+01:00

Currently posted on the site are updates from adaptation projects in the Brazilian Amazon, the Danube-Carpathian region, the Mekong, and many more. We will also be featuring adaptation related updates on COP 15. There is a lot going on at ClimatePrep and we would like to invite everyone to visit the link below to read, share, and be a part of the global adaptation conversation! www. ClimatePrep.org

Moving beyond despair: Copenhagen, trail running, and the persistance of hope

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-11-20T02:34:10+01:00

I am part of a large delegation within my parent organization attending the Copenhagen meeting in about 10 days, and I am preparing to work with a group of perhaps six or eight different organizations on a set of issues that focus on getting strong, robust language that emphasizes the importance of good water resource management for sound climate adaptation. In the scheme of things at the meeting, these issues are much less significant and visible than developing a new international framework around greenhouse gas emissions, creating a mechanism for using tropical forests as a repository for atmospheric carbon, or instituting a global fund for helping developing and vulnerable nations respond to the negative impacts of climate change. ...Sadly, about two weeks ago in a planning meeting to prepare for the Copenhagen sessions, all of the water language was removed. This was shocking and discouraging — inserting that language in the first place was very difficult and required intense negotiations by some incredible colleagues at other organizations. ...Just a few minutes from my home, I could I head off into the woods at a brisk pace, running up and down hills, in the rain, on broiling days, and even on snow and ice. ...The first physician said, If you are very patient over the next year or so, you might be able to run again. ...The leaves have been changing and I look up into the hills every day around my house and think, I should be up there. ...He’s been a serious competitive athlete in a variety of sports since he was a boy, and his love of running is even more passionate than mine. ... Following almost four and half months of solid travel, I also was able to begin swimming again this week — something else that had to stop after my injury in June. ...In truth, the loss of trail running feels like the friend has died, and I’ve been in mourning now for months. ...In my swim today, I managed to reach a point where I was gliding, buoyed and lifted by the water rather than struggling against the liquid.

Video: UK Rivers on the Edge

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-11-01T18:06:19+01:00

My own research has taught me two lessons about small freshwater ecosystems: (a) they are often critical parts of the landscape and reservoirs of biodiversity, and (b) they have less wiggle room in terms of climate shifts in precipitation, air temperature, and so on. Mostly the latter point is true precisely because they're small, which makes them sensitive to changes in runoff, groundwater, and human use. Sadly, these small systems are also among the least protected type of ecosystem: out of sight, out of mind. Last September, I was fortunate enough to go visit the Itchen river, one of these amazing chalk streams. The delicate, tresslike vegetation waved slowly at me as I stood on an old stone bridge near a twelfth-century grain mill. ... The scene was almost elfin in its delicacy and crystalline beauty. ...Rivers on the Edge was put together by colleagues in the UK to highlight the beauty and challenges of these ecosystems. Climate change is less prominent as an issue in the video, but the focus near the end of the video on water use efficiency is actually quite important as a climate adaptation strategy for these ecosystems. Such small streams will be highly sensitive to any increase the frequency or severity of droughts, and human withdrawals from these rivers will make these droughts even more sensitive. Given that in England most of these streams are in the greater London area, you can imagine the water pressure. Thus, by reducing the water abstraction pressures on the chalk streams, we can effectively keep more water in the rivers and help to buy them a little more time.

The Watery Road to Copenhagen Livecast: Water & Climate Change Symposium!

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-10-30T17:37:19+01:00

The Fuller Symposiom is two days of social and natural scientists, major international organizations such as the World Bank, and policymakers talking about where we are now. The timing is perfect: in December, the UNFCCC convenes arguably the most important climate change policy meeting since 1996, when the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated. This meeting is in Copenhagen, Denmark, and I'll be attending to help represent my organization's views there. Trust me: Copenhagen will be lurking behind the Fuller Symposium on both days. And there will also be a more direct connection, since I've been asked to make a direct statement from the floor of the Fuller Symposium to a pre-Copenhagen planning and agenda-setting meeting held in Barcelona on 3 November. ...The Fuller Symposium itself will be held in a venerable and very large (500 person capacity!) conference hall at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Unfortunately, I gather the live venue itself is full to capacity with registrants. ... I've heard rumors of having the ability to twitter questions to speakers, but I'm not sure about that. ...Registration for the live webcast: http://www.worldwildlife.org/science/fellowships/fuller/webcast.html List of speakers, agenda, and overview: http://www.worldwildlife.org/science/fellowships/fuller/fuller-symposium-2009.html

Water & Climate: Not Everything Is Negative

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-10-27T23:53:55+01:00

There are hilarious aspects of the interview in the backstory — one of the hosts refers to me as "Dr. ... In Europe, the honorific "professor" is very important and highly restricted. A professor in much of Europe refers to someone who has a high-ranking position in a university, such as the director of a research unit. In North America, "professor" just means someone who teaches at a university or college. ... However, in a background check for the ministerial panel at World Water Week (described here), the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) asked me if I had an affiliation with a university; I said, yes, vaguely. ... But I am linked to a department at a university. ... And suddenly I began receiving these promotional materials that listed me as Professor John Matthews. When I went back to my contact, I said, What's with this professor thing? ... We needed you to sound very impressive in order to have you speak on the same stage as the ministers. I have yet to live this down with my colleagues in our freshwater network. I have been greeted as professor John over many thousands of kilometers since last August.

Speaking Water to Power: An Address to Ministers in Advance of COP15

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-09-01T05:38:36+02:00

Two weeks ago in South America, I sat in a high-level forum such as this with representatives of a number of Brazilian ministries, multi-lateral groups such as the World Bank, corporations, and non-governmental organizations. After a day and a half, however, two women from the upper Amazon came to talk to us about their experiences with climate-altered flood regimes, the effects this has had on their fishing and agriculture, and the strange responses of species and ecosystems to an increasingly unfamiliar world. ...Speaking on behalf of a range of organizations that have identified climate change adaptation as the work of humans for generations to come and that have been struggling — and sometimes succeeding — with policies and projects at all spatial scales, I have come here to say that the UNFCCC and NAPA processes are not in the mainstream of adaptation practice. ... To paraphrase Yeats, the center is not holding, even as a consensus emerges in the NGO, civil society, and resource management communities that climate adaptation for humans must be grounded in the climate-sustainable management of freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. ...Yes, it is critical that we develop an adaptation fund that can transfer sufficient resources from the developed world to the vulnerable communities of the world, and these transfers must begin quickly. ...This April 2009 statement values sustainable development; the resilience of ecosystems, livelihoods, and economies; good governance and implementation; information sharing, and a far more holistic view of economics and finance that begins to view all development aid as a tool for ecosystem-based adaptation. The NGO and civil society community firmly believe in the importance of water as a unifying theme that can inspire and motivate the community of nations to move quickly to implement climate-resilient policy and land and water management. ...This positive initiative has been building relationships with negotiators to increase understanding about ecosystem-based adaptation generally among Copenhagen negotiators as well as of building broad commitment for holistic adaptation policies at the highest political levels. We need to send a strong message to negotiators that without a focus on land and water management in relation to adaptation, the resulting mechanisms from COP15 may not be useful to the water community, or to those societies, species, and ecosystems that are so exposed to negative impacts from climate change. While the international climate change community needs to listen to the water community, WWF also believes that the water community must adjust our language and engagement with policymakers so that they understand that we are no simply a sector. ... And while all of us in the water community know that there are many challenges to managing water beyond climate change, we have also come to understand three key concepts:

The Watery Road to Copenhagen: Video Interviews from World Water Week

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-08-26T14:38:33+02:00

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The Watery Road to Copenhagen: Podcast with Three Groups

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-08-18T15:58:35+02:00

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World Water Week: Climate & Water Interviews!

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-08-18T11:50:31+02:00

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One Talk, Two Heads: Bloviating on Climate Adaptation in Two Languages

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-08-12T21:05:16+02:00

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Fixed video streaming! The Cerrado of Brazil

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-08-09T17:19:13+02:00

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Beyond the Photos: Looking Closer at Impacts and Disaster Risk Reduction Plans for the Sundarbans

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-07-16T07:19:47+02:00

This will not only make it possible to have a small crop in a short span of time for consumption and sale but also kickstart the economic cycle which is as of now at standstill. ...Once the seasonal monsoon sets in, these will get filled and if they are restocked with fish, the community can have a harvest next year. ...Meanwhile, the Indian government has provided 6,000 Rupees (ED: about $120 USD) per house and the Panchayat (ED: local government) is willing to join forces with WWF in disbursing these funds appropriately. ...Having discussed the issue of stove efficiency with the community it appears that they are unlikely to adopt it unless they get to see one or two families using it. ...Getting children to embrace formal education in Tipligheri is a challenge but we believe this is one long term strategy that will help the community as well as the ecosystem. If more and more children join the mainstream and develop the capacity to make a living outside the ecoregion, the population in the Sundarbans will decline over time unless there are new settlers in the villages. ...If these children are targeted and put in residential schools run by missionaries, then they can eventually join the mainstream of Indian society and are unlikely to live in Tipligheri. ... Even if Rs.1000/-per child (ED: about $20 USD) is spent every month for 12 years the total expenditure is a mere ten lakhs over a 12 year period (ED: about $20,000 for all 65 children). ...Although the Government has announced assistance of Rs. 500/- per higher secondary student (ED: about $10 USD) it is anybody’s guess when this is going to arrive and school teachers apprehend that the students might complete their academic year before help arrives. ...We are almost assured of bulk of the funding required for this purpose but are short Rs. 10 lakhs (ED: $20,000 USD). If any of the above is of your interest and would like to support please do let us know we will be happy to develop a complete proposal and provide additional details.

John in the Tank

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-07-13T18:40:00+02:00

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New! Video blog entries

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-07-09T00:43:20+02:00

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Guest Blog: An Urgent Update and Message on Waxman-Markey

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-06-24T23:38:45+02:00

I’m writing to provide a quick update on the coming vote on US climate legislation in the House and ask for your help in stopping some dangerous proposed changes. ... Waxman reached a deal with the chairman of the Agriculture Committee and the Waxman-Markey bill [ED: discussed on this blog here and here] is headed for a vote on the full House floor on Friday [ED: this is, 26 June 2009]. ... Even with the weakening of the bill over the last 2 months, it is still a vital first step to long-overdue US action to address climate change. ...Although the overall bill is worthy of support, there are some very damaging changes currently being proposed by the Ways and Means Committee that would have very negative consequences for the UNFCCC [ED: that is, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is the main international policy institution charged with ushering us to global climate adaptation and mitigation treaties] negotiations. ... • Insert a new section providing mandatory direction to US negotiators in the UNFCCC requiring that an acceptable new treaty: 1) require that large developing countries take action that is “comparable” to the US; and 2) permit the use of trade sanctions against developing countries that don’t take on these similar commitments. These would be the only negotiating criteria in the bill, thus sending a strongly negative message to other nations about our priorities in reaching a new global climate deal. ...- They would send the wrong signal in the negotiations by saying that are only concern about a new climate treaty is threatening developing countries with trade sanctions. ...If we are unable to join a deal because the Senate will not ratify a future treaty, these trade sanction can be imposed on the USA. ...They are opposed rightly by the White House as a poison pill for the UNFCCC negotiations, which are already in a fragile state. ...We would urge you to reach out TODAY to any contact that you have on the Hill or in the Administration to ask that these changes not be included. ... Charlie Rangel (Chair, Ways and Means); any member on Ways and Means; Carol Browner, Nancy Sutley or others in the White House; Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer or other House Leadership.

Guest Blog: Reflections from the Sundarbans: Short-Term Progress, Long-Term Strategies?

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-06-23T20:57:20+02:00

It has been almost a month since tropical cyclone Aila hit the Sundarbans but the agricultural fields are still waterlogged and the salinity level is as high as 30 ppt (ED: parts per thousand; mean ocean salinity is about 35 ppt). ... It will be quite a while before the affected are able to pick themselves up and get moving in terms of their lives and livelihood. We at WWF Sundarbans Programme feel that we cannot continue with relief work much longer (our last consignment will last for the next 10 days at the most) and therefore the population (that we are directly involved with) needs to be engaged in activities so that they can start earning or else they will begin to venture into the forest. ... This has a couple of immediate challenges, (i) money to buy food, (ii) pots, pans and other utensils, and (iii) fuel for cooking (as of now the Panchayat [ED: local government] provides liquid propane gas bottles to the community kitchens). On an immediate basis we will get the people to work on dewatering the ponds and raising their embankments so that when rain comes the ponds have freshwater again. We will also get the ponds stocked with fish once these get filled with rain water (next month the ponds were to be harvested but all that has been lost). Small donations may be available for pots and pans but cooking fuel is going to be a problem and the pressure on the forest for firewood is bound to go up. ...The bigger challenge is to get the population back in the agricultural fields and to get houses reconstructed in a manner that these can withstand high wind velocity. ...The scientific literature confirms that cyclones and tidal surges are already more frequent and intense, that sea level is rising at rates higher than global average, and that coastal erosion is accelerating. ... Of course, the embankments will have to be strengthened but that can only be taken up by the government (what concrete embankments will do to the ecosystem will need to be examined). ... Moving out will become attractive for the population if (i) entire islands are purchased at very high prices compared to prevailing rates [the island can then be turned over to Nature], OR (ii) children are put through proper and adequate training in formal education or trades so that they are employable outside the region.

Guest Blog: A National "Climate Service"?

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-06-20T03:08:50+02:00

Today, I will highlight some of the existing federal monitoring and forecasting services Seattle relies on for water supply system operations and planning, describe how we use these services to help ensure that we meet our responsibilities and policy objectives and describe attributes that we would like to see in a National Climate Service. ...Given the dynamic nature of managing our water supply system, with our multiple objectives, capricious weather and the need to balance immediate and short term issues with longer term planning horizons, it is critical that we have access to real-time monitoring and forecasting information. ...To continue with the martial metaphor, we’re not just on the front lines, but we’re also in the war room gleaning intelligence data from original research and reconnaissance we have conducted; we’re often using satellite data to determine how much resources (e.g. water) we have to utilize; we’re assessing threat levels through vulnerability assessments, developing new tools to counter those threats, and building alliances to share information and resources. ...Chairman Baird, Ranking Member Inglis, and other members of the Subcommittee, I am pleased to speak with you today regarding NOAA’s vision for a National Climate Service and I am honored to be here as the Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and the Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), one of the nation’s premiere science and stewardship agencies. ...I will share with you our vision for how NOAA, in strong collaboration with other federal agencies, and a diversity of public and private sector partners, is ready to use its existing capabilities and develop new information, services and delivery mechanisms to lead such a Service. ...Until now, the systems and infrastructure that we as a nation have developed as the foundation of our water, energy, transportation, agriculture, and other sectors have been designed and built based on what we know about local environmental conditions, and our understanding of the past. ...At a hearing this Committee held in May 2007, the Western Governors Association stated that “decision makers at all levels of government and in the private sector need reliable and timely information to understand the possible impacts and corresponding vulnerabilities that are posed by climate change so that they can plan and respond accordingly.” ...A National Climate Service that works in partnership with other federal agencies, various levels of government, and the private sector to provide credible and authoritative climate information and services to assist the nation, and by extension the world, with decision-making, including informing and evaluating policy options for climate change mitigation and adaptation. ...As such, an effective National Climate Service will rely upon strong partnerships with and among federal agencies, and across levels of government, academia and the private sector to provide the nation with the climate services it needs. ...Existing agency networks include the interagency partnerships that comprise the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), National Weather Service Forecast Offices and River Forecast Centers, National Data Centers, Regional Integrated Science and Assessment projects at universities, State Climatologists, Sea Grant, the Coastal Services Center, NOAA Cooperative Institutes, and extension agents. Two examples illustrate NOAA’s experience as an authoritative source of climate information and provide a strong indication of the agency’s foundation for the development of an ‘end-to-end’ approach to climate services: (1) NOAA’s partnership with the National Association of Home Builders and Department of Housing and Urban Development, and (2) its leadership of NIDIS.

NEWS: Tabs for Sundarbans, Events Updates

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-06-16T01:31:04+02:00

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The Road to Copenhagen 1: Setting the Agenda in Bonn

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-06-03T18:50:09+02:00

This is actually the second meeting in an elaborate dance to define the agenda in advance of the December sessions in Copenhagen. Promoting issues on the special nature of the water sector for climate adaptation is an uphill goal, but major international policy often begins in a slow, gradual way — planting seeds for future talks. I believe this is the true goal of the freshwater adaptation side event being scheduled by GPPN, IUCN, IWA, and other groups. More updates on that as they develop. For contrast, the Kyoto Protocol itself began as a seed at the Rio Convention in 1992 before becoming a formal piece of policy for ratification in 1997 — and that finally entered into effect only in the last few years. So, while climate mitigation and adaptation finance are critical to resolve this December, we need to begin to look forward. How will international discussions begin to shift from climate mitigation policy to climate adaptation practice? What does good adaptation look like? And how can we support the good work that is slowly percolating through the lives of people and wild species?

News: Climate Adaptation Webcast

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-06-03T18:24:52+02:00

A Climate of Conflict: Considerations for Climate Adaptation featuring ...Please RSVP to ecsp@wilsoncenter.org with your name and affiliation. Climate change's impacts on agriculture, the hydrologic cycle, and the ...are also beset by conflict and instability, and thus face a dual risk. ...in 20 countries, has increasingly focused on climate change's potential ...governments and local communities to adapt to the pressures of climate ...An International Alert report, "A Climate of Conflict: The Links Between Climate Change, Peace, and War," analyzes these links to conflict and provides 12 recommendations for addressing climate change ...Dan Smith and Shruti Mehrotra of International Alert will discuss these ...focuses on climate adaptation in the run up to the December Copenhagen

News: SEI's Adaptation School

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-06-01T18:24:07+02:00

The Climate Systems Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town and the Stockholm Environment Institute, partners in weADAPT and the Global Climate Adaptation Partnership, are offering a 2-week “winter school” in the use of climate information for developing adaptation strategies, plans and policies. The winter school will take place from 13 to 26 July 2009, and is designed to provide a balance between seminar style teaching and hands-on training, supported by leading climate scientists and adaptation experts, using the weADAPT platform for developing the curriculum. We aim to provide an overview of the latest relevant climate science as well as working through sector specific case studies and experiences of the application of this knowledge in acting to reduce risks. ...One of the largest limiting factors behind appropriate regional response to climate change is the misunderstanding or lack of knowledge about core climate science concepts, access to climate information, and the use of climate change data. While globally there is a significant amount of published material and online forums, these are often not appropriate to a given activity, lack the important element of engagement with experts in the field, fail to make the link between the biophysical and the social, and sometimes do not provide effective access to core knowledge. This training course aims to fill some of those gaps, providing participants with the knowledge and skills to use regionally appropriate climate information in their work on adaptation. ...The course will use case studies that illustrate vulnerability, impacts, risk assessments and adaptation measures in key sectors (including water, agriculture, the urban environment); and the interpretation of climate information will be covered in framing discussions on social networks, risk perception, adaptation choices, adaptation knowledge platforms and climate risk screening tools. ...Expressions of interest from potential participants are being solicited and should be sent to winterschool@csag.uct.ac.za To apply, please provide your current affiliation and position, and a 1-page letter outlining your experience in the field of climate change and adaptation. Include a brief statement of your goals in taking the course and, where possible, a short description of one specific climate change case study related to adaptation which you have worked on. ...Further information will be emailed in due course to applicants, as well as being made available on the course website at: http://www.csag.uct.ac.za/winterschool2009.

From Climate Crisis to Weather Disaster: Tropical Storm Alia Strikes the Sundarbans

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-05-29T16:17:57+02:00

Tropical cyclone Aila with wind speeds up to 116 km/hr (about 80 miles/hr) passed through the state of West Bengal, India, on Monday, 25 May, leaving behind it a trail of destruction. The district of 24-Parganas South bore the brunt of the cyclone although it has wreaked havoc in the entire state from the coast to the mountains of northern Bengal. ...It took over three days for electricity and water to be restored in Kolkata [ED: also known as Calcutta, a city of over 15 million people]. ...At least a dozen deer carcass have been spotted in and around Tipligheri village, one of WWF-India’s areas of operation in eastern Sundarbans. As expected of a situation like this, there is speculation about tiger deaths but there are no figures yet. Although tigers in Sunderbans are known to be good swimmers, it is not known how they have fared against the cyclone. ...Field staff of WWF-India is coordinating with the forest department, other NGOs, and UN agencies to provide relief. ... WWF-India’s state office has provided relief material to communities in Sandeshkhali I & II blocks in North 24-Parganas. ... From the accompanying images it is clear that not much of this area will be left cultivable due to salinity damage [ED: an important part of the community-based adaptation efforts focused on adaptive agriculture]. ... Also, as an adaptive strategy against frequent seawater incursion to groundwater, WWF-India has been encouraging local aquaculture farmers to cultivate sea bass. ...WWF-India will always stand by the Sunderbans and its inhabitants, and this cyclone is no obstacle to the team’s dedication.

Memes in Action: Climate Mitigation vs. Climate Adaptation

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-05-28T19:32:08+02:00

Climate mitigation and climate adaptation are both critical but quite distinct responses to climate change, even though the terminology is confusing. To understand the relationship between the terms, imagine you’re in a car driving quickly and you realize suddenly that you’re headed towards an obstruction like a wall or a building. Your first response should be to reduce your velocity — put your brakes on hard and slow down. ... Climate mitigation focuses on greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — how they get there, how to reduce their rate of emissions, and how to remove them. You want to avoid an impact if you can, and if you’re going to hit the obstruction anyway, you’ll definitely benefit from reducing your speed before you have a collision. And you definitely need a climate mitigation strategy. Now let’s say you can see that a collision is very likely, maybe even inevitable. To improve your changes of surviving or avoiding serious injury, you want to take evasive action and certainly to make sure your seatbelt is on. Ideally, you’re been thinking ahead and have a car with air bags and your car insurance is all paid up. That’s climate adaptation: dealing with the inevitable to reduce the negative effects. Both tactical (braking) and strategic (insurance) aspects of climate adaptation are important, especially since we know that the climate has already shifted in ways that are significant for people and species and will continue to do so for many decades even if we successfully implement stringent climate mitigation.

NEWS: Crypto-Adaptation Legislation Leaves Committee

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-05-22T20:31:41+02:00

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Dragons of Change?

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-05-20T06:55:23+02:00

It is no coincidence that many of the best-documented biological impacts of climate change were made by butterfly biologists such as Camille Parmesan (University of Texas) and Terry Root (Stanford University). ...First, they belong to a different biological “order” than butterflies, which means that they are not closely related to butterflies at all — roughly as close as rodents (rats and mice) are to primates like humans and chimpanzees. ...Most species are habitat specialists as larvae too, found in particular types of freshwater: shaded sandy-bottom streams in southern forests, small isolated ponds on Great Plains, or deep fast-flowing rivers in the Sierra Nevada. ...Led by Viola Clausnitzer and sponsored by IUCN and published in Biological Conservation, this team found that only about 10 percent of the surveyed species were “species of concern,” meaning that they showed evidence of a decline. ...The authors’ overall conclusion was that dragonflies were less threatened than many other groups that are well known, such as bird, amphibians, and mammals. ...Perhaps the most important research issue is that most dragonfly species have not been studied or observed very long, while naturalists have been collecting observations about birds and butterflies for centuries. ...Most of the early studies of butterflies and climate change were really documentation of shifts in phenology, or time- or season-specific behavior such as breeding date, migration timing, the rate of larval development, and so on. Or these studies looked at how the ranges of butterflies species had shifted — can you find the species in the same place now as 100 years ago? ... But given the robust nature of an insect order capable of surviving more than 350 million years (and many thousands of significant shifts in global climate over that period), surely these changes are the most important ones to focus on from a climate perspective. ...To better understand the impacts of climate change (and to design appropriate climate adaptation interventions), we need to apprehend the relationship between climate and phenology for many species. And the moves to increase the global resolution of freshwater ecosystem monitoring and evaluation methods mean that dragonflies may actually be a powerful means of engaging public consciousness and strategic planning in climate-aware water resource management.

Stalking the Emerging Climate: Three Paradigms

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-05-20T04:30:03+02:00

This week, I’ve been revising a set of recommendations about how to manage water resources in a way that is climate-sustainable for humans as well as aquatic and terrestrial species. The process of thinking through these issues reminds me very much of the hunting I did as a child: seeking a moving target — stalking an elusive animal over rough terrain, my vision obscured. ...As someone who works on climate adaptation, this type of hunting has become the new state of conservation and sustainable development today. For more than a century, we’ve assumed that conservation and development were about restoring past conditions to damaged ecosystems and places. Or we focused on “preserving” intact regions we viewed as ecologically special (or that had significant livelihoods, such as artisanal fishing), trying to limit future damage, such as from invasive species. ...“Restoration” for a hurt ecosystem doesn’t make a lot of sense if you can’t also restore its old climate at the same time, since climate plays a profound structuring role for most species, ecosystems, and human livelihoods. And if preservation means limiting damage, how do we discern between the potentially good climate-preemptive invasions by species that are shifting their ranges as a result of climate change and potentially negative invasions by species that are not responding to shifts in climate? ...But no one a century ago could have predicted that we would soon be experiencing geological-scale climate impacts on the timeframe of a human lifetime. ...The new climate is the quarry to track now — the elusive beast we are trying to apprehend through monitoring systems and hydro-ecological models so we can understand how to help facilitate change and reduce negative impacts from a shifting climate. ...But perhaps even more critical is a new way of thinking about conservation and development that focuses on the changes we can manage to control and those we can’t — a paradigm that can distinguish between when we should facilitate or resist climate-driven shifts. ... Ultimately, we need to think carefully about the kinds of ecosystem change we can manage to influence and those we must simply become accustomed to.

Report from Kenya: The Nairobi Guiding Principles of 2009

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-04-24T21:35:09+02:00

I was there at the invitation of the Danish government, which had started an initiative in the last half of 2008 to develop to focus attention on climate adaptation in advance of the UN’s December 2009 climate change meeting in Copenhagen. Countries that sponsor such meetings (called councils or conventions of the parties or “CoPs,” as with Ramsar) have special privileges for introducing pet issues, and Denmark was apparently concerned that the climate adaptation would be discussed next December in an overly narrow way. ...However, there is also a great deal of attention being paid to the creation of a UNFCCC “adaptation fund” (which is usually just referred to as “the adaptation fund” even though there are now many adaptation funds that are now emerging). The UNFCCC adaptation fund is intended to be a new global institution (or “mechanism”) where nations such as the U.S. and most of western Europe can deposit funds that reflect their historic responsibility for most of the climate change that has occurred to date, which will inordinately affect the less-developed nations and poorer people on the planet. ...Both topics are critical issues that need to be resolved, but my personal feeling is that (a) there are a lot of other sources of adaptation funds and national adaptation policies that are emerging right now (even in the U.S., as discussed here) that need to reference some international consensus-based guidelines on what good climate adaptation looks like, and (b) that adaptation work cannot wait to begin until additional funding is in place. ... The Danish government added a third concern: almost a decade passed between the time that the Kyoto Protocol emerged from the CoP process and the time when the Protocol was finally ratified and went into effect, so developing clear guidelines on climate adaptation should be viewed as a long-term process that should be started sooner than later. At least some members of the Danish delegation also had another motive: that most of the work of climate-ready sustainable development was about freshwater adaptation, even though the title of the draft principles was about land and water adaptation. ...UNEP is based in Nairobi and has been active in developing a major new global adaptation network (I was at the organizing session for this network in Korea in October 2008, which I will describe in another entry). ...Though quite general, the Danes focused on five major topics: development is necessary and should be sustainable, climate adaptation should begin now and focus on building resilience to climate impacts, resource management institutions need to be strengthened and made into instruments of climate adaptation, access to data and analyses about resource management should be freely available and accessible to a wide range of groups, and finance for climate adaptation should be increased and made available soon. ...My personal contribution was to shift the name of the first clause from “The Development Principle” to “The Sustainable Development Principle”; I introduced some other interventions to change the wording of on the process of adaptation and on water management (not just mentioning the need for increased water storage but also the necessity of attending to water demand and water-use efficiency more broadly) were not approved, vetoed by a major global financial institution behind the scenes, apparently. ...The second of these meetings occurs in early June, where the Danes creating a spearhead group of water organizations to forge a set of water-sector adaptation principles, built at least in part on the set that I put together with a colleague.

The U.S. Politics of Climate Adaptation: The Waxman Committee

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-04-12T19:39:41+02:00

What I am referring to as small-A adaptation is the assumption that the emerging climate doesn’t really have big implications for the way we do work as a society — whatever that business is, in terms of human economics, the practice of conservation and development, or even our species’ cultural trajectory. ...In contrast, big-A Adaptation says we are entering a revolutionary phase in human history, and our future as a species (and that of most other species) will be very different in the near term as a result. ... But we might imagine that lots of cities and homes in the developed world practice rainwater harvesting and graywater recycling, not to mention that large percentages of the population in drying regions leave for still-wet areas, resulting in mass migrations comparable to what was seen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (or the massive rural-to-urban migration in China in the past 25 years). ...Many of the issues with the adaptation text should be familiar to people who work in adaptation now: the focus is largely on funding adaptation, on national-scale federal programs, on assessing climate vulnerability (rather than on responding to that vulnerability), on treating adaptation as separate from other kinds of work, and ( implication) on small-A adaptation. ...This section is pretty interesting, actually: “The purposes of this subtitle are to (1) establish an integrated federal program to assist natural resources to become more resilient and adapt to and withstand the impacts of climate change and ocean acidification; and (2) provide financial support and incentives for programs, strategies, and activities that assist natural resources to become more resilient and adapt to the impacts of climate change and ocean acidification.” ... Moreover, the program is updated every five years, which is absolutely necessary and required for any kind of realistic long-term adaptation process (and is also linked to the uncertainty issue mentioned above). ...This is a traditional approach in the U.S. federal political system: it’s not that easy for the national government to tell California or North Carolina what to do. ...I think most people who’ve thought a little about the scale of economic changes that are necessary to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations will agree that a low-carbon economy looks very different than the economic pathway for almost every developing or developed nation right now. ... But I also doubt that many global citizens have let those implications sink in, not least because the politicians that do “get” the scope of the changes necessary don’t want to alienate their constituents — not all at once, anyway. ... • There is not an explicit recognition that the U.S. should have big-A adaptation, but the bill focuses on adaptation as a policy process. ... As a recent New York Times article on Obama and his climate policy suggests, this is not going to be easy, and we may see some backtracking on policy when big deficits in understanding between policymakers and the public exist.

Certain Uncertainty: Models and Climate Change

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-04-04T21:29:59+02:00

But others — sadly, most of the ones that are important for freshwater ecosystems, such as precipitation and evaporation — are not, mostly because they tend to be associated with a lot of stochastic (random) processes that simply cannot be predicted. This means we really don’t know that much about what will happen with freshwater ecosystems more than a decade or two away from now. ...But he appears to fundamentally believe, first, that humans probably don’t have the ability to change the climate, and even if we do, our ability to prepare for future changes is challenged by our dependence on climate models. ... If we’re not sure what will happen where and when, then how do we make plans for building or modifying new water infrastructure like dams, which are supposed to last for decades? ...As we look farther into the future, we really begin to need to know a lot more about how humans will continue to modify the climate, for instance — greenhouse gas emissions scenarios vary a lot, depending on economic and policy conditions. ... And then there are potential synergies between climate, human behavior, and other natural systems that are extremely difficult to predict, such as shifts in precipitation that lead to changes in fire regime that alter sediment patterns, which then create quite different kinds of rivers and wetlands. ...In many ways, adapting ourselves to an emerging climate means doing much of what we have already been doing for some time, but trying to work more effectively and efficiently, and with mindfulness for the long-term interactions between our actions and the climate context. ...Pilkey and Pilkey-Jarvis have written an interesting new book called Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future, which offers a severe critique of the use of models to deterministically set policy action. ... This kind of modeling is very important if, for instance, you’re considering whether or not to replenish the sand on your community’s beach, which is a very expensive proposition for most towns and cities. In many cases, models that might be useful from a qualitative perspective (“sediment will probably move a great deal during large storms; removing a jetty could slow this process” ) are applied in a quantitative fashion (“add 43 metric tons of sediment, which will replenish this beach for 23 years” ). ...The challenge is to use models as a means of informing policy without strictly determining policy in a mechanistic fashion or — even worse — becoming crippled by uncertainty and not acting at all.

Growing an Adaptation Community

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-04-04T19:58:30+02:00

This site was created to increase our ability to learn and collaborate about climate adaptation. We hope that adaptation professionals will use this community much like you would use the books and space available in a library. You can post articles of interest, chronicle a particular project, or pose a question to the group. Having a centralized location to post and work on documents is essential when working as far apart from one another as most of us do. You can use this as your workspace for collaborating on projects with others. If necessary, you can create “private” spaces for individuals or groups working together. ...Our community of contributors is comprised of individuals from NGOs/CSOs/non-profits, researchers, consultants, and government agencies. Additionally, while there are a handful of administrators from several different institutions, this site is unaffiliated with any specific organization. Our site is organized by both biome (freshwater, terrestrial, marine), region, and thematically (community adaptation, conservation, finance). To gain access, please visit http://www.climateadapt.info and request a username and password. A friendly and quick voice-delivered overview of the site can be provided on request.

New Sundarbans Adaptation Center & Disaster Risk Reduction

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-04-04T17:14:13+02:00

Some 60 percent of the islands on the Indian side have lost large amounts of their sustaining forest, and these islands are literally dissolving away. WWF-India’s Mousuni Climate Adaptation Center, in partnership with WWF-Netherlands, Hewlett-Packard, and GTZ, is working with the extremely vulnerable communities on Mousuni island on a type of climate adaptation usually called disaster-risk reduction (DRR) to help them cope with high-intensity events. Anurag Danda (email: anuragdanda at wwfindia dot net), head of WWF-India’s Sundarbans program, spoke at the inauguration of the Adaptation Center: “Mousuni island is in peril. ... The island has faced serious breaches recently, some of which have been widely documented, including in the Indian media and through moving personal stories. ...They are passionate, smart, and dedicated professionals who understand intuitively that climate adaptation is a process, that adaptation requires a fundamental reorientation of development, and that development must be coupled with conservation to make adaptation sustainable. ...Cyclones and tidal surges have further destroyed the lives and livelihoods of the communities by breaching embankments, wrecking their homes and ruining harvests due to salt-water incursion into groundwater resources. ...Actions that can be counted on as soon as the next tropical storm season include an electronic early warning system to warn residents of oncoming disasters, such as powerful cyclones and storm surges that could cause rapid loss of land and life. The early warning system has been linked to Jadavpur University in Kolkata and will receive messages whenever there is an oncoming disaster. ... Youth on the island have also been organized into a Disaster Management Team to develop awareness and local capacity for quick reaction. Long-term DRR climate adaptation strategies include sustainable community economic development that depends on and reinforces healthy ecosystems. ... As the market value of this variety (called tal mugur) is not far behind other high-yielding varieties, farmers on the island have been successful in maintaining their livelihood without having to worry about losing it to saltwater incursion to irrigation water and storms.

My Conventional Intervention at Ramsar

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-03-31T18:19:28+02:00

It’s also the name of a major international treaty (or “convention” ) designed to guide the protection of wetlands, which was signed in the city of Ramsar. Every three years, Ramsar convenes a CoP (council of the signatory parties to the convention) to discuss how well the agreement still works and what needs to be updated or revised. ...Changwon was swarmed by some 1200 delegates from the countries that have ratified the convention as well as outside groups (such as my employer) that wish to play a role in the negotiation process. Negotiations happen in all manner of ways — within the central chamber with all parties (through prepared speeches, called interventions ), within small side rooms (which tend to topical and confrontational ), and of course hallways, which are always the most important places for making real decisions. ...I was there in the role of someone contributing to two draft resolutions on climate change and wetlands for an important NGO, in a delegation of about 20 people. ...Delegates were making their interventions by the order they had approached the acting chair, running through the country delegates and then any of the NGOs. ...An enormous old-fashioned TV camera with a huge zoom lens stood to the left of the podium, so that when a speaker was called upon to make an intervention, she or he activated the microphone the cameraman scanned the room for the red light. ...There seemed to be a long pause, but I know it could have been no longer than a second or two as my hand moved forward. The US delegation was immediately in front of us, and a young lawyer was leaning back far enough that her neck was only a few inches from my mouth. ... The hairs on the back of the lawyer’s head alternated between light and dark brown … I could feel the eye of the camera scanning across the room, looking for me. ...I could see the light pink of her scalp, then her neck tighten and flinch as she realized I was behind her, speaking.

Istanbullish on Water

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-03-31T15:36:24+02:00

Talk of low- or no-regret development of water infrastructure in the developing world is mostly a response to a lack of faith in the ability of climate models to tell us very much about what the future holds. Or at least to tell us with enough confidence that we can say clearly, The climate in this place will look like this at this time and change in this direction. ...And this theme leads us to the issue of implementation, which seems to break down into three components: effective water management institutions (capable of regulating water demand as well as supply, for istance), policymakers who govern with an eye to often-ignored stakeholders (such as poor people and the environment itself), and paying for all of these new approaches to water management (“adaptation finance” ). ...In one closed door meeting, one of the prominent organizers on water and climate issues led a discussion that eventually centered on all of these points. ...For instance, should we think about wetlands, which hold a massive amount of locked-up carbon, the same way we plan to treat tropical forests as reservoirs of carbon? By implication, should we manage wetlands for their carbon content or for whatever precipitation regime they may be entering — which might be much drier and more likely to emit carbon? ...Another critical topic with massive variations in intepretation is how we should weight climate change as a negative force versus other influences on water quality and quantity. ... More human-oriented practitioners trend towards viewing climate as a more distant problem — something we need to be aware of and prepare for now, but traditional threats to are more important to focus on. ...Marxists in the nineteenth century used to argue about theory versus and praxis — purity of vision relative to compromising for local circumstances, and something similar is happening with water and climate change now. I gave a talk two days before the Forum in the UK to a small group of colleagues about the preliminary results of a study we’ve working on for an important global institution on climate change and freshwater management. ... I was looking at your slides of the process of incorporating climate resilience into water management, and I kept thinking about a project I’ve been working on in central India.

Silent Gaps

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-03-31T14:37:41+02:00

Though it was a sunny Saturday morning in Delhi, I knew it was late in Oregon — some 12 and a half hours behind me. So I had a slow breakfast in the hotel without my cell phone, which was left charging in the room while I read the paper and the histories of the major sights. ...My wife is a physician, so if she tells me that someone is in poor shape, I know she's preparing me for worse news. ... He's lived a hard life, and though he expresses his feelings with the small movements of horses, they are no less deeply felt or received. ... Perhaps it's the shared experience of being the oldest son in a Southern family, with high expectations and too much self-discipline. ...If my wife tells me that his end is near, I will abandon this trip and get on the earliest, fastest plane that I can. ...I cleansed my feet and entered, walking as far to the back of the long, tall room as I could. ...Carrying as much with me as I dare and am able but still separated from all that is most important. ...It is as silent as I feared, and I keep my cell phone nearby though I won’t be able to turn it on for another five hours. At the end of a month of travel across Europe and Asia Minor, on my last evening, last night, I received an email from my mother. ... My last dinner in Istanbul with my wife — our first vacation together in a long time — was quiet, beers half-drunk even as we could see the incomparable Blue Mosque big and close in the night.

Two Easy Pieces, Redux

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-03-06T14:24:04+01:00

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Elevator Stories: Moving Up at the World Bank

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2009-04-05T18:35:52+02:00

Conservation biologists are not known for our tendency to wear suits and ties nor to speak to economists and financial policy audiences. I was sure many of my conservation colleagues would claim I had given into the enemy simply by being present. But I was also glad to be at the Bank — to learn something more about how the world’s power brokers work and think, and perhaps so that they could learn something about how I work and think too. The bad news is that the IMF and Bank don’t have a great reputation from the 1960s and 1970s for development. But the good news is that the Bank — and some other development-oriented Banks — have been giving a lot more thought to ecologically sustainable development and water management (the subject of a 2008 entry). I came early so I could meet with my contact on the staff and look at the room where I would be speaking. ...He’s been working in the area for a long time and has a solid relationship with many members of the Bank’s staff. ... A man and a woman were already on, speaking to one another about something related to their work. ...Well, I have to confess, I told him as we walked on, this is pretty exotic for me. ... In fact, I think we’re really much more comfortable ranting about policy and finance rather than engaging. ...I finally added, I don’t feel entirely comfortable here in such a great seat of power.

Dashing Among the Eco Stars

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-10-13T01:02:58+02:00

And I was in the company of colleagues who have been in climate change issues for a long period and who are far more widely esteemed and known than myself. ... I won’t mention their names here, but these are the people that headline edited books and appear in the New York Times or the BBC. ...When I didn’t recognize the names of the folks whose hands I was shaking, I knew enough that I should retain their face and association. This seemed especially true given that many of these unknowns were not Names but Wallets: the financing behind international conservation. This world is especially small, but I could see that the Names and Wallets seemed to spend a lot of time together. Perhaps I sound cynical — that is not my intention or desire, and I would repudiate any imputation of cynicism. I think this is the system in which we find ourselves, and most of the time I think it works pretty well. ... The issues we face in international conservation are not (for the most part) that complex, really. ... If difference exists, then I think I must look inward to find that difference: knowing enough of the actors and systems involved to recognize the striations and gradations, the levels and interstices. ...And part of my experience is seeing the high and low in the near and far: traveling between this world of professional conferences and into places with pit toilets and people who do not care about Names or Wallets or the clean cold surroundings of the WCC meeting rooms. I hope we may all do the good that must be done, as soon as we can.

Only Two Pages

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-10-12T15:38:22+02:00

I’d like to know more about how passport control officers think and are trained. This one was typical: he carefully flipped through the stamps, checked visas that had been inserted, and asked me what I did for a living. Some seem genuinely interested in what you were doing abroad, especially in the UK and the US. ... They are more likely to carefully study each page, flipping back and forth (I assume) to find the entry and exit marks. ...He seemed chipper and happy, and when he pressed down on his stamp the mechanical thump seemed to echo his “Have a good day.” I flipped open my passport to see where he had placed the stamp. ... If I need a visa to enter the country, then the stamp is often somewhere near the visa, even on top of another stamp. Others seem to look for blank spots on already-crowded pages, filling in the edges so that you have to look hard to read what the stamp says. ... Flipping the next page, I could see only two more full blank sheets. This was a new passport two years ago, and already it was full — almost wholly from the past year. ...I sighed a bit and made a mental note: check the State Department’s website on getting extra visa pages.

Wetlands 1: The Real Estate Crisis in Protected Areas

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-10-03T13:51:39+02:00

I think most wetlands biologists would agree that wetlands are a type of ecosystem where the soils are flooded often enough to have developed anaerobic (non-oxygen needing) processes and for the species living there to have some adaptations (in a Darwinian sense) to flooding or flood cycling. ... There are a lot of wetlands globally, though the U.S. is typical here for losing about 50 percent of our wetlands since European and African settlement began ~1500 and for not doing very much to protect the wetlands that are left. ...That’s because they’re shallow, and most of the actual water in wetlands — that wetness bit — is from precipitation that either falls directly into the wetland itself or into its catchment, the surrounding terrestrial zone that drains into the wetland. There may be some current in a wetland, draining further into a river or the ocean, for instance, but often the major outflow is evaporation (or evapotranspiration — ET— if we want to include the water that all of the plants that live in the wetland are able to send into the atmosphere too). ...Even small shifts in climate tend to create big swings in “normal” rainfall rates, and ET is a climate variable that particularly reflects a whole range of other variables, like air temperature and humidity, not to mention the plants that are living in a given place. ...What this means is that when we back begin to look at wetlands over climate-relevant timescales like centuries or millennia, we see that they (a) tend to jump around the landscape, and (b) change in their qualities very rapidly. ...This leads us back to protected areas, to the PAs, which have only been around in their modern incarnation in any form as actively and “scientifically” managed for about 120 years. ...But change isn’t always easy to fence out of an area, especially if the change we’re talking about is climate-driven change. ...So we’ve made these wetlands PAs, but they exist in a climatically dynamic manner that may not be compatible with (a) the boundaries of the PA, or (b) the way that we manage on a daily or monthly basis the species within the PA. ...One is hydrological: Imagine a wetland PA wants to expand seasonally form its assigned borders as a result of more-intense precip events and more-frequent flash floods (both common climate impacts), then we tend to react badly. ...We can’t do that much about the hydrological implications, especially if the trends we’re seeing in climate are just the opening chords in a long symphony of human-driven climate change.

Ozy(mandias)fest 2008: Political v. Climate Change

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-09-27T17:05:31+02:00

My read of these various threads comes down to two basic points: the framework we (generally) use when we discuss how to limit climate change for the future, and the sense of priority that the U.S. has about climate change issues. ...This number is supposed to reflect mean (average) global air temperature in degrees celsius and is almost always described as a series of increases relative to recent preindustrial temperatures: +2°, +4°, or +6°. This debate assumes that (a) we’ve already realized or achieved 1.8° C over preindustrial mean global air temperatures, and (b) increases larger than 2°C will be very difficult for people and non-human species to adapt to. ... While global mean air temperatures sound relatively small (2°C is about 3.6°F), when we look at how temperatures show up on the ground, some places like the Arctic are seeing very high temperatures already at “only” global mean 1.8°C. ...We have a very good idea from our past climate records that big changes are usually sudden and dramatic, more like going from climate state A to state B rather than proceeding 1, 2, 3, 4.... ...Here, the idea is that we pass some kind of threshold level of change or tipping point in the global climate system where natural ecosystems begin to pump out their own high levels of carbon dioxide or methane (a really bad form of atmospheric carbon). ... No one knows what concentration of carbon dioxide or mean global air temperature corresponds to irreversible positive feedbacks, which would mean that our climate mitigation efforts and negotiations are mostly for naught. ...The recent scientific papers mentioned above, especially the editorial in PNAS by Schellnhuber, suggest that we’re going to stabilize at one of the higher concentrations and that we’re already committed to at least 2.4°C even if we effectively do everything right and we do it right now. He writes: “My conclusion is that we are still left with a fair chance to hold the 2°C line, yet the race between climate dynamics and climate policy will be a close one.” ...The massive amounts of money required to “repair” the U.S. economy mean that we cannot put that money into many other worthy, even critical priorities, such as science funding, healthcare, and adapting infrastructure for climate change. ...If there is good news, it is that climate mitigation is really very simple conceptually and is mostly about working through parochial objections about various lifestyle and industrial changes, as well as the relative contributions over time from the developed and developing worlds.

Are Dams Evil?

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-09-10T01:54:25+02:00

I actually have to confess to cursing dams generally, specifically, and completely as recently as last January as I was riding in the back of a van with two Chinese colleagues to the Shanghai airport. ... After all, dams have ruined a lot of rivers globally, and the U.S. has until very recently been the world’s leader in building very large and destructive dams. ... I remember how beautiful and biologically rich was the first such river in Texas I saw a few years ago (the Devil’s River; I was visiting a TNC property at the time). ... Indeed, until very recently the U.S. has effectively “owned” most of the really big dams in the world (as seen on this map of about 1 percent of the medium and large dams of the world). ...Thinking more broadly than simple storage dams (traditionally used for irrigation purposes in arid regions), humans have been modifying freshwater ecosystems significantly for extremely long periods of time — one recent study suggests wetlands have been modified for rice growing in China for about 8,000 years. ...Today, somewhere between 45,000 and 55,000 medium to large dams dot our landscape, not to mention (what is no doubt many times more) irrigation canals, hydropower facilities, flood dykes, cooling ponds, and the many other kinds of water-body modifications humans apparently revel in. I was recently struck by how similar Matto Grosso state in southwestern Brazil looks like my native Texas from the air: thousands of small cattle tanks in fields and barrages across creeks. ...Perhaps the first change was hearing a water infrastructure economist (I’ll call him J) argue forcefully that saying no to all modifications is the fastest way possible to exclude yourself from any kind of influence with the important institutions that are interested in building or financing dams. ... A run of the river dam (increasingly common for hydropower) diverts some part of a river into a pipe or canal and (in theory) doesn’t effect the main body of the river; after spinning a turbine, the pipe takes the water back to the river. ...Perhaps J’s most important lesson to me was simply that we — the conservation community — need to be able to engage in a conversation about how and where water infrastructure is placed. ... Mostly my re-think is about changing the terms of the debate with people that don’t care very much about bugs or native fish or freshwater molluscs to ecosystem services, habitat protection, and ecological health that is tired to human economic well being.

Schadenfreude Weltenschaung

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-09-08T01:43:18+02:00

On the other hand, our relative populations are not that far off (India is about 2.8 times the size of the U.S., versus about 4.5 for the U.S. and China). ... India does have a relatively high growth rate and that is of some concern, but most Indians are terribly poor, and the so-called economic miracle of India is very limited to its tiny middle class. ...On my last trip to China, I was particularly struck by how openly people talked about how to try to find a new, more sustainable development track that is different from ours. In fact, I was there during the coldest winter in 50 years and saw that the society is very parsimonious with its resources. ... ◦ People in the U.S., Canada, and Europe today, because we have very high consumption to population ratios ◦ People in the U.S., Canada, and Europe in the 19th century, when we set economic relationships that essentially took resources from the developing world and empoverished people there for at least another century or so. But their ire is usually pointed outwards, not at the U.S. today or our ancestors who set this path. After all, it’s very hard to tell people they can’t follow a path for development that we’ve been following for more than a century. ...From talking with so many biologists holding such jaded perspectives, I have a strong suspicion that the schadenfreude weltenschaung comes from (a) sheer frustration with the idiocy of most people about conservation issues, and (b) a deeper understanding about how people impact species and ecosystems. ... Given that most biologists see humans as meddling, destructive bumpkins who don’t care about snail darters, I think this plague-wish (which I’ve heard at least a dozen times from mostly drunken ecologists) is simply a desperate desire for a quick solution to a difficult problem. ...I think a pragmatic approach is vital: we need to connect the importance of healthy ecosystems and non-human species populations with sustainable development.

Dead Time in the Aeroporto

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-09-01T21:57:45+02:00

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Meet the Banks

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-09-01T20:45:45+02:00

During the question component of the symposium, the moderator asked what each of the three panelists would do with 1 percent of global GDP to respond to climate change. Both of the scientists gave reasonably predictable answers: more research (especially on local monitoring efforts), as well as more investment in information management and distribution systems. These are worthy and important responses to climate change, but they are essentially in service of the study of climate impacts. ...“I fully respect the need for more information about climate impacts, but we cannot wait 30 years for that science to come in. ...Clearly, he had made the leap to a subtle understanding of climate adaptation by grasping that “precise” information may be a long time in coming and that we need to move beyond the static models of freshwater ecosystems that have dominated our thinking for too long. The amount of money involved is impressive as well, as I found out later that day. A colleague saw me across a large room and pulled me out to meet with a loan officer at a regional development bank. It turns out that he specifically manages a climate adaptation fund within the bank. ... Europe and the North Americans are beginning to put up a lot of money for climate adaptation worldwide.” ... Now we build for 100-year floods, assume that flooding will occur, make sure the dams can survive flooding, and use the money to clear the floodplains of people so no one gets hurt.” Both of these observations represent a major shift in thinking in these individuals about water management -- away from assuming perfect and powerful knowledge rather than humble, flexible thinking.

Meet the Press

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-23T14:12:41+02:00

At a staff meeting on Thursday, our press officer pointed at me and another colleague: Be at the press office by noon. ...A few hours later in the press office, I was shunted into a bare white room with soundproofing on the outside of the door. ... Our press officer was pointing at my name sitting on the table at the other end in front of a World Water Week backdrop. ... Just make a concise statement of two or three points you think are key to freshwater and climate change, perhaps three minutes. ...We were told the camera was on, and the most senior colleague introduced the three of us to the sparsely occupied room. ... Besides some convention support staff and the woman with the videocamera, I could identify only two reporters, both women in the late 20s or early 30s without any ID. ...Thought again, crossed one out, and then thought, My business card is a very small piece of paper to read notes from. ...I tried to look at each person in the rest of the room and to ignore the camera, which loomed like some glowing eye of Mordor at me. ... And then I said a little about how freshwater was different from other kinds of biomes, such as forests or coral reefs. ...M on the front row gave me a big smile, and the colleagues at the back of the room seemed happy. ...Then she handed me a card from a well-known U.S. magazine and asked if she could contact me if she had further questions.

Water, North and South

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-23T14:08:12+02:00

The Pantanal has been occupied by humans for a long time as well, but until the 1960s most of the inhabitants were native Americans, mostly hunter-gatherers. ...However, most of the really big industrial impacts probably date back from the 19th to the mid 20th century, and ecological conditions have probably stabilized or even improved in recent decades. The Pantanal has recently received a lot of attention across the region in developing one or more large navigation canals that would cut across the area — the equivalent of slicing open the Florida Everglades (which has already been done) or southern Africa’s Okavango. Recovery or “restoration” of a freshwater ecosystem once it has had its hydrology converted by channelization is limited, to say the least. Development is just beginning, but compared to the relatively slow evolution of the Swedish economy from agriculture, mixed industryl and agriculture, high industrial, and now post-industrial over a 200 year period, the Pantanal is seeing very rapid and high-impact growth. ...• Climate projections for Stockholm (and Scandinavia generally) suggest high amounts of precip, with most of it coming as rain rather than snow. ... Impacts from increased climate variability (more floods and droughts) or changes in the timing of the highly seasonal precipitation are likely to be more important that absolute increases or decreases in mean precipitation, at least in the short run. ...Stockholm will probably need to reconfigure its drinking water supply and may, with time, need to move upstream and/or build additional flood and sea-level rise protections. ... In fact, if it follows the model of other post-industrial nations, the ecosystem integrity and quality may actually improve relative to the past few decades. ...In effect, the goal may be to help an ecosystem in reasonably healthy condition today transition into a different state that is also healthy — maintaining integrity at a new, different equilibrium. ...The story of these two extremes is, in some ways, typical of the disparities across north and south globally: one hemisphere, largely responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere to date but buffered by wealth, and the other hemisphere, striving to grow economically while exploding with new ideas and hopes, moving forward by making good use of its available natural resources but with lean climate-adaptation margins.

NEWS: climate adaptation case studies

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-22T22:31:43+02:00

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Action in the Air Conditioning

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-20T04:42:37+02:00

I know why I am here, of course, and I realize the value of being here: there are ideas to be exchanged. ...Two or three sounded smugly apologetic and a little shrill, as if they really believe that the most important things in the world actually happen in air-conditioned rooms with well-dressed people. I am struck by how small so many of the circles of people involved in development really are -- that it is quite conceivable in some areas like “sanitation” to know many of the major individuals and organizations involved, like institutional constellations made up of only a few stars. But those “stars” from the naked-eye truth of the surface of a small planet facing away from its sun are often whole galaxies themselves, even clusters of galaxies. And they represent millions, even billions of stars when we see only a single point of light. ...I remember in college during a cold Chicago winter, a cultural anthropologist working in the Amazon basin brought a friend of his from an indigenous group in Brazil. ... He was speaking with the kind of natural gentility Melville mentions, describing through a translator something about his world and the problems his culture faced with change. ... A few years later, I was in Nicaragua working ineptly at a small rural clinic run by a nurse from the U.S. Occasionally she too would don out of date “nice clothes” and head to conferences and churches in the States, asking for money and seeking medical support from physicians’ groups. ... I was obviously very moved by seeing a Kayapo man in my world, and I understand why Dorothy made her sojourns. ... But I try here to remember some of what I know and have seen and the people outside of the air conditioning.

News: Change Comes to the Thames

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-18T09:18:49+02:00

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A Cheap Room in the Hotel Talk: Science as an Agent of Change

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-16T18:25:36+02:00

In a perfect world — perhaps the world some of us even imagine that we live in — policymakers confront an issue and then go to the respective experts in the area. ... The Chinese Academy of Sciences, for instance, is supposed to hold exactly this formal no-argument position with the highest levels of the Chinese national government; when asked a question, their answer is law. ... And sometimes the experts have no clear answer — economists seem to be a contentious lot, and I don’t envy having to sort through their strong opinions to make good sausage. ...Shifting to some midground in order to keep from “legitimizing” unapproved sexual behavior led to needless deaths in the U.S. and the spread of the disease into much wider circles in the population. ...I am no Jim Hansen; I was not (and am not) famous or inherently influential, so no one cared what I thought in my most recent world. ... Simply by virtue of my association with a well-known NGO, I gain some (limited) access to groups that are — relative to most scientists — a bit heady. ...In no case has this been true, even in the case of Name scientists given extensive media coverage or access to the very highest circles of sausage-making. ...The “activation” of the Kyoto Protocol after almost a ten-year delay following its negotiation — an anemic response to human greenhouse gas emissions by any measure — highlights the lack of real science in its formulation. ...My hunch is that the culture of science is inherently resistant to the culture of compromise in policy; we credit information and arguments differently. ... In climate science, the relatively high degree of uncertainty about what the climate will look like in a particular place at a particular time is a huge obstacle for making good policy. ...I am mindful in Stockholm that I am swimming in a school quite different than my native group — I am an invasive here, hoping I can provide enough rhetorical tools that are, in fact, science based, so that the winning arguments on water and climate change are also the correct ones.

NEWS: Freshwater Climate Adaptation Primer

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-15T17:02:12+02:00

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Islands on the Edge: Climate Resilience and the Sundarbans of South Asia

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-14T20:41:02+02:00

I was giving a workshop on climate adaptation to a group of colleagues when I met D. Most of the participants worked on freshwater issues, but two came from the Kolkata (neé Calcutta) office and focused on the Indian Sundarbans. ... They receive no more sediment, while they are exposed to increasing sea levels and (potentially) an increase in severity and strength from tropical storms as a result of climate change (though the evidence here is still evolving rapidly). ...At the workshop, the two colleagues from Kolkata struck me by their intensity and their high level of expertise: I would ask them about issues and challenges, they would provide a concise list, and for every question they had not only implemented a pilot project already, they had the results. ... He was arguably the most advanced person I had participate in a workshop since I started giving these, and (I suddenly realized) I had nothing to offer him. ...Many of them will face some one or two massive storms within the next decade or two that will kill many tens of thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands more will be forced to flee, potentially creating a major international incident between Bangladesh and India or within India, exacerbating Hindu-Muslim tensions. ...At a symposium on North American bull trout, I brought up the Sundarbans (even showing a photo of D and a tiger — not particularly relevant, but moving nonetheless) on the last slide. ...Much of time is spent thinking and talking about “climate adaptation,” which is the general concept of responding to climate change impacts. ... One of these (much misused) is resilience, which basically refers to how well species or ecosystems can return to some pre-existing state following a disturbance, like an extreme heat spike. ...I have worked these islands into a variety of other talks as well, none of which are any more relevant than bull trout.

Nine Challeges to Freshwater Management from Climate Change

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-10T20:21:01+02:00

Does climate change represent a fundamentally new challenge for freshwater conservation and development? ...How do we manage systems, places, and species for multiple conflicting climate scenarios? ...Looking backward, modeling forward: how can we make e-flows, water infrastructure, and water stewardship climate-sustainable? Flexible policy structures, the realistic potential for long-term planning, negotiating for and during crises, transboundary conflicts — these are the focus of attention here. ...How can water-management institutions and policies become effective instruments for addressing climate change impacts? What are the implications for agriculture and irrigation, groundwater management and monitoring, equity and market mechanisms, intensive industrial use and pollution ...Shifts in water timing and drought frequency and severity: how can watersheds and basins be managed for changing natural flow regimes? ...Peak shifts in flood intensity, timing, and frequency: how can we change the dialogue about using floodplains rather than channelization? Can floodplains be “restored” or created de nova in the face of sea-level rise and rapid urbanization? ...How do we balance major conflicting development, conservation, and greenhouse gas reduction interests within our organization on climate change issues? ...Can NGOs, GOs, and businesses that manage water become climate-adaptive institutions: how do we capture and distribute effective lessons and principles?

The Direction of Adaptation: Is E.O. Wilson Wrong?

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-10T00:31:50+02:00

Andrew Revkin, a well respected environmental reporter with the Times, had a good chat with Wilson on the philosophy behind conservation we should be using now, reported on Revkin’s blog, which is definitely worth reading on a regular basis. ...Wilson’s critique is based on the idea that we are focused primarily on the non-living parts of the world when we design conservation — water quality, air quality, clean soil, and so on. ...I fear that Wilson is largely unaware of the work that is now going on worldwide focused on climate adaptation (the “get ready for big climate impacts soon!” ... Or if he is aware of this work, then he is thinking largely of the kind of high-level discussions that surround the CoP meetings, which remain very vague and uncertain and make climate adaptation sound like some kind of theoretical or distant activity. ...A species can only get on this list if they have already undergone some serious decline, often with no relation to climate change or other emerging threats. ...Third, the species we really have a chance to save are not ones that are known to be threatened now but the ones that are going to be in trouble in 10 or (more likely) 25 years. We have to look around corners and spend our limited money wisely, not throw money at polar bears that are already toast but make good cover copy in the newspapers. ...Lastly, Wilson’s big point is that we have to focus on the species (however we arrive at the list of species) over looking at environmental quality. The fundamental flaw here is that we actually know what species need and how they will respond to climate change and other emerging threats. ...In most cases, the only thing we can honestly and accurately state is that we need to help species have as few human-applied pressures on them as possible, which means focusing on a clean and highly connected environment. ...There are more specific kinds of climate adaptation intervention can be brought to bear in some cases, but for the most part the overwhelming and distressing truth is that most species are largely on their own.

Conservation Redemption

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-10T17:09:00+02:00

Perhaps the first time I can remember feeling redeemed was when the North American ivory-billed woodpecker was said to have found in the lowlands of eastern Arkansas. ... This was a bird that had disappeared early in my father’s lifetime in officially documented sightings, though in family tradition (and many anecdotal accounts) the ivory-billed seemed to continue on for some time. It was a magnificent, huge woodpecker — a king of the old-growth bald cypress bottomlands I had grown to love as a boy. It should tell you a lot that all of the major North American bird field guides kept the ivory-billed woodpecker in their pages, usually described as presumed extinct. ...Unfortunately (in a way that I suspect would make Max Weber smile as he reflected on the lingering burden of the Protestant ethic), redemption does not seem to be a status that — once achieved — is kept and maintained. ...And so many cultures too — symbolized for e with great finality by Ishi, the “last wild Indian” of North America captured in California early in the 20th century. I’m sure if Freud laid me down on a couch and asked me to free associate around concepts of Nature, you’d hear early memories of a huge magnolia tree next door that was cut down by two well-meaning older women, an even larger old-growth cypress in southwest Louisiana I visited when I was six that shortly after became part of a housing development, having my father point to pond in Galveston where the last Eskimo curlew was seen, watching the slow progress of fire ants across eastern Texas and corresponding loss of horned (“horny” ) toads from our yard and farm. You don’t have to be paying close attention to feel like we’re losing so much now, with terrible quickness. Yet there are good stories, ones that are better than the ivory-billed, which despite Cornell’s assertions is almost certainly dead and gone and has been for several decades at least. The New York Times granted us a rare reprieve recently with big vertebrates with a wonderful story about lowland gorillas in war-ravaged eastern Congo. These are the signs I think many of us seek in the gloom, hoping that the path will not always be dark.

The End of the Beginning

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-10T20:20:00+02:00

The fork I see before me offers on one hand a path further into policy development and engagement, my status of scientist largely a legacy rather than an active membership. ... I like being a scientist, which in part involves both learning and research that keep my worldview in some degree of flux and adjustment. ...When I was in publishing as an editor, I was struck by how most of the people I worked for knew less and less about books, authors, and markets the farther they got away from actually working with authors’ words. ... It was occasionally depressing as an employee interested in doing good work that I sometimes felt I knew more than my betters. ... And this hubris is in conflict with a desire to remain humble, close to the ideas, and receptive. These points seem occasionally true with climate adaptation work, where balancing human economies and cultures, greenhouse emissions, and natural resource management bottleneck in a narrows that requires a lot of specialities to negotiate. ...The other path before me means retaining more a technical perspective, developing a stronger role on the minutiae of climate impacts and adaptation science. ... As a practical concern, keeping contact with the stream of science has not been easy since I began in this position, and this concerns me a great deal. I don’t know the solution, but I suspect that this dilemma is common with staff scientists in “science-based” NGOs. ...Indeed, I have arguably grown most in the past year from powerful conversations with several economists and one very thoughtful engineer. And perhaps my greatest professional challenge (described in “Managing Water Managers” ) is how to reach out to corporations and agencies that manage water, to shift their thinking and conversations.

Devonian Time

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-07-25T21:20:21+02:00

I arrived in Devon after a long sleepless night of (mostly) dancing and munching in Vienna, returned to my hotel room about 4 am to pack, and then arrived at the airport about 5:30. By 8:30 in the morning, I had landed at Heathrow and began looking for train tickets. ...Tiny stations with people parked beside the train waived at their children and grandchildren, and wheat fields came to the edge of the tracks. My map spread on my lap to track our progress, I noted that ancient hedgerows began appearing when we crossed into Devon. ...A few text messages with my colleague T settled which station I would arrive at and, along with a brief description of my ride, I jumped off the train. Two other guests were on the same train with me, and we all piled into the little car and headed off through a series of villages on narrow, hilly roads to the cottage. ...I imagine there have been many times in the past when the number of people living there was much higher. ...The schedule for that day involved several hours of cricket, the stately game that I was told was “very similar” to baseball. Cricket is almost nothing like baseball, except that there is a ball (thrown by a bowler) and a bat (wielded by a batsman). ... I could also see that there were some very competitive members of the two teams who genuinely wanted to win. ... And after my stint batting, I was granted leave to go sleep for a few hours before dinner that evening.

Managing Water Managers

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-08T21:19:57+02:00

Just as important as legacy infrastructure are legacy ideas — is the body of knowledge and experience that has accrued over the past 150 years still relevant now? ... From a climate perspective, the Thames is probably more frequent high flows from intense, sustained precip events, but there is also concern marine upstream tidal floods and higher rates of evapotranspiration from warmer temperatures. Thus, the lower reaches may be more likely to see some salt water incursions. And some of the smaller tributaries (which pass through a unique chalk-stream ecosystem with a lot of habitat specialists) may see much lower summer flows as the water enters the atmosphere at higher rates, at least during normal non-flood years. And of course London is growing rapidly as one of the world’s great cities, expanding outwards with many new communities. ...I have not spoken with water managers before this meeting, and I found this to be frustrating as a means of starting a conversation with them using the climate adaptation talking points I normally employ with some success with conservation and development people. They seemed interested in the potential conflicts between climate mitigation and climate adaptation (for instance, what is the carbon footprint of water management?). They also seemed a bit tired of the discussion of dealing with uncertainty in climate projections and models. The former topic may not be a good starting place for a sustained conversation. ...Trying to reach this audience will become a more pressing issue in future months, I suspect, as we begin to launch good assessments of freshwater vulnerability on regional scales. Somehow I need to find better ways of convincing water managers and engineers that they need to think forward in time and not just backwards on documented historic variability, that “the bugs” in water are worth counting because they are a good way of showing how well they are managing water, and that increasing efficiency and reducing demand may be the best hedge against future bottlenecks.

The Legacy of Empires

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-07-25T21:19:25+02:00

I often use the image of the Roman god Janus in my talks about how to think of climate change, and I found myself thinking of the founding of Vienna as a Roman frontier city -- another kind of Forward Operating Base. ... I hope he was happy I was there, invoking him as the god of climate adaptation. ...The stewardess on Austrian Airlines strolled down the aisles in their bright red semi-military dresses; Richard Strauss’s waltz’s played on the speakers as we boarded the plane as the passengers calmly boarded. The contrast with boarding a plane in Paris, San Francisco, or London (much less Beijing or Delhi) was enormous. The buildings of the central core of the city expressed the powerful legacy of being the new Rome of the western Church -- the residual seat of the old Holy Roman Empire. ... But the sense of a lost empire was strong too: government buildings from the nineteenth century that were “too big” for the size of the nation now and housed libraries or museums, a dozen Starbucks or so, clothing that looked towards Milan or Paris, British and U.S. chains. ...My last night in Vienna, I was taken out by some of the local staff with many of the other visitors. We had a great time, and I was glad to socialize with my colleagues. ... At first I thought they were Corinthian, but the leaves at the top were not acanthus but grape vines with fruit, perhaps suggesting the fertility of the Danube valley in this area. ... A small star of David had been carved into the front of each capital; a Torah had once stood in what had probably been a wealthy old synagogue here, at least until the Anschluss. And I thought about how Vienna had been part of other empires, looking north.

Flowing Regimes in Central Europe

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-07-25T21:07:31+02:00

These are not countries that easily fit the definition of a classic nation-state either: the eastern reaches in particular show the patchy mix of ethnic minorities, languages and distinct language-groups, occasionally conflictual religions, and old power struggles and arguments that have shifted borders regularly. ...Floods happen more often, and the last ten years have seen some massive destruction in the central and lower reaches as a result; 2006 was especially bad, causing hundreds of millions in damage. ... Thus, the lower, eastern areas are being squeezed in a drought and flood vice: too much water, all at the wrong time. ...Inter- and intra-state conflict has been a big issue in the Balkans in the past 20 years with the dissolution of the Czeck Republic and Slovakia, the breakup of Yugoslavia in a violent war, the tensions around Kosovo, and the unease surrounding Macedonia’s relationship with Greece. The Danube tries to cross this stage channelized through old flood-control measures, drained wetlands, many small and a few large dams, feeling the effects of poorly regulated pollutants. The upper river was long ago put under the firm thumbs of Germany and Austria, but in the Carpathian mountains -- particularly at the Iron Gates region -- large dams have substantially affected the health of the river. ...People from all along the river: Austria, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, and Bulgaria, as well as a few stray people from outside of the basin like myself, a few other North Americans with close ties to Austria, and a Brit (as well as the Dutch in spirit). ... People who ranged from pounding the halls in Brussels for the EU on water issues to folks who traveled along the channels of the delta looking for dams and building projects by development pirates. ...There was also a lot of concern about the future of sturgeon (they don’t respond well to dams or large-scale water pollution, much less overharvesting), the development of hydropower in the Carpathians, and the bimodal problem of too little and too much water in the lower Danube. I’ve seen in many cases a serious tension between being able to make a thorough list of the important challenges facing a system and the being able to match up the realistic capabilities and expectations of a small program; this event was no different. ... Trying to move people out of the floodplain and then turning this land into functional, healthy wetlands seemed the best way to provide more room for flexibility and growth in the system as a whole — remedying some old wrongs, preparing for some new threats.

On the Road Again

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-07-12T03:11:24+02:00

These feelings are mostly very private and when I cannot repress them I usually leave the room to be alone. I can’t be sure why these feelings are so vivid and close, so readily stoked into flame. But I think they stem mostly from feeling too aware, so afraid of losing

Great Circles: My Big Night Out & Up

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-07-02T17:27:27+02:00

They looked like they were about to fight, but my cabbie decided to sacrifice his manhood to my mission, and he began pulling away, leaning out of the window as he flung a few last, choice insults to his friend. ...My flight is at midnight and lasts 15 hours, and it would be nice to get cleaned up a bit after all of this dusty heat today. ... I took a quick Indian-style shower (scooping water from a big bucket to wet and rinse myself), then dressed with the remainder of my clean clothes: khakis, decent dress shoes (a bit cuffed now and in need of a polish), a dark brown linen shirt untucked, and a dark gray patterned sportscoat that doesn’t pack well. ...I remembered my last trip to the Delhi airport at night, when the cabbie pulled over on the side of a deserted busy road and demanded more money to continue on, citing “additional fees.” ...He smiled and said, we need to pick up my wife, and we might need to make a little detour for a few minutes. ...We just need to stop at an event for a few moments, put in a brief show, and then we can head off home. ...A group of some of the most beautiful (and tall) Indian women were standing around the edges of the room, dressed in some kind of hot vaguely pro-environment (but mostly pro-skin) uniform. ...I looked like some kind of c-list Bollywood porn star (soon appearing in, Is It That Cold in Here or Is It Just Me?). ... But I am tall by Indian standards, and as we moved forward (me with a hot ice-free mojito in hand) all of the cameras veered from the stage to track our appearance. ...A group of not very fit but boldy spandex-clad dancers came out to perform some silent morality play that seemed to have something to do with tides or strong winds or being very wobbly. ...The flight was amazing — good food chosen from a menu, raining down wine and liquor on travelers, a huge seat with legroom ample for people much taller than myself; even a fully reclining seat.

NEWS: Fish and climate change streaming talks

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-07-01T05:11:54+02:00

USGS landscape ecologist Christian Torgersen and Environmental Protection Agency scientists Joe Ebersole and Dru Keenan organized the full-day special session "Identifying, Protecting, and Restoring Thermal Refuges for Coldwater Fishes." Torgersen synthesized current science and identified research needs on coldwater fish and thermal refuges, and Mary Ann Madej from the Western Fisheries Research Center discussed thermal refuges and rearing restrictions of juvenile coho salmon.

UPDATE: Kids and Climate Paranoia

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-08-22T20:40:00+02:00

Certainly the threat of total nuclear destruction is much reduced, though the potential for “small” explosions seems far more likely than before. ... I suspect that the rise of climate change as an increasingly definite and defined threat is well positioned to replace the widespread paranoia of my youth. ...I spent most of the past week as a one of several scientists in residence in Alabama at an event sponsored by an NGO and several corporate sponsors. My stay there was only a small portion of the total time of the workshop for the students, who had all been directly or indirectly impacted by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. ... They all seemed smart and engaged, and most of them seemed well out of the norm relative to the rest of the U.S. ...Much of what they heard from myself and the other content specialists was pretty depressing: the science behind climate change, the range of global and regional impacts assessments, and what could (and should) happen in response. ...I tried to show I didn’t take myself too seriously, and occasionally I interrupted other speakers when I thought they were being too negative and frightening. But no amount of humor can hide a central point: bad things are happening as a result of climate change, and they’re going to get worse. ...An easy response is one alluded to by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth: it’s very easy to go from not knowing very much about a big problem to knowing a little, and slipping directly from ignorance to total despair. ... But they seemed pretty resilient to much of what they were hearing, even when I saw their earnestly serious faces staring at me, brows furrowed. These kids seemed very focused on the task of their generation — a sort of spit-on-your-hands-and-get-down-to-work reaction.

Dams Be Damned?

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-06-27T04:06:21+02:00

As a freshwater biologist, I instinctively hate most large types of water infrastructure, particularly dams. They tend to last many decades, and some in Turkey, the Middle East, and Asia have even lasted for millennia. They alter waterways in permanent ways, restrict the free movement of species, and profoundly alter flow regime. They can effectively turn a river into a lake, shifting the mix of species to completely different assemblages. But one of the odd side-effects of my travels of the past eight months has been to develop a new respect for water infrastructure — to learn that at least there are other frames of reference that need to be adopted to understand and appreciate these structures in their own terms. Dams are deeply appealing to most governments, even a way of saying in the case of very large structures, that We have arrived. Three Gorges in China, for instance, now seems to be regarded even by the Chinese government as a debacle, but the level of national pride invested in the structure suggests that it is likely to be with us for some time. ... Thus, we need to be able to speak their language a little and to appreciate this other world in order to argue against them more effectively. Dam by Trevor Turpin (2008, Reaktion Books) is a new and mostly accessible foray into this world. Turpin doesn’t address climate change and he has a very limited and myopic view of the conservation implications of water infrastructure, but he does love dams, their history, and the people who make them. And he has some great stories of the creation of the some of the largest and most significant ones of our time: the Hoover Dam, the Thames tidal barrier, Three Gorges, the Aswan dam.

Meteorology & Climate Change Skepticism

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-06-27T03:29:50+02:00

She plays an enormously positive role for open-minded people who are willing to learn from a climate scientist with media skills. ...My home town in east Texas has never been a bastion of progressive politics (at least since the Spanish and French came to town), but KLTV’s team of TV meteorologists recently banded together to produce a local program that apparently argues that (a) the climate is shifting, but (b) humans have not caused these shifts. ...Oregon had a man who called himself a state climatologist (though he was not) who said similar things; based at Oregon State University where there are many people working in climate science, he became a local pariah, academically speaking, and was eventually fired by the governor. ... San Diego has a TV meteorologist who has similarly unleashed and ranted online (referenced on the Yale article). Perhaps the sadly ironic part is that the US professional association of meteorologists has come out strongly endorsing the findings of the IPCC with a clear statement that the climate is changing, primarily as a result of human activity, and that media meteorologists have a duty to educate the public about these issues. ...They’re much more dangerous than people like Rush Limbaugh, who are clearly ideologically driven and have no veneer of science in their rants. ...One of the more famous TV meteorologists in the U.S. is based in Washington, D.C., and was brought into a small meeting I was also attending, along with a number of other scientists, conservation NGO staff, and some support personnel. Our nominal focus was on some gifted high school students who had been affected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and who wanted to learn more about climate change and how to become leaders on this issue. ...He came in for a single day out of the total of 10 days in Mobile and gave a nice talk about emissions issues, some basic climate science, and lots of images and visual metaphors to be able to get the students to understand the basis of climate change in a more visceral, intuitive way. ...Many are media studies people who were sports casters before, and they may have some concern about the politicisation of climate change. ... Climate is different than weather, and the complexity and reliability of these models is much higher over long timescales, even really long timescales.

NEWS: IPCC freshwater climate change report

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-06-25T13:28:39+02:00

This report seems very good and thorough -- its recency is also appreciated. Be aware that the file is over 6 mb in size.

NEWS: streaming freshwater adaptation talk

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-06-25T04:50:12+02:00

The May 2008 symposium must be one of the most comprehensive single-species climate focus for freshwater that I’ve seen. I give the final talk, looking at some general freshwater climate adaptation themes.

Skymilestones

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-06-16T22:01:32+02:00

I was getting a bit smug about passing this level as I was sitting at a table on a cool night in April in the Himalayas with some colleagues, enjoying war stories and Indian rum. And I made the mistake of mentioning my travel to a far more senior member of our company. She gave a little smile that said, Yes, that’s nice, John. But I shall remain silent about my travel. Why do we need to travel so much in an era of cheap telecommication? ... But I felt a little defensive on the subject while chatting with an engineer at a large computer company who worked on high-end videoconferencing techniques. Would our products help you keep from traveling so much? ... I used Skype all the time, and if I can’t reduce my travel with Skype then I don’t see where a higher-end version would help any. ...In most of the places where I work, if I can’t smell the person I’m talking to, I’m probably not standing close enough. This is conservation, but it’s still about people too, and people are about relationships. ... She listened, perhaps not agreeing but willing to tolerate my answer.

NEWS: Watery Feet & Conserving Water

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-06-14T19:43:56+02:00

The idea has some merit, but it also has a few flaws. Reducing water consumption in the U.S. doesn’t help provide more water in southern Africa. And on a smaller scale, using less water in Oregon doesn’t do much for water consumption in Arizona. That said, there are good local and global reasons to reduce water usage in many regions. Clean water, for instance, consumes a great deal of energy to prepare for domestic and most industrial uses. And many people are interested in doing proactive things to reduce their consumption of clean water and, by extension, their energy use. I recently saw a nice list of ways to reduce water use that might be of more general interest.

NEWS: polar bears, the endangered species act, and climate change

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-05-29T18:44:02+02:00

The big news on 24 May was the long-awaited listing of polar bears as a threatened species on the Endangered Species Act by the Bush administration. ... Most attacks have been from the people saying that the listing allows development — especially oil drilling and mining — to occur unabated in some of the regions where the threats are greatest. ...The next step is to secure the long-term survival of the species by ensuring that the polar bear habitat in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas is protected from the threat of oil and gas drilling. Even while the Interior Department was taking steps to give these bears ESA protection, the Bush Administration opened almost 30 million acres of polar bear habitat to oil and gas exploration, which -- by their own admission -- may ultimately kill polar bears. ... The polar bear has become the mascot of all we could lose to climate change and it is critical that we fight to save this species even as we wage a larger battle against global warming.” ...With the number of polar bears substantially up over the past forty years, the decision announced today appears to be based entirely on unproven computer models. The decision, therefore, is simply a case of reality versus unproven computer models, the methodology of which has been challenged by many scientists and forecasting experts. ...“Lost in the debate is the fact that polar bear numbers have dramatically increased over the past forty years – a fact even liberal environmental activists are forced to concede. ... Credit should be given to protection already provided the polar bear by way of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the several international conservation treaties including the 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears and the U.S.-Russia Polar Bear Conservation and Management Act of 2006, as well as conservation, education, and outreach agreement with native peoples. ...Yet the ESA is simply not equipped to regulate economy-wide greenhouse gases, nor does the Fish and Wildlife Service have the expertise to be a pollution control agency. ... The implications of today’s decision, therefore, will undoubtedly lead to a drastic increase in litigation and eager lawyers ready to use this listing to do exactly what they have intended to do all along – shut down energy production.”

NEWS: wetlands & methane emissions

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-05-28T18:42:53+02:00

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Rush & climate change

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-05-14T18:41:50+02:00

I'm gonna tell you something, folks, when it comes to global warming and the hoax and the fixes for this hoax, the solution, we do not have one of the three presidential candidates who differs from each other. ... When you find out how much this is going to cost you, and after it has cost you what it costs you, when you then learn that it's not going to make a bit of difference in whatever climate changes, if any, are happening, you are going to be fit to be tied, just as they are now in the UK. ...In the UK I really don't know if it's enough, if it's accurate to say that the population there is fed up with liberals. ...We have audio sound bites, ladies and gentlemen, and I have to say that some of this sounds like -- we have a montage here -- Senator McCain sounding more like he's trying to position himself as a vice presidential candidate for Obama rather than as a Republican presidential candidate. ...I have not faced a situation where a major Republican presidential candidate sounds just like a liberal Democrat and I know of no other thing to do here than to tell you the truth about this. ...Let's say you have a coal-fired power plant or some industry somewhere, and the federal government, some arbitrary federal agency is going to announce, is going to proclaim what its permissible carbon emissions are, on a yearly basis, daily basis, I don't know how they're going to do it, monthly, probably yearly. ... However, what they can do is they can go out and they can find another industry that is not using up all of its allowed carbon emissions and buy them, and thereby stay legal in the eyes of friendly Big Government. ... And you will have nothing to say about these carbon emissions that these industries are engaging in, but you are going to end up paying for it, all of us are. ..."When the public finds out how much any legislation that punishes energy use is going to cost them, with no guarantee that anything we do will have a measurable impact on future climate, there will be a revolt just like the one now materializing in the UK and the EU. At some point, as they are faced with the stark reality that mankind's requirement for an abundant source of energy cannot simply be legislated out of existence, the public will begin asking, 'Just how sure are we that humans are causing global warming?' ... But McCain has made it clear that the science really does not matter anyway because, even if humans are not to blame for global warming, stopping carbon-dioxide emissions is the right thing to do.

NEWS: Playa lakes & climate change

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-04-01T18:39:59+02:00

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NEWS: Death of Philip Corbet

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-03-31T18:39:06+02:00

Perhaps the most recent and saddening conservation news I can think of is the death of Philip Corbet on 13 February 2008, easily the world's greatest odonate ecologist. There have been good obits in The Independent and The Guardian; he also featured in a National Geographic article along with Ola Fincke, just to Philip's left in the photo above. He will be sorely missed, and he was a good friend. This photo is from Spain in 2005 at a conference, where we were able to meet in person.

Adventures in Cabbing

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-06-13T20:36:08+02:00

We sped out of the airport and then veered onto the shoulder of a busy freeway under a bridge. He pulled out a large atlas of the District, holding it very close to his face so he could read the street index. ... He pulled out an ancient pair of very thick tortoise-shell glasses with a large paperclip (curiouslyblackened) standing like a flagpole where his right earpiece joined the lens. ... Sitting in the opposite corner of the car in the backseat, I could see Lanier rather clearly. ... The meter was up over $8 and we were less than five blocks from the terminal. ...Normally a great tipper of all sorts, I began calculating how much this ride was going to cost me. ...The meter is over $18 now, and I yell out Lanier from the backseat. ...The atlas and the glasses are out, the thick finger pacing the wrong part of the page. ... We’re on Ontario Street now, which I can see does actually run next to Lanier in another eight blocks. ...We fucked up his country, and now I have to tip him. ...I glance at the sheet on estimates for taxi fares they handed me at the airport — $17 was the average.

The 32-Year DC Zoo Review

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-06-11T13:35:03+02:00

Part of the trip was to visit an old family friend who lived near DC, but we also hit the museum circuit pretty hard. And for my birthday that July, we went to the National Zoo, which had recently obtained a panda or two. I had a meeting yesterday with a colleague who had been enlisted with home day-care duties. We had to work intensively on several issues, and he and I had to get together. ... Oh -- that’s really close to the zoo. ... I’ll pick you up, and then we’ll go to our place to work. So after breakfast I turned right instead of left out of my door and began walking in a new direction. The zoo is only a few blocks away, as it turns out, and almost to the day, I reappeared at the zoo after 32 years. It seems much smaller and a bit aged and worn, but then they also let me in for free, and the zoo was crowded with families and children. ... That’s who we work for! All three of us looked into the large pen with the high walls, a massive panda lying on his back with his hand over his head to shut out the light and the sweltering, humid heat.

Another Shot in the Arm

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-06-11T12:37:13+02:00

Given that I had recently taken both of my dogs to the vet for their rabies shots, it seemed like the first real evidence I’d had in a long time for ultimate justice in the world. Rabies vaccine is purple, and there’s a lot of it in each shot — even with three different injections. ...Each time I get a vaccine, the vaccine-administering person writes the type of vaccine (Japanese Enceph, liquid oral), the date (November 2007), and the place (San Franc Trav Cl), plus his or her initials. ...There was a burst of vaccinations just before I went to Nicaraugua in the late 90s, a few updates like tetanus, and then a large number of shots since I started this job last fall. ... And on my last trip to Brazil I was actually stopped at the gate of a national park before entering the cerrado outside of Brasilia and asked in a blurry mix of Spanish and Portuguese by two women with dengue fever t-shirts if I had my “carta amarilla.” I only had the longer, more complete one with me, though of course it didn’t have yellow fever on it. ...You often have to spend 30 or 40 minutes in a “consultation” with a travel clinic, especially if you haven’t been there before. You need to explain where you’re going, what season, how far in the future (for multi-sequence vaccinations), and potential risk factors, such as rural versus urban travel. ... Oregon seemed to lack all Japanese encephalitis last fall just before a trip to China (a major risk area for the disease), and I had to run to San Francisco to get a rush visa to India anyway, so I thought as I waited around for my visa I’d try the San Francisco Travel Clinic. ...Of course, most of the really scary things you can catch abroad don’t have vaccines: dengue is a huge worry, and I have a few friends that have been infected. ...On my last big trip, I suspect I caught some Asian influenza on a 15 hour flight from Delhi to Chicago and was brought low for a week afterwards.

Wetlands in the Air

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-05-26T01:09:50+02:00

First, methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, one that is not found in the same abundance as carbon dioxide but which is much more effective in capturing the sun's energy and enhancing the heat retention abilities of the atmosphere. ...Second, paleoclimatologists have traditionally interpreted methane shifts in ice-core analyses of atmospheric composition from tiny ice bubbles (say, from Greenland or Antarctica) as a sign of the abundance and extent of wetlands globally. That is, wetlands are a major source of atmospheric methane, and when methane levels went up in the past it was often because the number of wetlands also increased. ... Instead, it appears that the most likely explanation is that many wetlands that have been in effect frozen for centuries or millennia at high latitudes are defrosting. Places like Siberia and Alaska are warming quite rapidly, and these frozen peaty areas are beginning to turn into wetlands and giving up their great stores of methane. ...The third and potentially very bad possibility: runaway climate warming, AKA the era of positive climate change feedbacks. Most climate scientists currently agree that we can probably make big reductions in our emissions now (or soon) and atmospheric greenhouse gases should level off and eventually fall, so we can avoid the worst models of climate change. ... The climate in the past has tended to make most big shifts rather suddenly, changing states (from A to Q) rather than gradually (1 then 2 then 3). Our models are better at showing gradual but not generally sudden change, which is a little unrealistic. ... In other words, the atmosphere warms a little, high-latitude frozen muck begins to warm and releases a lot of methane, which makes the atmosphere warm a lot more, which means more methane is released. This is positive feedback, and if that has begun, there's not a lot we can do in terms of climate mitigation.

The Accent of Power

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-05-23T22:07:43+02:00

With an express train from Heathrow, a quick shower and some fresh trout at a friend's home, and a dash through the Tube, I appeared only 15 minutes before I was scheduled to speak. ... I was very aware that I was outside of my cultural zone, that English was not the first language here, and that the U.S. was not viewed in a friendly way by most of the attendees. ...One of the diplomats from what could be described as an emerging regional superpower said, I am tired of these people from Europe and the U.S. coming to tell us what to do with climate change. ... And I worry too that people come to us and always talk about China and India .... as if these are the only standards for emerging economies, or the most important. ...As you can tell from my accent, I am from North America — from the country that has done so much to cause climate change to date and for the near future. And I am fully aware that we in the U.S. have been slow to alter our ways and take responsibility for the debt we owe the rest of the world. ... I'd also like to say that we have come not to talk about climate mitigation but climate adaptation — to talk about what we all need to do to respond to the effects of climate change that have already been felt and that our children and grandchildren will do. We come to you because we know that climate change has altered the way all of us should be developing our economies and saving species. ...I found out about this talk just a few days ago, and I asked my wife, Should I use examples in my talk from the region where these diplomats are from, or should I give examples from other places. ...I thought, here could be a pinnacle of my work to date — a young scientist, not yet a year after my defense, speaking to people who mention "my president" when they mean, "my friend, the president, with whom I'm dining next week." ...One man who had been both very quiet and very attentive came up to me and said, I am from a very small country.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-05-20T17:20:10+02:00

Here, you hope your seat belt is clicked in place and strong, that your car has airbags that work, and (finally) that you have a paid-up and functioning insurance policy for your car and yourself. ...There are genuine points of conflict (as a topic for another blog), but the climate has already changed and will continue to change, so we need to "adapt." ...I've just come from a meeting with a group of other NGOs and one GO that all have activities centered on climate change science, climate mitigation policy, or (in my case) climate adaptation. ... "I am in a sense paid to go to places and see the bad things that will be happening there in the near and distant future." ...They had to be in trying to persuade government and business leaders to sign on climate mitigation policies that often required substantial amounts of political and investment capital to implement. ... In a sense, they were peddling hope where I was the Old Testament prophet, trying not to wrent my own clothing as I delivered the Bad News. ...I think I'd rather be a Troubleshooter of Doom, well-known author of "Doom on Less than 50 Euros a Day" and "Practical Tips for Making Peace with Doom." But I also realized later that there may be a kind of silent good cop–bad cop effect the mitigation and adaptation worlds are having together that may make our efforts more effective. I think that climate mitigation has served as a "first order" response to climate change in that the solutions are relatively easy, clear, and straightforward. ...Climate adaptation represents a second-order problem that is far more difficult and complex; adaptation assumes that climate change is already occurring and we have to prepare ourselves for major transformations as a result of new conditions. ...Perhaps it is the hope in me feeding my own imagination, but I believe that I see awareness of these issues in the faces of those I speak to.

Banker's Hours

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-05-20T16:46:12+02:00

I don't know anyone in this sponsor's global office, only the handful of people I've run into at two North American meetings. ... This first meeting six months ago was somewhat stressful for me simply because I had only a slight understanding of what my position entailed. ...The managing staff have primarily worked with two of the other recipients; my connection has primarily been through a handful of reports sent via email through third parties. ... But they have been sending a handful of employees through a process of becoming aware of climate change issues by participating in a series of two week events at a research facility assisting on a project investigating forest carbon questions. ...All of them struck me for the most part as remarkably unremarkable in many ways — very mainstream, salt of the earth people. ...One woman spoke to me about how the initial discussion with a scientist about the realized and projected impacts of climate change had so upset her and her colleagues that they left the room afterwards in silence, many in tears. ...As a side effect, the managers I met six months ago were not the same managers I was meeting on this trip — I should say, they were the same people but also quite transformed, even if by proxy. ... They were among the most carbon-aware people I've ever met in North America outside of the environmental community. And some were making climate-aware changes in their own lives that would be remarkable and interesting well beyond the little spheres of this program. ...I was also struck my a hunger on the part of many of these individuals who had been through this program to connect to me and the other relatively silent member of the partnership — what were we doing? ...I was not happy about the time spent at this meeting — some 60 banker's hours — but I was grateful to have met these individuals.

Barak and the Pew Center: Girding for Battles as President?

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-05-15T18:48:16+02:00

That's about 10% of the population of Albany, and about 5% of Albany and Corvallis combined. ...The crowd espond most strongly to his statements about improving education (leaving behind Bush's No Child Left Behind legislation, improving science education, improving teacher salaries) and — perhaps to an even greater degree — minimizing our involvement in Iraq for the future. ...He brought up climate change issues at least six times by my count during the speech, always at his own behest rather than in response to a question from the audience or from one of the two previous speakers. This count is roughly equivalent to the number of times he brought up the Iraq war. And his discussion of climate change came into his speech and responses to the audience in a far more multifaceted way: how can science education be improved? ... Clearly, he was thinking about how difficult and all-encompassing climate change will be for the next president, and how he (might) have to wage some difficult battles over the issue. On the same day, the Pew Center published the results of a depressing survey suggesting that the number of climate skeptics in the U.S. is actually increasing, though all of the increases are accounted for by more Republicans doubting that climate change is a result of human activity. In no small part, this partisan division may be a result of the constant denial of people like Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk-radio host, who is a very vocal climate skeptic (see the 14 May item in the News & Press section), not to mention politicians like James Inhofe (15 May item in News 7 Press). I have to think that Obama is extremely aware of this challenge. The fight for U.S. action will require some very basic persuasion for many millions of people. I have to think (and hope) that having a president eager to act on climate change from many different directions will make great use of the bully pulpit role of the presidency.

Bracing Myself

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-04-10T02:59:28+02:00

I don't have business class privileges yet, so my poor legs are at the mercy of whomever is in front of me. ... If anything, leaning particularly ruins daytime flights, since my laptop won't be able to open sufficiently for me to see the screen. I am left contemplating the smell of the hair of the man (invariably, it is a man) in front of me. ...Flights originating in the U.K., in contrast, tend to have folks that don't like to make eye contact or chat, with an often active dance of carefully ignoring people who are sitting quite nearby. I've even spoken some friendly opener to people and had them pretend I wasn't there a foot or two away. This week, I try to relieve my travel anxieties by preparing a stack of things I need to bring -- some books to deliver, a novel that is a gift, a novel to read for fun. ... Weight is an issue, and I abhor checking luggage, preferring to have one overhead piece and one for below the seat in front of me. ...I worked up until about an hour before my shuttle to the airport before emailing something I feared was incomplete and lacking. Worried about the project and my current time crunch, I ran cursing to the closet, throwing together clothes and gear, my wife tearful and upset for me, unable to help -- only watch. ... With many apologies and a tearful departure, I left with the uncomfortable certainty that I must have forgotten a lot of important things. ...And as I said goodbye, pausing for an instant, I was more mindful in the end of the things I could not bring with me.

The Round Tables

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-04-10T00:56:18+02:00

Two seats were extremely important: the #1 position ("most honored guest", located the farthest from the main entrance to the room) and the last-ranked position ("lord of the manner," located closest to the door). Ranks declined from the #1 seat, alternating right and left until you reached the lord of the manor seat; this person paid the bill. ... I normally took a high number, but only once or twice over a week did I take the highest position. In contrast, most of our non-meal formal meetings with institutions in China (as at universities) were at long rectangular tables. ... The two groups (us and them) faced each other, with seating highly correlated with rank -- the highest ranking person on each side normally closest to the screen. ... If there were insufficient seats for all of the people one side to be at the table, they might spill over to the other side or sit in a second row, against the wall. Also quite important was having the higher-ranked person from a group of speakers begin a talk, with additional, later speakers of descending rank. ...Perhaps this a flaw here in North America -- it might be difficult to tell who is "meant" to be the most important for the audience. And we certainly have a vigorous effort to appear egalitarian and democratic, erasing the evidence of rank whenever possible, but the perhaps we doth protest too much. I suspect we often care quite deeply about rank as well but we seek evidence through less obvious cues than I saw in China. Or -- even more intriguingly -- we might engage in a struggle to establish rank among parties through discussion and competition.

Odd Jobs

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-04-07T23:23:11+02:00

I was in the publishing industry for about 12 years and for much of that time my parents, sister, and my extended family kept asking me, What is it that you do? ... That really baffled a lot of people, at least until they were distracted by the publishing work. ... I could say to someone in publishing that I was a developmental editor and they would know what that meant. ... Now, I work with people worldwide who are told to implement climate adaptation projects (often with me) but they don't know what that means. Climate adaptation is extremely new even if the term is not; no one had ever been hired to do climate adaptation work until quite recently, so the term has remained fairly theoretical. In practical terms for my daily tasks, that also means that I spend a lot of time telling people around the world what climate adaptation is. Even harder is telling them what climate adaptation looks like -- and if it's different than what they already do. ...The label is easier in the sense that the scope of work is narrowed to a single biome, but describing what freshwater climate adaptation looks like gets harder once you begin to really drill down into the concept because -- despite more than a century of freshwater conservation work and over 4,000 years of intensive human modification of freshwater ecosystems -- there have been almost no examples of work that have been explicitly and purposely described as freshwater climate adaptation. There are now some attempts to say that particular projects in the past were (in effect) types of climate adaptation, but this is very post hoc and not particularly satisfying. Perhaps the strangest part of this odd job is that almost everyone that I meet in and out of the organization pointedly states that climate adaptation is very critical and important work -- a set of approaches that will only grow in importance for our NGO and others. Thus, given that there are (almost) no examples of climate adaptation and no clear sense of what the term means, we can at least know be clear that it's important.

Aquatic Synergasms

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-04-07T01:31:31+02:00

For instance, in China the Three Gorges Dam (TGD) is a massive structure about 2/5ths of the way upstream from the mouth of Yangtze river. ... It represents both the hope of more than 4,000 years of Chinese struggle against flooding and climate variability and a massive environmental, social, economic, and cultural disaster. ...Historically, these lakes along the shores were big enough for major naval battles to be fought, such as during the terrible Taiping rebellion of the mid-19th century. These lakes and wetlands receive a great deal of their water from the river itself during its normal annual flooding. Thus, when the river gets high enough, some of the Yangtze’s water flows into these other water bodies – they are not the “standing” water bodies most of us think of. ... Given that these systems are often intensively used by cities and pork farms (for sewage treatment) and by fish farmers, they need to be flushed. ... The river’s annual flooding also serves as a signal for many kinds of wildlife to shift from one kind of habitat to another, such as moving from the main channel to the lakes for spawning. ...Given that the region is seeing more climate variability (more frequent droughts and floods), the interaction between TGD and climate change on the river can potentially be terrible during a drought. ... A talk with a research team focused on conservation of the Yangtze finless porpoise suggested that December and January saw the untimely separation of one major porpoise breeding lake, one of the last (and best) regions of habitat for the species. Early estimates suggested that the surface area of the lake was less than 5% of its historical norm for this time of year, potentially trapping several hundred porpoise into a tiny and probably pollution-rich and food-poor area. ...And climate change in many cases is going to lead to more very difficult kinds of competition between humans and our needs and wild species and ecosystems and their needs.

The Evil of Nature

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-04-07T00:40:48+02:00

Evil is a word we associate with polemicist attacks on us, yet as conservation scientists we should be aware that the nature of evil is changing in the public, perhaps even the global public, and that we may need to alter our usage and sensibilities as well. ...The twentieth century’s most widely viewed Evil was clearly the Holocaust of Jews and other groups in Europe, an evil somehow heightened by the ordinary quality of many of the individuals like Adolf Eichmann who carried out these acts with devoted efficiency. Other mass killings in the past century have strong echoes of Eichmann’s “banality,” such as the genocides of Armenians in Turkey early in the century, the mass deaths of citizens and numerous minorities in the Soviet state under Lenin and Stalin, the cultural revolution of China, the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1970s, and the savage inter-ethnic and inter-religious wars of the 1990s in the Balkans and Rwanda, and the ongoing violence in eastern Congo and Sudan. There are many other events that could be added to this short list (see chapter 1 of Ferguson, The War of the World), but the lesson is clear: the twentieth century has moved the evil of humans against humans into our consciousness, with ample reinforcement. ...Regardless of whether we should consider the event September 11, 2001, as an Evil, the twenty-first century’s attacks are a perfect example of a crisis-event that reconfigured the perception of the relationship between developed-developing and western and Moslem-majority nations. My unscientific intuition is that most biologists — at least, those of us who work in conservation-relevant aspects such as ecology and evolution — would add another distinct Evil: humans regularly and unthinkingly commit terrible acts against Nature. ...However, I fear that another great Evil is about to alter the consciousness of many in the world, particularly in the developed and rapidly industrializing worlds: climate change. ...However, the instantaneous acceleration from ignorance to hyperawareness can just as easily emerge as despair and anger — as a sense that too much has already been changed, that no one now alive will see the benefits of our austerity, and that no reform now can alter a dangerous endgame. ...Like Gore, those of us who know about climate change can guess at how economies, cultures, and ecosystems are likely to alter; we have eaten this apple, cyanic seeds and all, and we have made peace with working for less-severe climates we are unlikely to see appear. ...But other candidates will appear within a few years — a massive ice separation in Antarctica or Greenland, a super-cyclone or –hurricane, thousands dying at high latitude from record heat, a biblical flood-event that costs us another great city. ...Nonscientists (and particularly anti-scientists) will be at hand and ready to blame the coming crises on our “sins,” but we must be equally ready to demonstrate causality and to show that our greatest service is in our stewardship for the future.

Leaving, on a Jet Plane

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-04-06T19:57:30+02:00

My own body of knowledge is a bit more vague and amorphous. To use a term a friend made up as a joke, I have become a sort of meta-ecologist, talking about how ecology and conservation are changing at this point in their history. And in the brief periods in Surrey and Delhi when I will be talking, I will be in this meta-ecology mode of trying to describe my sense of how we must shift in our work in order to be successful. This is my “conservation philosophy” talk. Even these thoughts, though, are mostly intended to stir thinking in other people and to evoke their responses. So I can go back to listening again.

The Romance of Conservation

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-04-06T19:42:23+02:00

In February, I met an ornithologist in Hawaii who – with evident pain and passion – told me about the challenges she felt she faced in her work trying to save the few remaining native bird species in the islands. ...Or that effort, research, and funding is pressed away from species that are more threatened but less charming, lack a backbone, are too small, or don’t photograph well. But most people don’t think about these other species and become very upset when priorities shift away from this big charismatic species. ...I can remember vividly calling friends the morning that the ivory-billed woodpecker was rediscovered and crying, thinking of the stories elderly relatives and friends had told me as a boy about these incredible birds. ...I think most people who work in conservation are faced with a serious contradiction between enjoying the experience of being outside and seeing wild, living things, and knowing how much loss we’ve experienced and how much more we face in the near future. ...And I’ve met one or two physicians who responded to that experience of reaching people too late by wanting to shift from clinical or hospital work (work on individuals) to something like public policy or outreach work (working on groups). ...I met a woman who spent her work-week in a nonprofit trying to help the homeless in a large southern U.S. city – mostly men, often psychologically and psychically damaged. ... She had such difficulty reaching the adult men, felt such visible pain in the difficulty of this work, that she had to also work on trying to prevent more such people. ...The dominant species paradigm in North American conservation is not unlike trying to treat individual patients or to change the behaviors of adults who are persistently homeless. From a climate change perspective, that approach makes very little sense, and it probably doesn’t make much sense for the majority of threats that conservation biologists confront. There are simply too many species that are threatened, and humans – even very clever ones – are simply not smart enough to design comprehensive strategies to help all of them.

The Ugly American?

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-03-31T06:01:39+02:00

It often comes out that I am from Texas, one of the few states in the U.S. with a distinct "personality" to those abroad who have never been here. And most reasonably educated people from abroad know that Bush was our governor, that he too is from Texas. ...Defensively, even preemptively, I am inclined to point out that I voted against Bush 43 four times: twice as governor, and twice for president. And I studiously avoid the use of "American" to describe myself unless I am including Mexico, Canada, Central America, and South America, which is how the rest of the Americas use the term. ...The '00 election debacle in Florida, Abu Grib, the Iraq invasion, Guantanamo, Kyoto, the illegality of gay marriage, the prominence of politicians who do not believe in evolution. The deficit between Enlightenment ideals and reactionary action has not been so great since at least the mid 60s, and perhaps much farther back than that. ...The best sign of this may be when I hear them ask me earnest, probing questions somewhere a few drinks into casual conversation: Why has the U.S. does invaded Iraq? ...My answers often feel so inadequate, in part because I don't really have very good answers. ... I don't really understand why the U.S. has developed a reasonable engagement on climate change issues. I cannot apologize for civilian and military authorities that covered over torture and prisoner abuse, forcing our country and much of the West into a multi-decade conflict with the Middle East. ...And I know they intend to compliment me, but I feel so sad when I am told, You are not like most Americans, are you?

Tough Talking

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-03-31T06:00:58+02:00

Much of my talk, frankly, is a bit canned -- slides of greenhouse gases over time, trends in temperature and precipitation, a few general categories of impacts, and so on. ... I added a few slides that talk about regional climate trends and potential and realized impacts, then I move on to the Yangtze. I find these talks very difficult and quite emotional and the same time that I know they are, in terms of giving undergrads some fear and hope, extremely effective. ...I cut this photo and added several of my own from India: men digging a well by hand in a field in India to get access to groundwater, two WWF colleagues standing in a dry river bed about 40 or 50 feet below a mark on the pylon of a bridge that shows where the flood level was in 1992, one of the world experts on e-flows walking across another dry stretch of river bed, and a terrible image of cremation sites in a river bed. In fact, all of these photos are from my last trip to India and the Gambiri river, which has been dry along a significant stretch for over five years -- a victim of a long drought and an inter-caste war. Explaining these images to the 40 undergrads in the room, the timbre of my voice went from amusement (at the bridge) to the horrifying crisis of people hoping that the river returns so that, in keeping with their religion, their relatives can enter the sea and find salvation. ...I said, The last time I gave this talk, there was a public debate on whether or not to list the polar bear as an endangered species. ...I am often disturbed that I have seen such horrible things in this job already, and I feel very concerned that I can see into the future several awful, depressing decades. ... I cannot think about the loss, only what we can do for redemption, to carry as much over the river as we can. ...Moving on in the talk, I saw two young women chuckling to each other in the back, but I am too old to worry about such concerns. ...Some stayed for an hour to ask questions and to be in touch with our message that bad things are happening while some people are trying to make a change.

I'm not sahib! Right?

johoma@climatechangewater.org — 2008-03-31T00:29:59+02:00

Desperately hoping for caffeine and distraction from my personal anxieties, I took my laptop and went to the little dark lobby, watching the bugs circle the lamps outside and the elephant-headed statue of Ganesh beside me as I typed in the dark. Around 5 am, an old man appeared at the door to the hotel and walked in. ...The tall white male in the room was assumed to be in charge or responsible in public places, and people were often quite deferential and soliticous. Veteran of the sahib role on the subcontinent, the friend advised: Don't question it or reject the role. ... But as uncomfortable with being granted authority because of my gender and race, I can also be quite uncomfortable with the authority granted to me by right of my doctoral degree, research experience, and job title. My PhD focused on several issues concerning long-distance dragonfly migration, including how climate change over the past 40 years in one Canadian population has altered the timing of development in this species. ... And my position with WWF takes these predilections to another level — calling me a global freshwater climate adaptation specialist. I now have several months of people looking at me and saying, OK [sahib]. ...This other, implicit sahib echoes around my head on at least a weekly basis. ... But the discomfort here is being the expert, having some authority over important issues that matter to a lot of people and species, and realizing people are listening to me. ... Conscious that at best perhaps three-quarters of my advice in 50 years will have proven to be correct.