I’ve heard for years about the “coffin hotels” of Japanese airports: you rent a tiny room in a hotel inside of a terminal in places like Tokyo. Most of the businessmen using these are between long-haul flights. Apparently Brazil’s Sao Paolo has something similar since I’ve checked in. The hotel charges by the hour (five hours comes to about the price of a regular hotel room). It’s about two meters wide, three meters long, and tall enough for me to stand up, assuming I duck under the TV suspended from the ceiling. There’s a mirror, a bunkbed, a wastebasket, and four blank walls. It’s a coffin, unfit for the claustrophobic or those in need of visual stimulation. Sitting in the basement, the only sound comes from the ceiling’s air vent. The warren of hallways leads to showers, a hair salon, and even a small gym. It’s a great idea, even if it provides further disorientation to the travel process. Read More...

Tags: travel, brazil

Much of the emphasis about freshwater climate adaptation boils down to how we manage water through infrastructure like dams and water management plans like environmental flows. But someone has to pay for dams, and large dams are very expensive and complex building projects. In much of the developing parts of the planet, these projects are funded by lFIs: international finance institutions. In practice, this means large development banks. As a biologist, I have had little experience interacting with banks beyond my own checking account. But in the world of water, they’re important. And in Stockholm’s World Water Week, I had some enlightening perspectives on how they are engaging with climate adaptation as part of their business world. Read More...

Tags: climate adaptation, policy, funding

World Water Week in Stockholm is very policy oriented. This year, much of the focus was on sanitation, but two days were spent in a series of linked symposia on water and climate. Talks ranged from more details on emerging climate impacts with the IPCC’s new technical report on water and climate to regional and local adaptation strategies and tactics. Easily two of the most novel experiences for me as a scientist were interacting with the press as an “adaptation expert” and holding some introductory climate adaptation conversations with two international development banks. I’ll write more about the banks later, but the media interaction was a good if difficult experience. Read More...

Tags: media, travel, sweden, policy, climate adaptation

Roughly 30 hours ago, I was rushing to the Stockholm airport. As I boarded the plane, I passed a small window used when guiding the walkway between the plane and the gate. A little sign a few feet in front of the nose of the plane stated the airport name, the city, and the latitude and longitude. Fifty-nine degrees north latitude, I thought. That’s the farthest north I’ve ever stood, at least on the ground. Then I laughed: this flight would carry me in 10 hours to Chicago, where I’d catch an 11-hour flight to Sao Paolo, Brazil, and then a last plane headed to the southwest for two hours to Cuiaba, Brazil, near the Bolivian border. From there, I drive straight south several hours to roughly 25 degrees south latitude, the southern-most point of my life. In basically a day and a half, I’d be spanning 85 degrees of latitude and pushing the extremities of my experience.But the contrasts were not merely of hemisphere and geography. My time in Stockholm was largely spent at a 2,500-person conference where water was only visible on PowerPoint slides and drinking fountains, while the Pantanal is a wetland the size of England and Scotland filled with jaguars, hyacinth macaws, and capybaras. The night sky is bright with stars and is one of the few places with essentially no planes visible in the sky. It has a great deal of water and very few people. Read More...

Tags: europe, travel, south america

A colleague closely affiliated with WWF who is now at Australian National University has just written an excellent series of climate adaptation case studies. Jamie Pittock, the author, is in the highest tier of international freshwater conservation and policy advocates. I highly recommend downloading the 6.5 mb file. A major recommendation behind this and a companion overview of climate adaptation that I wrote with another colleague, Tom LeQuesne, is maintaining healthy freshwater species and ecosystems is the key to keeping reliable and high-quality freshwater resources for societies, economies, and livelihoods Read More...

Tags: news, climate adaptation, policy, india, africa, china, Danube, yangtze river, europe, mexico, north america, brazil, south america

UPDATE: You can see a short video of these kids from the week as described below. A marketing piece, but a very nice one.

Originally posted: 25 June 2008
I’m old enough that I was among the last generation to grow up with serious, warranted nightmares about massive nuclear exchanges between the U.S. and Soviet Union. I can remember being about six or seven and first learning about total nuclear annihilation; I had nightmares for a while, and I felt a consistent sense of fear and unease, certainly well into Bush 41’s presidency. I never had to deal with duck and cover drills like the generation before me, but I always felt aware of this potential doom, which felt completely out of my hands. The undercurrent of that time is hard to explain to people who haven’t lived through it.
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Tags: north america, travel, outreach, cultural impacts

I’m in Stockholm for World Water Week. I speak tomorrow with some colleagues as part of a larger series of talks on water and climate, though I’ve been here for several days. This is an unusual meeting for me: heavy on policy and programs, light on science and what I am used to thinking of as analysis. And being here captures some of the tension that a lot of us involved in climate adaptation work feel on a regular basis: How do we balance between being in a clean, well-appointed convention center, somewhere in the over-developed (even post-developed) world, talking about “issues” with people that are often several steps removed from where the action is -- places in the developing world, out of the air conditioning and the people sampling the smorgasboard of ideas and recommendations in the cold light of energy-efficient bulbs.
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Tags: policy, climate adaptation, europe, north america

The Thames is a great world river because of its connection to England for millennia, to London and the City as agents of modern history, and to its special chalk landscape. I first saw the Thames last February, late on a cold and windy night when I was full of sherry and dragging a lot of luggage on a tour of the City. I smiled into the thick, churning waters from a bridge. “That’s one of your rivers,” my friend T said to me as we looked down. I now smile since we’ve just launched a climate vulnerability assessment of the Thames. The report comes in three versions. The best place to begin is a glossy and very accessible summary. Also available are a technical summary and the full technical report. Read More...

Tags: united kingdom, news, climate adaptation

My hotel in Stockholm is called the “Talk.” I assume this is because it joins a big convention center in the city, but the name also suggests the process of conversation, discourse, and discussion. From my perspective, that suggests making policy out of the science. After all, across the sea a little to the south stands Prussia, where Bismarck suggested that the making of politics and sausage were best left out of sight. Here in Sweden, I am trying to make a little sausage. Read More...

Tags: policy

Just published online today, the ides of August, is a flyer for policymakers and water resource managers that I wrote with a good friend and colleague. Intended as a primer on climate change and freshwater conservation and economic development, it’s an introduction to some of the basic of my work. On some level, it’s a crystallization of a series of talks I’ve given to a wide range of scientific, policy, and lay audiences now 40 or more times in the past eight months. Be forewarned: the download is about 3 mb. Download it yourself, read it onscreen, and save some trees. Read More...

Tags: publications, media, policy, news