Adaptation Network

Building Resilience in a Changing Climate

Publications

Occasional Newsletter II, DECember 2006

Dear Friends of the Adaptation Network:

First, WELCOME to the new people receiving this. I’ve added to our list those I’ve met and those I haven’t but who are working in adaptation—some have created work products I recommend below.

It’s fun to report where I’ve spoken in public about the Network since I last wrote you:

• a senior seminar in philosophy at Elon University (North Carolina), via conference call (powerful, important questions they asked; I believe we’ll hear more from these students & their professor, my friend and pragmatist environmental philosopher Anthony Weston);
• a meeting of researchers and thinkers on biofuels at the Center for Humans and Nature held in Chicago but national in scope;
• a plenary session of the Massachusetts Climate Action Network. I’m getting good at being the first one up at the mike when a conference session gets turned over to the audience! The response I get when I drop the word “adaptation” into the ears of those assembled is so interesting— usually noncommittal from the formal speakers who have given the audience the floor and then afterward, numerous people coming up to ask for more! This is precisely why I do this and what I hope for! This vigilante public speaking will soon shift as more of us are asked formally to speak on adaptation. Please think about how you can personally increase opportunities to talk about adaptation in public settings. Invite me, or someone even smarter I can hook you up with from the Network—or do it yourself! We can coach you! Try it some time! Short, friendly and accessible works well for the adaptation vigilante.

What else? More money! We were blessed with our first donation from someone besides me—from the Evergreen Foundation. THANK YOU! The gift came with some very kind words about our early organizing that nourished me in a different way from the cash gift, yet remains equally sustaining. This latest gift is in addition to the contract we have for work on a scoping meeting mentioned in my last occasional email. This contract work is going beautifully by the way, including our connecting people who worked on the National Assessment with key people on staff for the organization doing the scoping. I look forward to more contract work not just for me but for those for whom we can broker services. Fee-for-service will become one of our income streams. (Fees will be set on a sliding scale so that we can afford to work for everyone who asks us. Sliding scales work amazingly when wisely structured.) My years doing nonprofit development have taught me how important it is to have diverse income streams. Fee-for-service is one; public and private grants are others; individual gifts from very large to very small and in between are still others. I’m currently seeking a fiscal sponsor, by the way, and actively having conversations that will result in the selection of a good one. This is a relationship of mutual accountability that permits the Network to utilize the 501(c)(3) status of another organization whose aims are allied with ours. If your organization is interested, let me know!

More: LOTS of incredibly powerful written materials. Here is a very briefly annotated list that will also serve as a guide to some of the programmatic work of several powerful entities working either on adaptation or in other edgy areas of the human dimensions of climate change:

• the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change published by Her Majesty’s Treasury: chapters 18 and 19 especially. Thank you, Paul Heltne of the Center for Humans and Nature for giving this to me to read.
  It’s good to have a starting point in the Review because it is BIG—both weighty and long. Yet what a relief to be able to have somewhere to start in counting the costs of adaptation, both “autonomous” (done by individuals or entities without central planning) and “policy-driven” (centrally planned) to climatic change. And here are examples of what adaptation IS if you are wondering what it looks like. Chapter 19 looks at developed nations’ adaptation costs, for example allowing “headroom for climate change” that reduces vulnerability,” for example _not paving over sections of parks not only for all the other good reasons to leave them green but also to decrease risk of flash-flooding; investing upfront in protection methods that are likely to prevent or decrease far greater post-disaster investments later (p. 420). P. 423 looks at central planning around a road made of packed snow and ice in Manitoba and two kinds of flood management, in London and Venice; p. 424 looks at heatwave adaptations, comparing France’s current plan and Philadelphia’s—which adds to France’s more typically state-level solutions adds the very culturally American “buddy system.” Useful, perhaps painfully obvious, charts help policymakers and the regular people who push them get what may be worth investment (high-risk, high-likelihood climate impacts) and what may not be (low-risk, low-likelihood impacts)—and how to begin to make decisions about the majority that lies in between. Chapter 20 looks at adaptation costs in the _developing world and here the recommended “measures to strengthen adaptation”: (p. 432) are precisely what I would recommend for US!: ensuring access to high-quality information about the impacts of climate change and carrying out vulnerability assessment; increasing the resilience of livelihoods and infrastrucure; improving governance; empowering communities; integrating climate change impacts in all national, sub-national and sectoral planning processes; and encouraging a core ministry with a broad mandate such as [the Department of Commerce] to help mainstream adaptation. As written from the UK, the author’s point of view is so different about where “developed” nations need to take next steps; the US looks like a developing nation on many of these counts. (Fun fact: who knew there was a “Corruption Perception Index”? It’s the product of Transparency International, which uses “expert assessments and opinion surveys” to rank more than 150 countries by their perceived levels of corruption. See the Stern Review p. 438. The first person to tell me the United States’ corruption perception score gets a prize, and mention in the next occasional email.)
  I would criticize only the Stern Review’s hard distinction between autonomous adaptation and policy-driven adaptation. Even in Europe, social change gets made from the bottom up as much as from the top down. But this is central to my view of how social change gets made. (It’s really more a DNA spiralling of the two together if you want my view.) That’s why I founded the Network!

• Hot on the heels of the well-known climate-related lawsuit against the EPA: a federal lawsuit has been filed to compel the US to keep up with its National Assessments of climate change impacts and adaptation! This is _the hottest thing happening on adaptation in the US at a national level. The Center for Biological Diversity filed the suit in federal court, with Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth joining in. You can read about it all, including a link to the beautifully worded “complaint” (text of the suit) here: www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/press/global-warming-report-11-14-2006.html. My thanks to Rick Piltz, director of Climate Science Watch for bringing this to my attention. Some of my favorite language: “Plaintiffs and their members live, recreate, research, photograph, work, and otherwise enjoy and value species, habitats, air quality, public health, water supply, water quality, and other reseources affected by global warming. [Remember: the suit has to prove the US is harming specific people by not studying impacts and implementing adaptation.] “As described more fully below, Plaintiffs and their members are harmed by the failure of Defendants to produce the overdue 2004 National Assessment. First, by failing to issue the National Asssessment Defendants have deprived Plaintiffs of the information contained in the Assessment itself, but also of the opportunity to participate in the development of the Assessment through public notice, commenting, and hearings…” Keep reading, it’s soul-satisfying. [The first National Assessment was seriously participatory science; see its website for its work products: www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/nacc/default.htm. There is every likelihood that future asssessments can include all of us in our different regions with our different interests; there were 19 regions in the nation actively creating the last National Assessment, and with more of us organizing, we can contribute even more next time.] **I have requested to know from Greenpeace what national grassroots actions we can support and help with. As the Stern Review puts it, “High-quality information on climate change could be considered a public good” (p. 418). _Should be considered a public good!
• The Climate Science Watch website, which now has "Assessments of Climate Impacts and Adaptation" as its #1 topic category, with some 13 entries in that category, including several November entries related to the CBD National Assessment case. If you want to watch climate policy made—from the top down and from the ground up, bookmark this site and visit regularly. US climate policy is changing and Climate Science Watch is one of the most powerful grassroots pressures on it to change in compassionate and intelligent ways.
• ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability, which has had a “Cities for Climate Protection” program for many years focused on mitigation, increasingly focuses on adpatation among its municipal government and government-entity membership, aided by a NOAA grant—yay NOAA! Yay ICLEI! A guide to how to do adaptation at the local level is coming out very soon, produced by the county government surrounding Seattle—Kings County—in partnership with the Pacific Northwest’s kick-ass activist scientists consortium, the Climate Impacts Group funded by NOAA and the University of Washington (hats off! Thanks from all of us!), and co-written and marketed/distributed by ICLEI. It’s not out yet but read about it at http://www.metrokc.gov/exec/news/2006/0802warming.aspx. The table of contents is available at this site, and memorably includes sections we wish we’d written: ‘Why “waiting it out” is not an option,’ “Moving beyond the common barriers: global warming is not my problem; I’ll deal with global warming when I see it happening; I’ll deal with global warming when you can tell me exactly what I need to plan for; I don’t think global warming will affect my community; I don’t have time or money to deal with global warming right now; I don’t have enough authority to plan for global warming.” That’s what the Adaptation Network also seeks to change: imagine if state and local governments feel these ways too—who’s going to do it? We can! Who has the authority? Everyone affected, including beings we must speak for—in organized, intelligent, no-regrets concert with those who govern, at all levels.
• “Changing the Social Climate” is a conversation published by the philanthropic sector—the Tides Foundation specifically—between environmental grantmaking specialist Catherine Lerza and the Executive Director of Redefining Progress Michael Gelobter, who has a proud history of work on environmental and specifically climate justice. You can download their conversation in report form at www.tides.org/fileadmin/tf_pdfs/Changing-the-Social-Climate.pdf. Discussion touches on the aspects raised in the Introduction: that “climate change is an economic issue, a social justice issue, a lifestyle issue. It’s about race, class, and democratic participation. It’s about globalization and global democracy. It’s about national security and global security.”

People who take the global-democracy aspect of climate seriously are EcoEquity. They have two reports I want you to know about “even though” they focus internationally. There is so much richness in the way EcoEquity frame our understanding of climate—how utterly urgent it is, and how urgent it is to redefine “realistic” so that it no longer simply means “palatable” politically! See their thinking on “greenhouse development rights” that are fair to developing nations, and especially their second paper, “High Stakes,” both on their website, www.ecoequity.org.

Finally, lot of conceptual work to report

• identifying who is already doing what in adaptation so that we are not reinventing the wheel or duplicating effort when there is so much to be done
• exploring what gaps it is our role to fill
• looking at adaptation in fresh ways, consistently asking the hard questions—of adaptation, of myself, of us, of the Network, of climate change science and policy as they now exist: how can this be improved? with less effort? with less expense? with more joy? with more degrees of freedom and local autonomy? with better networking?

Yours toward the answers, and ever better questions,
Beth