Be Our Guest: Planning for Climate Change, Part One

How did we get here, planning for climate change instead of fighting it?

By Sara S. Moore, MPP/ MA, Research Consultant on Climate Change Adaptation.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made its strongest, most scientifically grounded assertion yet on the reality of the threat of climate change with the release of its fourth assessment report. Governments around the world took notice, including California’s. Scientists had been measuring climate change and its impacts in California for years, but in 2008 the state finally decided the time had come to create a climate change adaptation strategy, and begin a vulnerability assessment.  Adaptation here means taking action to take advantage of opportunities and minimize harm brought by climate change. The state vulnerability assessment, due out in 2012, will help define which of the state’s communities, life-critical resources, and natural systems might be the most sensitive, exposed, and unable to get out of the way of the harm of climate change.

Why are we planning for climate change instead of fighting it? This question is sometimes asked by people committed to averting climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and I believe it presents a false dichotomy: according to climate projections, the impacts of climate change are likely to be dire enough that it is in everybody’s interest to BOTH plan for climate change and fight it. I say this as someone concerned for our collective well-being under inevitable climate change. But, most of us are concerned about our collective well-being. How did I get here, working to plan for climate change?

  Photo by Kathryn Barnhart

The “aha” moment when I decided to work on climate change adaptation

In my last job before graduate school, I was an organizer working at the grassroots to reduce the impacts of the oil, gas and mining industries in communities in the Russian Far East and Siberia. Climate change was only a peripheral threat in my view, even though I heard first-hand about Russia’s subsistence reindeer herders sinking into the melting permafrost with their herds. Al Gore won Oscars for a PowerPoint presentation, and the battle for clean air and water next to mines and oil and gas processing plants went on. I went to graduate school, expecting to gain policy skills to later work on indigenous communities’ access to clean water.

Then, coincidentally just a week before Schwarzenegger called for a Climate Change Adaptation Strategy to be drafted for California, I went to a talk by Isabel Hilton, a journalist who presented alarming information about the melting of the Himalayan glaciers and the war she saw as inevitable between Pakistan, China and India over fresh water resources. She talked about “inland tsunamis” from glacial lakes bursting their dams, and the slowing and shifting of the global wind regime from the lack of the glacier’s cooling effect. A silence followed her presentation. Someone asked her what we could do. Her reply: “Work on adaptation.” I went home and looked up the word. I had my graduate thesis topic, and a new career goal.

In 2008, I studied the development of the state’s Climate Adaptation Strategy, looking at the implications for California’s vulnerable populations, focusing on access to clean water. This past year, I worked with natural resource managers and scientists on a study for the California Energy Commission, doing a case study in Marin County, specifically the protected areas of West Marin.

 

Why West Marin?

 My project supervisors, Erika Zavaleta (UCSC) and Rebecca Shaw (EDF), and I vetted thirteen different candidate sites for a study of planning for resource management under climate change using a particular planning tool, scenario planning. We chose West Marin’s protected areas to give us the opportunity to work with different kinds of management agencies, and on different climate change problems, from sea-level rise to wildfires. Also, this site allowed us to ask the question that would captivate any Californian: “what if Muir Woods lost its redwoods?” We called the workshop “the Futures of Wild Marin.”

  Photo by Kathryn Barnhart

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This is Part One of Four that Sara Moore will be sharing here on the Open Space blog.  Stay tuned for the Part Two next Monday.

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About the author: Sara S. Moore, MPP/ MA, Research Consultant on Climate Change Adaptation. Sara most recently worked at the Zavaleta Lab, UC Santa Cruz, on a component study of the California State Climate Vulnerability Assessment. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a Master of Public Policy and an MA in International and Area Studies with a focus on government climate adaptation policy. Previously, she worked for Pacific Environment as a Russia Program Associate, helping communities protect their local environment in Siberia and the Russian Far East.