Be Our Guest: Generation Hot

Planning for Climate Change: Cool Responses to Prepare for Generation Hot

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

Environmental correspondent for The Nation Mark Hertsgaard recently coined the term “Generation Hot,” which he describes as:

“…the 2 billion people worldwide who were born after June 23, 1988, the day NASA scientist James Hansen's testimony to the U.S. Senate put the world on notice that man-made global warming had begun and threatened to make Earth uninhabitable.” (From How climate change will hit home, Oct. 30, 2011, Sacramento Bee.)

Generation Hot in California will likely see problems familiar to Californians (heat, flood, fire) changing their timing and intensity, and also see novel challenges like new disease vectors and new kinds of violent weather events. On our correspondent’s mind especially is the problem of the levee system protecting Sacramento: 100-year-old dirt mounds, and the only thing between high water and the 454,000 people living at the bottom of Sacramento’s watershed. This leaves the city “less protected than New Orleans had been before Hurricane Katrina” (Stein Buer, the former executive director of the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency, as quoted by Hertsgaard).

So what are we as Californians doing to prepare ourselves for the new future facing Generation Hot?

From the CA Department of Water Resources.

California Has a Plan

Right now, the only official state policy document outlining California’s priorities and intended approach to climate change is the 2009 California Climate Adaptation Strategy. It presents a summary of the science of climate change as it is accepted by the state government, and a set of strategies for adapting to impacts, broken down by sector (water, public health, transportation, etc.).

Following the launch of this state strategy, the on-line tool for visualizing the impacts Cal-Adapt was launched, a set of vulnerability studies were begun (due to be published Spring 2012), and a plan to create a California Adaptation Policy Guide was set in motion (due out also in 2012). I contributed to the vulnerability studies, and am currently serving on the Adaptation Policy Guide Advisory Committee, so my take on the state’s adaptation effort is biased. I see first-hand the level of commitment among our state agency workers and university researchers, and I think our state continues to do an impressive job tackling climate change head-on, especially in the face of flagging public support and slashed budgets.

But What is Being Done to Actually Adapt to Coming Impacts?

Most of what is being done to prepare for climate change in California (and elsewhere in the country) is establishing baseline data and preparing theoretical courses of action. Some concrete actions which will help us adapt are in motion, but the governmental budgetary chill is holding back progress. For example, Hertsgaard points to Gov. Schwarzenegger’s 2007 flood control plan that authorized repairs for about 30% of California levees, including those protecting Sacramento, but the current Republican-led House of Representatives in D.C. is blocking funding for the Army Corps of Engineers (opposing it as “earmarks”), delaying the work.

Some work can be done even in a bad economy, though. Measures which have significant benefits even in the absence of climate change are called “no-regrets” measures, and they are relatively popular with governments. (Read the UK Climate Impacts Programme explanation of “no-regrets” measures in its 2008 manual for governments “Identifying Adaptation Options,” page 15. Also, for more on their popularity with U.S. government planners, see the 2009 report “Good Morning, America! The Explosive U.S. Awakening to the Need for Adaptation” by Susanne Moser.)

Better water and energy efficiency are primary “no-regrets” measures in California, and the state’s initiatives on those counts can be tallied in the column for concrete preparation actions. For example, in February 2010 the Department of Water Resources and a host of other agencies launched a “20x2020” plan “a statewide road map to maximize the state’s urban water efficiency and conservation opportunities between 2009 and 2020,” in particular trying to reduce urban water demand by 20% per capita by 2020 (read the 20x2020 final plan here). (Using less water in California’s agribusiness would do even more good, since that sector uses 80% of the state’s water resources.)

But what is being done to improve preparedness at a local level in California?

Fresno and San Luis Obispo counties have created their own climate change adaptation plans, with support from the Geos Institute (read Fresno’s plan here; read San Luis Obispo’s plan here). These are starting points which were created with the assistance of scientists and with buy-in from both government agencies and elected officials, so they have the promise of political viability.

Another approach to local preparedness that I’m excited about is the Model Forest Policy Program’s “Climate Solutions University” training program. This program was launched last year, awarding grants to six natural resource-dependent communities to begin a process of building a team of stakeholders to develop a model climate change adaptation policy. The program follows the community through a year-long training curriculum (meeting once a month through long-distance learning) and through the second year, supporting the client community in implementing that policy within its local government. I interviewed the coordinator for the 2010 model policy for Bellingham, Washington, and was impressed with her account of the process. It is not designed to address every impact to the nth degree, but it puts a community in touch with scientists to provide scientific grounding to planning, and then provides a framework for creating a steering committee to develop a plan that can address the worst of the impacts. It seemed like an excellent starting point, with both a sustainable and community-based approach (as opposed to the model of flying in a team of outside experts for a three-day conference that establishes wham-bam both the science background and the priorities for planning, as done by some other consulting organizations). This year’s client communities include the far-northern rural California community of Hayfork, in Trinity County, which is 85% public land.  I look forward to following that community’s progress as it grows from the grassroots a plan for the future of “Generation Hot” in the remote evergreen forests of California.

 

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This is Part Four of Four that Sara Moore shared here on the Open Space blog.  Part One can be read here.  Part Two is here.  Last Monday's Part Three is here.  

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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.