Seminars and Coffee Talks

Interim climate policy targets for the mid-century
have been proposed as a way to guide policy over the next
several decades in the absence of agreement on a long term
goal, so that a range of options can be preserved for the choice
that is eventually made. However, no mitigation analysis has
explicitly examined the relationship between mid-century targets
and long-term outcomes. We carry out such a study employing
the IIASA integrated assessment modeling framework, which
includes a detailed energy sector, emissions of multiple
greenhouse gases, and reduced-form models of greenhouse gas
cycles and climate. We find that there are critical thresholds of
mid-century emissions or concentration levels above which
achieving particular long-term goals becomes infeasible. These
and other results could be used to guide policies linking uncertain
long-term climate goals with shorter-term actions. Better
characterizing the uncertainty in climate response to
concentration pathways that overshoot long-term targets before
declining to them is a high priority for future work.

Deforestation is of great concern to many for several important reasons.
Many authors project that growing demand for food and bioenergy will
increase the area of agricultural land in the future, and cause
deforestation. However, the time path of the change, size, and regional
scope are still debated. Few studies have attempted to combine forestry
and agriculture sector in a dynamically consistent way in order to
explore the influence of changing demand, technology, tree growth and
harvest. This study develops a global agriculture and forestry model
that could assess the influence of these factors on the projections of
land use changes. It could provide helpful tools for carbon and biofuel
analysis, impacts of climate change on forestry and agriculture
resulting land use changes. The baseline results of the model will be
presented and the future direction of economic land use model will be
discussed.

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Worldwide, the threefold increase in the incidence of extreme weather
events since 1960 was been accompanied by a ninefold increase in
damages, reaching a peak of US$219 billion in 2005. There is strong
evidence that the increases in some extremes, such as heat wave, are
related to climate change.

We have reached an understanding that the climate system has a large
degree of inertia. This means that the climate system will take time
to respond to actions that reduce the concentration of greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere. The consequence of this inertia is that we
are already committed to a certain degree of climate change beyond
that already observed. Further, the vulnerability to impacts of
climate change is increasing for other reasons, including
unsustainable development and economic inequity. Thus, it is
inevitable that damaging and even catastrophic events will continue to
occur regardless of efforts to mitigate emissions.

Adaptive governance is a means of directing attention to otherwise
neglected options that can help reduce our vulnerability. It has
emerged more or less spontaneously as a loosely-coordinated array of
pragmatic responses to manifest failures at several level of
governance, from local to national. Not surprisingly, recognition of
the pattern in the last decade or two and the term itself followed
innovations in practice.

This talk will review the understanding and practice of adaptive
governance with reference to field testing in Alpine Shire in
Victoria, Australia. The talk will highlight the role that extreme
weather events can play in reducing the vulnerability of people,
property and other cultural artifacts, and the natural environment to
climate change.

The Energy Imperative is an executive briefing geared to decision
makers. Escalating energy challenges call for new ways of thinking, and
this briefing will discuss many of the concepts used by Rocky Mountain
Institute to drive breakthrough solutions in radical resource efficiency
and the shift to renewable energy sources. Concrete examples of the
change disrupting industries such as construction, transportation, and
electrical generation will be discussed, along with some mind-bending
scenarios of possible futures.

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Recent greening trends in the Sahel observed from time series of satellite imagery have given rise to optimism and created speculation about their causes (Hutchinson et al., 2005). While the greening trend has generally been paralleled by positive trends in rainfall since the great Sahelian droughts, some pockets of greening seem to exceed what can be explained by rainfall alone (Herrmann et al., 2005). The present study, focusing on the Wadi Kowb basin in the Gorgol region of Mauritania, is the first part of a three-year project which examines local realities of complex human-environment interactions that contributed to the observed greening in selected sites in Mauritania and Senegal.

The goal of the study is to explore the complexities of the greening versus desertification debate in the Sahel by improving our understanding of the interplay of human and natural factors that helped create local environmental change. We conducted focus group discussions in four villages in a north-south gradient along the wadi on the importance of different natural resources (trees, pastures, soils) in people’s livelihoods, the use and management of those resources throughout time, and perceptions on environmental changes and their perceived causes. The local land user perspective was supplemented with information gathered from key informants, secondary data and interpretation of high-resolution satellite images and historical air photos.

The Wadi Kowb is a tributary of the Gorgol Noir river in southern Mauritania and spans an area of accentuated greening in its northern and modest greening in its southern part. Like much of the region, it was hit hard by the droughts of the 1970s/early 80s and has been described as suffering from desertification. In response to the drought crisis, a large dam was constructed in 1984, which created an artificial lake and an irrigated perimeter: the development scheme of Foum Gleita.

While the large-scale development scheme holds considerable explanatory potential for the accentuated greening observed from satellite imagery, the realities on the ground are not only positive: a large part of the irrigation scheme fell into disrepair soon after its inception, yields have decreased drastically, and abandoned fields have been invaded by a dense thicket of shrubs and rendered useless. Even outside the irrigated area, the presence of the dam altered the hydrology and ecology of the watershed, which possibly contributed to the increase in tree densities along the wadi. At the same time, however, the land users deplore a loss of biodiversity, with only few species contributing to the increase in trees, some of them of little use value.

Thus, the greening in this particular area was correctly picked up by a previous remote sensing-based study as exceeding rainfall trends. Unlike the cases of farmer-managed vegetation regeneration found in Burkina Faso and Niger (Reij et al., 2005), here the greening can be described as rather inadvertent, at least from the perspective of the local land users. While some limited soil and water conservation is practiced in the form of diguettes, a large part of the man-made of the greening trend is likely attributable to the - partly unplanned - effects of the irrigation project.

The case study illustrates the complexities on the ground that can be masked by vegetation index trends. What presents itself as greening does not necessarily constitute a form of regeneration or rehabilitation. The mostly inadvertent greening in the Wadi Kowb stands in contrast to the actively planned community effort that has been described for some other sites in the Sahel, though both have a similar appearance on time series of satellite images.

As always there will be coffee, tea and good cookies. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Ann Bostrom, Associate Dean for Research and Associate Professor, Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, University of Washington

In Winter of 2005 I started a graduate course about the intersection of science, economics, and policy. Since then, the course has evolved into a project-oriented course on solving problems related to the challenge of climate change. Students have come from six schools in the University and eleven Departments. This seminar summarizes the lessons learned from this experience. The (still not caught up) web site for the Winter 2008 version of the course.

Problem solving in climate change requires the consideration of the vested interests of many communities, for example, business, policy, resource management, ethics, and science. Virtually all elements of society have a tangible stake in addressing the challenges of climate change. There is stir of risk and opportunity, beliefs and knowledge. From the point of view of the scientist, one of lessons learned is the dual role of scientific knowledge in the climate change problem. On one hand scientific investigation is what drives all of concern and activity. On the other hand, when it comes to addressing a real world problem, scientific information sits on a palette of issues that must be considered in the possible approaches to problem-solving; it is, effectively, diminished. The role of scientific uncertainty takes on a character that is often alien to scientists. A three-axis framework for structuring paths towards solution is posited; the axes are time (near term / long term), geography (local / global), and wealth (poor / rich). Examples drawn from class projects are provided.

Numerous calls have been made from the hydrometeorology and climatology communities for greater research collaboration with the social sciences. Amid these invitations have been specific references to communication processes inherent in many aspects of the weather enterprise, including forecasting decision, scientist-user collaboration, how communities manage information, and cooperating with the media. Dr. Dan O’Hair, a communication scientist from the University of Oklahoma, will explore how communication theory and methodological techniques can reveal both obvious and subtle patterns of messages important to the weather and climatology community. Taking a multi-level, socio-ecological approach to communication science, Dr. O’Hair will explore the following topics:

• Risk Communication
• Communicating Uncertainty
• Message Analysis Processes
• Communication Networks
• Inter-Organizational Collaboration
• Community-Communication Infrastructure Systems
• Media Effects

This presentation will serve as an opportunity to intersect multiple disciplines in support of interdisciplinary research models that integrate information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts, and/or theories from multiple bodies of specialized knowledge to solve weather and climate problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline.