Heather Lazrus

The impact of climate change on tribal communities in the US: displacement, relocation, and human rights

Tribal communities in the United States, particularly in coastal areas, are being forced to relocate due to accelerated rates of sea level rise, land erosion, and/or permafrost thaw brought on by climate change. Forced relocation and inadequate governance mechanisms and budgets to address climate change and support adaptation strategies may cause loss of community and culture, health impacts, and economic decline, further exacerbating tribal impoverishment and injustice. Sovereign tribal communities around the US, however, are using creative strategies to counter these losses. Taking a human rights approach, this article looks at communities’ advocacy efforts and strategies in dealing with climate change, displacement, and relocation. Case studies of Coastal Alaska and Louisiana are included to consider how communities are shaping their own relocation efforts in line with their cultural practices and values. The article concludes with recommendations on steps for moving forward toward community-led and government-supported resettlement programs.

Exploring Impacts of Rapid-Scan Radar Data on NWS Warning Decisions

AbstractRapid-scan weather radars, such as the S-band phased array radar at the National Weather Radar Testbed in Norman, Oklahoma, improve precision in the depiction of severe storm processes. To explore potential impacts of such data on forecaster warning decision making, 12 National Weather Service forecasters participated in a preliminary study with two control conditions: 1) when radar scan time was similar to volume coverage pattern 12 (4.5 min) and 2) when radar scan time was faster (43 s). Under these control conditions, forecasters were paired and worked a tropical tornadic supercell case. Their decision processes were observed and audio was recorded, interactions with data displays were video recorded, and the products were archived. A debriefing was conducted with each of the six teams independently and jointly, to ascertain the forecaster decision-making process. Analysis of these data revealed that teams examining the same data sometimes came to different conclusions about whether and when to...

“Know What to Do If You Encounter a Flash Flood”: Mental Models Analysis for Improving Flash Flood Risk Communication and Public Decision Making

Understanding how people view flash flood risks can help improve risk communication, ultimately improving outcomes. This article analyzes data from 26 mental models interviews about flash floods with members of the public in Boulder, Colorado, to understand their perspectives on flash flood risks and mitigation. The analysis includes a comparison between public and professional perspectives by referencing a companion mental models study of Boulder-area professionals. A mental models approach can help to diagnose what people already know about flash flood risks and responses, as well as any critical gaps in their knowledge that might be addressed through improved risk communication. A few public interviewees mentioned most of the key concepts discussed by professionals as important for flash flood warning decision making. However, most interviewees exhibited some incomplete understandings and misconceptions about aspects of flash flood development and exposure, effects, or mitigation that may lead to ineffective warning decisions when a flash flood threatens. These include important misunderstandings about the rapid evolution of flash floods, the speed of water in flash floods, the locations and times that pose the greatest flash flood risk in Boulder, the value of situational awareness and environmental cues, and the most appropriate responses when a flash flood threatens. The findings point to recommendations for ways to improve risk communication, over the long term and when an event threatens, to help people quickly recognize and understand threats, obtain needed information, and make informed decisions in complex, rapidly evolving extreme weather events such as flash floods.

The Cultural Theory of Risk for Climate Change Adaptation

The way in which people perceive climate change risk is informed by their social interactions and cultural worldviews comprising fundamental beliefs about society and nature. Therefore, perceptions of climate change risk and vulnerability along with people’s ‘‘myths of nature’’—that is, how groups of people conceptualize the way nature functions—influence the feasibility and acceptability ofclimate adaptation planning, policy making, and implementation. Thisstudy presents analyses ofculturalworldviews that broaden the currenttreatmentsof culture andclimate changemitigationandadaptationdecision makingincommunities.The authors useinsights from community-based climate research and engage the Cultural Theory of Risk conceptual framework to situate community understandings of, and responses to, climate impacts. This study looks at how the issue of climate change manifests socially in four cases in the United States and Tuvalu and how ideas about climate change are produced by the institutional cultural contexts across scales from the local to the global. This approach helps us identify local and regional priorities and support the development of new relationships for adaptation research and planning by helping to diagnose barriers to climate change adaptation, assist improved communication through framing/reframing climate issues based on shared understandings and collective learning, and help move from conflict to cooperation through better negotiation of diverse worldviews.

Understanding Public Hurricane Evacuation Decisions and Responses to Forecast and Warning Messages

This study uses data from a survey of coastal Miami-Dade County, Florida, residents to explore how different types of forecast and warning messages influence evacuation decisions, in conjunction with other factors. The survey presented different members of the public with different test messages about the same hypothetical hurricane approaching Miami. Participants’ responses to the information were evaluated using questions about their likelihood of evacuating and their perceptions of the information and the information source. Recipients of the test message about storm surge height and the message about extreme impacts from storm surge had higher evacuation intentions, compared to nonrecipients. However, recipients of the extreme-impacts message also rated the information as more overblown and the information source as less reliable. The probabilistic message about landfall location interacted with the other textual messages in unexpected ways, reducing the other messages’ effects on evacuation intentions. These results illustrate the importance of considering trade-offs, unintended effects, and information interactions when deciding how to conveyweatherinformation.Recipientsofthetestmessagethatdescribedtheeffectivenessofevacuationhad lowerperceptionsthattheinformationwasoverblown,suggestingthepotentialvalueofefficacymessaging.In addition, respondents with stronger individualist worldviews rated the information as significantly more overblown and had significantly lower evacuation intentions. This illustrates the importanceof understanding how and why responses to weather messages vary across subpopulations. Overall, the analysis demonstrates the potential value of systematically investigating how different people respond to different types of weather risk messages.

Migration or Forced Displacement?: The Complex Choices of Climate Change and Disaster Migrants in Shishmaref, Alaska and Nanumea, Tuvalu

This article compares migration options in Shishmaref, Alaska and Nanumea, Tuvalu as responses to increasing risk of disaster. In both communities, increasing hazards and risks are associated with climate change—making the communities some of the first to be identified as environmental migrants or “climate refugees.” In both cases, what residents, researchers, and other stakeholders fear is that a large disaster will take lives and destroy critical infrastructure, causing communities to be displaced. However, we argue that migration pressures as a result of habitual disasters and increasing hazards interact with other migration pressures on the ground. In the lived experiences of residents, forced displacements and voluntary migrations are not so easily separated but are complex decisions made by individuals, families, and communities in response to discourses of risk, deteriorating infrastructure, and other economic and social pressures. Ultimately, residents make choices under constrained inventories of...

Recognitions and Responsibilities: On the Origins and Consequences of the Uneven Attention to Climate Change Around the World

Though climate change is a global process, current discussions emphasize its local impacts. A review of media representations, public opinion polls, international organization documents, and scientific reports shows that global attention to climate change is distributed unevenly, with the impacts of climate change seen as an urgent concern in some places and less pressing in others. This uneven attention, or specificity, is linked to issues of selectivity (the inclusion of some cases and exclusion of others), historicity (the long temporal depth of the pathways to inclusion or exclusion), and consequentiality (the effects of this specificity on claims of responsibility for climate change). These issues are explored through a historical examination of four cases—two (the Arctic, low-lying islands) strongly engaged with climate change frameworks, and two (mountains, deserts) closely associated with other frameworks of sustainable development rather than climate change. For all four regions, the 1960s and 1970s were a key period of initial involvement with environmental issues; the organizations and frameworks that developed at that time shaped the engagement with climate change issues. In turn, the association of climate change with a few remote areas influences climate change institutions and discourses at a global scale.

A Mental Models Study of Hurricane Forecast and Warning Production, Communication, and Decision-Making*

AbstractThe study reported here explores how to enhance the public value of hurricane forecast and warning information by examining the entire warning process. A mental models research approach is applied to address three risk management tasks critical to warnings for extreme weather events: 1) understanding the risk decision and action context for hurricane warnings, 2) understanding the commonalities and conflicts in interpretations of that context and associated risks, and 3) exploring the practical implications of these insights for hurricane risk communication and management. To understand the risk decision and action context, the study develops a decision-focused model of the hurricane forecast and warning system on the basis of results from individual mental models interviews with forecasters from the National Hurricane Center (n = 4) and the Miami–South Florida Weather Forecast Office (n = 4), media broadcasters (n = 5), and public officials (n = 6), as well as a group decision-modeling session wi...

Climate migrants and new identities? The geopolitics of embracing or rejecting mobility

Abstract New evidence is emerging to suggest that climate change mobility is giving effect to changing forms of island identity among Tuvaluans and i-Kiribati. This nascent shift prompts a number of questions addressed in this paper. What, for example, does climate change migration mean for island identity and its geographic performance? How does the spatialization of identity inform shared experiences of climate change, and how does identity assist in the formation of shared positions from which to advocate for change? Drawing on discourses of sedentarism and mobilization among Tuvaluan and i-Kiribati, we explore performances of identity related to climate change being fashioned and refashioned in different contexts.

Catalyzing frontiers in water-climate-society research: A view from early career scientists and junior faculty

AMEriCAN METEOrOlOGiCAl SOCiETY | 477 AffiliAtions: McNeeley, TesseNdorf, aNd lazrus—NCAR, Boulder, Colorado; lazrus—University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma; Heikkila—University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado; fergusoN—Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado; arrigo—East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina; aTTari—Columbia University, New York, New York; ciaNfraNi— Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts; dilliNg aNd kircHoff—University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado; gurdak— San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California; kaMpf—Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado; kauNeckis—University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada; lee—San Jose State University, San Jose, California; liNTNer—Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey; MaHoNey—UCAR, Boulder, Colorado; opiTz-sTapleToN— Institute for Social and Environmental Transition, Boulder, Colorado; ray—University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii; souTH—University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom; sTubblefield—Humboldt State University, Arcata, California; brugger—University of California—Davis, Davis, California CoRREsPonDinG AUtHoR: Shannon M. McNeeley, Advanced Study Program, Research Applications Laboratory/Integrated Science Program, NCAR, P.O. Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307 E-mail: smcneele@ucar.edu