Lisa Dilling

Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change

1 p. abstract. Print (xxv, 549 p.) available for circulation at the University of Oregons John E. Jaqua Law Library under the call number: QC981.8.C5 C767 2007. For more information, visit the publishers web site at: http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521869234#contributors

Climate Change and Western Public Lands: a Survey of U.S. Federal Land Managers on the Status of Adaptation Efforts

Climate change and its associated consequences pose an increasing risk to public lands in the western United States. High-level mandates currently require federal agencies to begin planning for adaptation, but the extent to which these mandates have resulted in policies being implemented that affect on the ground practices is unclear. To examine the status of adaptation efforts, we conducted an original survey and semistructured interviews with land managers from the four major federal land management agencies in the U.S. states of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. The survey was designed to examine current planning for adaptation on public lands and how it differs from prior planning, the major challenges facing land managers in this region, the major barriers preventing managers from planning for adaptation, and the major hurdles associated with implementing adaptation plans. Our results show that some adaptation planning is currently taking place, but that few adaptation projects have made it to the implementation phase. Overall, respondents considered lack of information at relevant scales, budget constraints, lack of specific agency direction, and lack of useful information to be the most common barriers to adaption planning. Budget constraints, lack of perceived importance to the public, and lack of public awareness or demand to take action were reported to be the biggest hurdles to implementation of adaptation projects. Agencies showed differing levels of adaptation activity, and reported different barriers to adaptation and hurdles to implementation. Reasons for the differences and implications for future research and policy are discussed.

Equity in forecasting climate: Can science save the world's poor?

For the past ten years, the role of seasonal climate forecasting (SCF) in decreasing the vulnerability of poor populations in many countries to climate variability and change has been discussed in the scholarly literature and policy circles. This paper reviews the literature on climate forecasting information and explores three main equity implications of SCF use. First, while investment in SCF as a decision-support tool has been justified in social terms, many examples of application show that the most vulnerable are unable to benefit from SCF information and may be harmed by it. Second, the usability of SCF as a decision-making tool has been constrained by accessibility and communication issues. Third, there may be opportunity costs in the sense that focus on SCF displaces political, human and financial capital from other more effective alternatives for decreasing the vulnerability to disaster among the poor. This review argues that, without attention to specific mechanisms to counter pre-existing inequities, the distribution and use of SCF is not likely to ameliorate the conditions of those most in need. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Managing United States Public Lands in Response to Climate Change: A View From the Ground Up

Federal land managers are faced with the task of balancing multiple uses and goals when making decisions about land use and the activities that occur on public lands. Though climate change is now well recognized by federal agencies and their local land and resource managers, it is not yet clear how issues related to climate change will be incorporated into on-the-ground decision making within the framework of multiple use objectives. We conducted a case study of a federal land management agency field office, the San Juan Public Lands Center in Durango, CO, U.S.A., to understand from their perspective how decisions are currently made, and how climate change and carbon management are being factored into decision making. We evaluated three major management sectors in which climate change or carbon management may intersect other use goals: forests, biofuels, and grazing. While land managers are aware of climate change and eager to understand more about how it might affect land resources, the incorporation of climate change considerations into everyday decision making is currently quite limited. Climate change is therefore on the radar screen, but remains a lower priority than other issues. To assist the office in making decisions that are based on sound scientific information, further research is needed into how management activities influence carbon storage and resilience of the landscape under climate change.

What Stakeholder Needs Tell Us about Enabling Adaptive Capacity: The Intersection of Context and Information Provision across Regions in the United States

In recent years increasing attention has been focused on understanding the different resources that can support decision makers at all levels in responding to climate variability and change. This article focuses on the role that access to information and other potential constraints may play in the context of water decision making across three U.S. regions (the Intermountain West, the Great Lakes, and the Carolinas). The authors report on the degree to which climate-related needs or constraints pertinent to water resources are regionally specific. They also find that stakeholder-identified constraints or needs extended beyond the need for data/information to enabling factors such as governance arrangements and how to improve collaboration and communication. As climate information networks expand and emphasis is placed on encouraging adaptation more broadly, these constraints have implications not only for how information dissemination efforts are organized but for how those efforts need to be informed by the larger regional context in a resource-limited and fragmented landscape.

Carbon stewardship: land management decisions and the potential for carbon sequestration in Colorado, USA

Land use and its role in reducing greenhouse gases is a key element of policy negotiations to address climate change. Calculations of the potential for enhanced terrestrial sequestration have largely focused on the technical characteristics of carbon stocks, such as vegetation type and management regime, and to some degree, on economic incentives. However, the actual potential for carbon sequestration critically depends on who owns the land and additional land management decision drivers. US land ownership patterns are complex, and consequently land use decision making is driven by a variety of economic, social and policy incentives. These patterns and incentives make up the ‘carbon stewardship landscape’—that is, the decision making context for carbon sequestration. We examine the carbon stewardship landscape in the US state of Colorado across several public and private ownership categories. Achieving the full potential for land use management to help mitigate carbon emissions requires not only technical feasibility and financial incentives, but also effective implementing mechanisms within a suite of often conflicting and hard to quantify factors such as multiple-use mandates, historical precedents, and non-monetary decision drivers.

Governing geoengineering research: why, when and how?

Research on geoengineering – deliberate management of the Earth’s climate system – is being increasingly discussed within the science and policy communities. While justified as necessary in order to expand the range of options available to policy makers in the future, geoengineering research has already engendered public controversy. Proposed projects have been protested or cancelled, and calls for a governance framework abound. In this paper, we consider the reasons why geoengineering research might be subject to additional governance and suggest mechanisms that might be usefully applied in developing such a framework. We consider criteria for governance as raised by a review of the growing literature on geoengineering and other controversial scientific topics. We suggest three families of concern that any governance research framework must respond to: the direct physical risks of the research; the transparency and responsibility in decision making for the research; and the larger societal meanings of the research. We review what mechanisms might be available to respond to these three families of concern, and consider how these might apply to geoengineering research.

Toward Carbon Governance: Challenges across Scales in the United States

Public and private sector actors increasingly recognize the need for action to address climate change. With the introduction of carbon sinks into the policy dialogue, the notion of managing human activities to mitigate climate change has extended beyond energy systems and emissions of carbon dioxide to include management of the carbon cycle itself, through manipulation of the terrestrial and oceanic realms. The number of decision makers involved and scope of managing the carbon cycle deliberately for climate purposes raises enormous challenges to governance including identifying appropriate mechanisms where they do not yet exist and adding additional criteria onto existing mechanisms that are already affecting the carbon cycle. In this paper, I define effective carbon governance as limiting the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This paper outlines a number of challenges to effective carbon governance at multiple scales using the example of land use in the United States and elsewhere.

Geoengineering, Ocean Fertilization, and the Problem of Permissible Pollution

Many geoengineering projects have been proposed to address climate change, including both solar radiation management and carbon removal techniques. Some of these methods would introduce additional compounds into the atmosphere or the ocean. This poses a difficult conundrum: Is it permissible to remediate one pollutant by introducing a second pollutant into a system that has already been damaged, threatened, or altered? We frame this conundrum as the ‘‘Problem of Permissible Pollution.’’ In this paper, we explore this problem by taking up ocean fertilization and advancing an argument that rests on three moral claims. We first observe that pollution is, in many respects, a context-dependent matter. This observation leads us to argue for a ‘‘justifiability criterion.’’ Second, we suggest that remediating actions must take into account the antecedent conditions that have given rise to their consideration. We call this second observation the ‘‘antecedent conditions criterion.’’ Finally, we observe that ocean fertilization, and other related geoengineering technologies, propose not strictly to clean up carbon emissions, but actually to move the universe to some future, unknown state. Given the introduced criteria, we impose a ‘‘future-state constraint’’. We conclude that ocean fertilization is not an acceptable solution for mitigating climate change. In attempting to shift the universe to a future state (a) geoengineering sidelines consideration of the antecedent conditions that have given rise to it —conditions, we note, that in many cases involve unjustified carbon emissions —and (b) it must appeal to an impossibly large set of affected parties.

What do stakeholders need to manage for climate change and variability? A document-based analysis from three mountain states in the Western USA

Resource managers and governments at all scales are becoming more aware of the challenges and opportunities that climate change and variability pose for their operational goals. At the same time, providers of climate information are learning that simply creating and disseminating information without context does not necessarily serve the needs of decision makers. As a result, calls for new ways of supporting decision making and supplying information abound. Many of these calls suggest that much more consultation with stakeholders is necessary in order to effectively serve their needs and provide usable information. While this is undoubtedly true, there is also in many cases an existing wealth of experience understanding needs of stakeholders that could be assessed before additional interaction is warranted. The goal of this study was to produce a baseline of stakeholder needs with respect to climate-related decision making from existing documents in three interior western states in the USA to examine patterns of needs and avoid stakeholder fatigue. The results suggest that stakeholders express needs for additional data and research, improved communication and coordination among data and information providers, education of their various publics, and changes to policy and legal frameworks to better manage under a changing climate. Stakeholders express these needs in the context of trying to assess expected impacts, characterize their current and future vulnerability, and manage for future change. The needs and gaps identified suggest opportunities for additional interagency coordination, methods for prioritizing and funding data streams, and partnerships for understanding future climate scenarios.