A Call from Science to the Arts

By Wendy Foden

When giving lectures on climate change impacts, I often begin by asking the audience if they have watched the movie, The Day after Tomorrow, a fictional action movie in which New York freezes overnight due to climate change. Usually at least half the audience has watched it, compared to just a few who have seen An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s factual account of climate change. When later in the lecture I cover some of the risks of polar ice melt, I find people more interested in engaging with the science and curious about the possible impacts of the changes.

In my previous blog post I wrote about Kunzes, a school teacher from the arid, mountainous region of Ladakh in Northern India. Climatic changes in the region have meant that she and her village are now unable to grow three of their seven traditional crops. When I asked if the village had thought about introducing new crops, I was met with an uncomfortable silence from Kunzes. Contemplating the challenge that her village faces in changing centuries-old farming practices, I realised that each of us faces similar mental leaps in preparing for an unknown and unprecedented future.

Risk is generally measured as the perceived severity of a threat, multiplied by the perceived likelihood that it will occur. In trying to understand why risk perception is so subjective and differs markedly from person to person, psychologists have long theorised about how we process the information leading to these perceptions. Not surprisingly, our individual cognitive, socio-cultural, emotional, individual and subconscious tendencies are all at play. Most interesting, I find, is that when processing risk-related information, our brains take various shortcuts (called heuristics) to help us speed up our judgments. These include using the nature, severity and frequency of past events to judge the risks of such events in the future. If events haven’t occurred previously, our brains seek parallels with similar events, but where no similar events are known, risk perception is based on how easily we can imagine them.

A Changing Climate at the World Parks Congress

By Emily Darling

Last month, 6000 delegates from 170 countries attended the once-in-a-decade World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia. The summit, hosted by the IUCN, is a global forum to discuss the successes and future for protected areas– an ever timely issue given the threats to wildlife and wild places around the planet. There have been several excellent blogs (see here and here) highlighting the take-away messages of the Congress and the “Promise of Sydney”, a roadmap that will guide the ecological, economic and social investments in parks over the next 10 years.

Here, I’ll focus on climate change – an issue that was front and center at the Congress. “Responding to climate change” comprised an entire stream of plenaries, World Leader Forums, workshops, symposia, roundtables, side events, youth engagement and art pieces over the weeklong congress. To sum up, here are my four takeaways on climate change and protected areas from the World Parks Congress.

Farmland in Flux – Farming may be the most adaptable industry, but are farmers reacting to the right signals?

“I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone through a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.”
– Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food

By Sara S. Moore

I don’t know all the reasons why people go into or stay in farming. I grew up in a rural, isolated farming region of Northern New York where dairy farming was a family tradition, providing a stable (not booming) income for many. It isn’t my impression that farmers go into farming for the large profit margins. But neither do farmers farm in order to stay poor: they are market-savvy. They respond—perhaps first and foremost— to price signals. For example, right now almond prices are soaring because of increased demand (especially from China) and the collapse of bee colonies: even with the ongoing threat of bee colony collapse, the increasing price of almonds translates to fields of row crops being converted to almond orchards.

The other main signal that governs decisions is weather. Farmers watch weather, or the present condition of climate variables and their interactions over the short term, measured in minutes to months; but not necessarily climate, the pattern of weather over the long term, often measured in 30-year averages. Right now the main source of almonds for the world, California, is experiencing an epic drought. 2013 was the driest year in the state’s recorded history. As a result, almond trees are being turned into wood chips. And yet where irrigation is possible the transition from row crops to almond orchards continues, such as in the north of California’s Central Valley, according to Eric Parfrey, Yolo County’s principal planner. It’s a constantly shifting balance of variables, with long-term climate considerations given relatively little weight.

Ensuring Food Production in a Changing Climate

By Katharine Vincent, Kulima Integrated Development Solutions

With COP17-CM7 underway in Durban, agriculture has a high place on the agenda. The world’s population has just passed 7 billion people, and is due to reach 8 billion in 14 years’ time. As if the challenge of population growth is not enough, agriculture is having to adapt to a changing climate. Farmers have long been noticing the changes, and are attempting to respond accordingly. But they are often impeded by barriers that could be removed by effective policy and political commitment. Southern Africa is one region where climate change is projected to have substantial consequences for agriculture.
Variations in climate conditions are nothing new for farmers in southern Africa. The region has long been characterised by variations in temperature and rainfall from year to year (and often within years), punctuated by climate extremes, such as floods and droughts. But recent research by Oxfam and Kulima Integrated Development Solutions with over 200 farmers in southern Africa highlights how recent observed changes are different in magnitude to what they experienced in the past.

Farmers have widely kept observations of increased temperatures and greater rainfall variability, which are consistent with meteorological records, and in-keeping with what is expected under climate change. Hotter conditions year round and changes in the rainy season, such as the rains starting later and finishing earlier, as well as rain falling in more intense bursts, have implications for the growing season and increase the risks of poor yields or crop failure. This affects subsistence farmers and commercial farmers, as well as farm labourers, whose employment is often indirectly dependent upon weather conditions.

Fog Harvesting Provides Relief and Economic Gains for Thirsty Peruvian Villages

By Eliot Levine 

One of ClimatePrep’s primary goals is to highlight unique solutions to some of the toughest challenges presented by climate change. This week we would like to draw attention to a project in Peru that combines an old technique for gathering water with modern technology to develop a low cost solution to dwindling, and costly, water supplies for a suffering hillside community.

The cheapest place to live near Lima is on the steep hills at the edge of the city. The hillside village of Bellavista has attracted people from all over the country, mostly farmers looking for a cheaper way of life. The newcomers who settle in this area build shacks on unclaimed land. If they stay long enough, and plant enough trees to fend of the dangerous landslides, they can obtain government issued title. Unfortunately, the region has a serious lack of freshwater. Lima only gets about 1.5 centimeters a year and as a result the city relies heavily upon glacial melt from the Andes Mountains. Unfortunately, the glaciers have been receding at an alarming rate and according to climate models this trend will only increase. The lack of water available has meant that planting and irrigating the trees has become extremely difficult for longtime residents as well as newcomers. Additionally, the lack of reliable water resources means that the villagers are spending ten times the amount that city dwellers spend on water for cooking, cleaning, and drinking as it must be transported up the hills on a weekly basis. Kai Tiedemann and Anne Lummerich, two German biologists who run Alimón (a small nonprofit that supports Latin American development) have decided to implement a unique solution.

Between June and November, a dense fog sweeps in from the Pacific Ocean and engulfs the steep, dry hillside with the very water the residence so badly need. The challenge resides in harnessing it in some way.

Artificial Glaciers Provide Water to Farmers

By Eliot Levine, WWF-US

The information, graphics, and quotes found in the article below were repurposed from an earlier report on this subject by Scientific American. The original article, with additional pictures can be found here.

In India, the ancient kingdom of Ladakh, between Pakistan, Afghanistan and China, is the highest inhabited region on Earth.

It is also one of the driest, and received no more water a year than the Sahara Desert. But despite this, more than 275 000 people are living in Ladakh, most of them farmers and their families. Due to the weakness of infrastructures in this area, all of them are totally dependents on glaciers and snowmelt to irrigate crops and so to survive. Changes in the regions climate, such as decreasing amounts of precipitation and increasingly warmer winters, has resulted in a severe decrease in the number and size of many of the glaciers. The ones that remain are at higher altitudes, too far from villages, and don’t produce significant melt water to irrigate the population’s crops. Consequently, the inhabitants only have 2 solutions to survive: one is to migrate to megacities, and the other one is to adapt to these new changes in climate. A retired civil engineer, Chewang Norphel, has decided to develop an innovative community-based solution. “Water is the most important thing we have. Without water, we have no food; no life” he says. His solution is both innovative and relatively simple- create an artificial glacier.

Farming with the Titimangsa: Losing Weather (and Water) in Time

By Nikolai Sindorf, WWF-US

In 1997 I went to the western part of Java in Indonesia to perform research on agricultural water management. Java is one of the most densely populated regions and high-yielding rice paddy lands in the world. The focus of my research was how rice farmers dealt technologically and organizationally with ongoing reforms in large, engineered irrigation systems. During this research I met a farmer who had meticulously typed out his traditional cropping calendar. This cropping calendar — a titimangsa — read like a beautiful poem, describing the smell of the dew, the color of the sunset, the touch of the soil, and the observation of insect life cycles.

Based on this titimangsa, the farmer made decisions about when to start land preparation, sowing, harvesting, and other parts of the agricultural cycle in order to support the traditional rate of two to three rice harvests per year. By the late 1990s, farmers had already observed how traditional agricultural decision making was changing to more centrally planned modern irrigation systems, but each village still maintained a traditional water diversion and distribution networks as well. For village farmers, the traditional system added real flexibility to their daily water management.

Titimangsa means “time” in the local Sundanese language (spoken by about a third of Java’s population) but has clear connotations for many important spheres of life for these people. It is similar in this way to the French temps or the Spanish tiempo, which refer to both “weather” and “time”. Perhaps the closest English analog is season, which like titimangsa has calendrical and meteorological implications. A steady shift between time and weather in these meanings has been occurring, where time is becoming increasingly separated from weather. It cannot have been such a long time ago that people began to start losing that combined concept of time as weather. The loss might be related to how developments like insulation, air-conditioning, and heaters have taken the suffering out of weather, at least for a prosperous part of the global population.