I just returned from the World Conservation Congress (or IUCN, as it is also known) in Barcelona, Spain. There is clearly a circuit of these international conservation and development meetings, with a set of individuals who travel from one meeting to the next. Sadly, I am now in this group. Walking around, recognized many faces from other recent, previous meetings, such as the Stockholm World Water Week (described in Meet the Banks and Meet the Press). Strangely, a few people even recognized me. There is a small hierarchy of what I can only assume are professional conference-goers. And in this hierarchy, there are the Eco Stars: those people known to all, who exist as Names and Contacts. Read More...

Tags: travel, climate adaptation

After 15 hours on planes and in airports, I was finally back in Oregon. The descent was beautiful: deep forests, snow already covering some of the higher mountains, a smoking volcano. We landed and passed quickly into Homeland Security’s border control area. The line was gracefully short. Within 15 minutes, my passport had been stamped, gratuitous questions asked, and I was through and on my way to customs. Normally, I rarely look at my passport, but for some reason I did this time. Read More...

Tags: travel

This entry will be the first in a series over the coming weeks. I have a series of talks and will be attending a number of unrelated events that are focusing on wetlands as a theme, so I will in turn inflict some of these thoughts on you, gentle reader. A serious contradiction exists with protected areas — places likes natural reserves and parks — and climate change. On one hand, these places have been designated because they are “special” and unusual parts of the landscape, having qualities that make them distinct from other places and thus worthy of being a protected area (or PA). Think of this as the spatial element of a PA. On the other hand, these areas are generally special because some mixture of climate, geology, and biological history combine to make them distinct during some window of time. At a different period in either of those three elements, the special qualities may exist in a very different combination at that place, or even over a different range of places. Think of this as the temporal element of a PA. Of all the most common types of PAs found worldwide, wetlands may be the most climate sensitive. And that has very important implications for how we define and protect wetlands PAs everywhere. Read More...

Tags: climate adaptation, wetlands, policy, climate refugia, ramsar

The past ten days in the U.S. have been quite dramatic politically, even by the standard of being near the end of a very long and tight presidential campaign. A financial crisis on a scale with the the beginning of the Great Depression of 1929 looms, our once-close ally Pakistan has exchanged shots with U.S. troops in a border skirmish, and the two presidential candidates have had their first and quite volatile debate. But climate change issues have not gone away, and we’ve seen important statements that carbon dioxide emissions are speeding up particularly in the developing world, and several articles (and an excellent editorial) in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (arguably in the highest tier of general-science journals) review the latest analyses of realistic paths and rates of climate change and suggest that we may need to “start panicking.” Unfortunately, all of these pieces of news are not isolated from one another. Read More...

Tags: climate adaptation, climate mitigation, policy, news

I’m a liberal (in the left-wing North American usage) and a conservationist by almost any standard definition. In fact, my commitment to obtain a conservation-oriented biology PhD is a searing indictment of how serious my intentions are. Given that my area of specialty is in aquatic/freshwater ecology, I might be expected to oppose all non-restoration human modifications of lakes, rivers, and wetlands under any circumstances. In truth, a year ago that was probably an accurate description. But I have recently drawn fire and ire for commenting positively on dams and the people who pay for them. I will attempt to explain myself here. Read More...

Tags: Dams, policy, conservation

A comment to a recent entry on this blog suggested that the single-most important environmental issue of our time was overpopulation. I’d like to take issue with that view here, which has been part of the mainstream of North American (or at least U.S.) conservation dogma for a few decades, though some of the old stalwarts are dying off. Paul Ehrlich put forward the argument most forcefully in books like The Population Bomb (1970): too many people were on the planet, populations were continuing to explode at ever-greater rates, and resources would soon be depleted. As humans reached some K carrying capacity (which we were just a few days or weeks away from), economic and population collapses would follow, mass starvation, warfare, and bad television would ensue. The last part came true, but somehow we’ve continued to struggle past the first two. This little idea is ethnocentric, simplistic, dangerous, and will result in policies that delay constructive action generally and foster North-South and East-West conflict in particular. Overpopulation as a global threat shows (at best) a lack of imagination and general knowledge. At worst, it is racist and forcefully ignores the real issues at stake in our time. There are more nuanced approaches (such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse). But they’re the exception, not the rule.
Read More...

Tags: conservation, policy, philosophy

I’ve heard for years about the “coffin hotels” of Japanese airports: you rent a tiny room in a hotel inside of a terminal in places like Tokyo. Most of the businessmen using these are between long-haul flights. Apparently Brazil’s Sao Paolo has something similar since I’ve checked in. The hotel charges by the hour (five hours comes to about the price of a regular hotel room). It’s about two meters wide, three meters long, and tall enough for me to stand up, assuming I duck under the TV suspended from the ceiling. There’s a mirror, a bunkbed, a wastebasket, and four blank walls. It’s a coffin, unfit for the claustrophobic or those in need of visual stimulation. Sitting in the basement, the only sound comes from the ceiling’s air vent. The warren of hallways leads to showers, a hair salon, and even a small gym. It’s a great idea, even if it provides further disorientation to the travel process. Read More...

Tags: travel, brazil

Much of the emphasis about freshwater climate adaptation boils down to how we manage water through infrastructure like dams and water management plans like environmental flows. But someone has to pay for dams, and large dams are very expensive and complex building projects. In much of the developing parts of the planet, these projects are funded by lFIs: international financial institutions. In practice, this means large development banks. As a biologist, I have had little experience interacting with banks beyond my own checking account. But in the world of water, they’re important. And in Stockholm’s World Water Week, I had some enlightening perspectives on how they are engaging with climate adaptation as part of their business world. Read More...

Tags: climate adaptation, policy, funding

World Water Week in Stockholm is very policy oriented. This year, much of the focus was on sanitation, but two days were spent in a series of linked symposia on water and climate. Talks ranged from more details on emerging climate impacts with the IPCC’s new technical report on water and climate to regional and local adaptation strategies and tactics. Easily two of the most novel experiences for me as a scientist were interacting with the press as an “adaptation expert” and holding some introductory climate adaptation conversations with two international development banks. I’ll write more about the banks later, but the media interaction was a good if difficult experience. Read More...

Tags: media, travel, sweden, policy, climate adaptation

Roughly 30 hours ago, I was rushing to the Stockholm airport. As I boarded the plane, I passed a small window used when guiding the walkway between the plane and the gate. A little sign a few feet in front of the nose of the plane stated the airport name, the city, and the latitude and longitude. Fifty-nine degrees north latitude, I thought. That’s the farthest north I’ve ever stood, at least on the ground. Then I laughed: this flight would carry me in 10 hours to Chicago, where I’d catch an 11-hour flight to Sao Paolo, Brazil, and then a last plane headed to the southwest for two hours to Cuiaba, Brazil, near the Bolivian border. From there, I drive straight south several hours to roughly 25 degrees south latitude, the southern-most point of my life. In basically a day and a half, I’d be spanning 85 degrees of latitude and pushing the extremities of my experience.But the contrasts were not merely of hemisphere and geography. My time in Stockholm was largely spent at a 2,500-person conference where water was only visible on PowerPoint slides and drinking fountains, while the Pantanal is a wetland the size of England and Scotland filled with jaguars, hyacinth macaws, and capybaras. The night sky is bright with stars and is one of the few places with essentially no planes visible in the sky. It has a great deal of water and very few people. Read More...

Tags: europe, travel, south america