6 Responses to “Final Version of Paper”

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1. John Fleck Says:
   November 22nd, 2005 at 10:00 pm

   I finally got around to reading this, and it’s an excellent paper. But there’s something that I’m either misunderstanding, or that I disagree with.

   You argue that adaptation has been given short shrift in the policy discussion at the international level, and I would agree. But does not the real discussion of adaptation have to happen at more localized levels, and in response to “climate change” defined at its broadest? While a coordinated international response seems required for mitigation to succeed, adaptation policies are being implemented all the time – drought response, water system policies, agricultural policies in response to changing conditions, beach erosion and levee building, all the sorts of mundane responses to the interplay between climate variability and changing human populations. In other words, don’t the two things happen, sort of by necessity, in different spheres.

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2. Roger Pielke Jr. Says:
   November 23rd, 2005 at 6:18 am

   Thanks John for these comments. Two reponses:

   1. Mitigation, at its very basic level of implementation, is just as localized as adaptation. Mitigation occurs in countries, in cities, by companies, in households, etc. The actions by states and municipalities in the US clearly shows this to be the case. The international framework is as you describe a mechanism for coordination much more so than control.

   2. Adaptation also can be coordinated at the international level (and it should be). The UN FCCC includes a focus on adaptation and the UN also has programs on disaster mitigation. Adaptation, like mitigation, occurs in particular locations, but this, like in mitigation, does not preclude that a broad international frameowrk cannot be used to coordinate. As the tsunami and south Asia earthquake indicate (not climate events of course), sometimes disasters are better handled through international coordination.

   One of my arguments is that we start down the wrong path when we think of mitigtaion as a global problem and adaptation as a local problem. There is nothing intrinsic to these issues that makes this so. In fact, strip away the content and the dynamics of adaptation and mitigation decision processes looks very similar (i.e., local actions with cumulative global effects). But this framing is one reason why the FCCC tends to squeeze out adaptation. The reality is that adaptation and mitigation are both local and global at the same time.

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3. Roger Pielke, Jr. Says:
   November 23rd, 2005 at 2:54 pm

   John- This paper just out in Nature is relevant:

   http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7066/abs/438301a.html

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4. John Fleck Says:
   November 23rd, 2005 at 6:06 pm

   Thanks for the Nature citation. I hadn’t seen the paper, but I have been writing about the New Mexico initiative, so I’ve been following the state and regional-level greenhouse gas reductions efforts around the country. I guess I still feel like the distinction I raised above has some validity. The folks in New Mexico working on the mitigation effort see themselves as playing a role in implementing a global policy aimed at reducing climate change. Whether literally or metaphorically, the see themselves as being part of something Kyoto-ish.

   Meanwhile the folks involved in “adaption” don’t really see themselves as being involved in climate change at all. They’re worrying about a set of practical local-level problems involving agriculture and water supply and such. I can imagine, as you discuss above, that there is a useful place for international-level adaption work – your tsunami response analogy makes sense to me. But my own anecdotes suggest that whatever international policies are pursued with respect to adaptation and mitigation, most of the adaptation responses are going to be more on the order of people at local levels say, “Geez, I don’t think we’ll have enough water 20 years from now” and performing either well or poorly as a result. They won’t think of it as a climate change policy response. They’re just trying to make sure they have enough water.

   So while the framework you suggest in this paper would seem to matter for the international-level adaptationist response, it doesn’t matter beans for the local guy dealing with his dams and ditches.

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5. Roger Pielke Jr. Says:
   November 23rd, 2005 at 6:18 pm

   John- Well, that is indeed my point! If you take a close look at most state and municipal responses o climate, they are done note simply because of global climate change, but more direct and immediate local effects. See this post:

   http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/000437more_cart_and_horse.html

   An excerpt:

   Michele Betsill at Colorado State University has studied cities and climate change. She writes in a 2001 paper,

   “The experience of CCP [Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) campaign sponsored by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives] communities indicates that global climate change is most likely to be reframed as a local issue when city officials recognise that actions to control GHG emissions also address other local concerns already on their agendas. Localisation requires the prior existence of a local hook on which to hang the issue of global climate change. Localising global climate change is an important first step in developing a municipal response to global warming; it helps generate political support for reducing local GHG emissions. However, not all communities are able to move from reframing to policy action. There are several institutional barriers that make it difficult for cities to develop and implement policies and programmes for mitigating climate change: the issue does not fit the way most city governments organise themselves; many city governments lack the administrative capacity to monitor their GHG emissions; and there are often budgetary constraints that make it difficult to invest in emissions reduction activities. Ultimately, motivating local action to mitigate global climate change calls for an indirect strategy, focused on the ways in which emissions-producing activities are embedded in broader community concerns (Rayner & Malone, 1997). The primary benefit of an indirect approach is that it avoids many of the political debates about climate change science that have plagued international efforts to address this issue (Sarewitz & Pielke, 2000). Several officials noted that it really does not matter whether global climate change science is credible. Since the emphasis is on how reducing GHG emissions can help the city address other (more pressing) problems, questions of the scientific basis for climate change rarely come up. When and if they do, city officials can easily reply that these are actions they should take anyway.”

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6. Eli Rabett Says:
   November 28th, 2005 at 7:17 pm

   WRT adaptation, I would recommend Under the Weather: Climate, Ecosystems, and Infectious Disease (2001)
   Commission on Geosciences, Environment and Resources http://www.nap.edu/execsumm/0309072786.html to you. I think adaptation is not as neglected as you say.