Climate Adaptation

Carbon Based Industry and Society

Max Boykoff is examining climate adaptation strategies in urban environments (with Dr. Emily Boyd, Leeds University). In this project they have focused on adaptation to flood events in Mumbai, India, and compare particular events in recent years to flooding in urban areas of the UK, and associated adaptive strategies. This project links with some of Max’s past research that has examined vulnerability and livelihood issues in relation to global climate change and extreme events in Honduras. Read more ...

Colorado Climate Preparedness Project

This Western Water Assessment-funded project addressed the state of Colorado’s progress toward the Governor’s goal of preparing the state to adapt to unavoidable climate change. The primary purpose is to set the stage for the next governor to continue to plan for climate variability and change by providing a catalog of climate vulnerabilities and current activities, personnel, products, and projects from Colorado and other entities along with policy relevant, but not prescriptive, suggestions for future actions. Read more ...

Interactions of Drought and Climate Adaptation (IDCA) for Urban Water

This new project, which was recently funded by the NOAA Sectoral Applications Research Program (SARP), will examine how drought policies interact with both short-term drought and long-term climate change. It will ask whether adjustment today or in the past lead to more resilient systems across climate time scales. The project researchers hypothesize that the more effective a policy becomes in terms of increasing water use efficiency, the more reliant the system becomes on accurate information. Read more ...

Extreme Events and Disasters

Drought, Climate Change, Water Institutions and Society

Since 2002 the Center has undertaken a series of Western Water Assessment-funded projects focused on drought, climate change, and water institutions. In its "Impact of Earlier Spring Snowmelt on Water Rights and Administration" project the Center examined whether the growing mismatch between seasonal water rights and earlier runoff in the Intermountain West has resulted in conflict between supply and demand. Earlier work analyzed the drought coping mechanisms of several Colorado Front Range water providers. Read more ...

Drought Vulnerability Indicators Project

This Western Water Assessment-funded project, “A Drought Impact and Vulnerability Indicator Suite” led by Center director Bill Travis with research assistant Kristin Gangwer, has spent the past year creating a set of indicators for assessing the impacts of drought across different sectors (urban, agricultural, water, recreation), with the goal of developing both research-quality time series that can be normalized and analyzed for trends, and applied indicators that can help managers assess impacts and changing vulnerabilities. Read more ...

Dryness and Desperate Measures: The Implications of Land Tenure on Rocky Mountain Ranchers' Drought Experiences and Behaviors

Ranchers in the Rocky Mountain West navigate a complex land-tenure system comprised of deeded, leased, and public grazing lands. Droughts create management challenges for ranchers across their land holdings and impose physical, social, and economic impacts on the ranching system. However, while some studies have explored western ranchers’ drought experiences and management strategies, none have looked specifically at the role land tenure plays in their drought responses, and most literature on the relationship between land tenure and drought has thus far focused outside the United States. Read more ...

Flood Damage in the United States: A Reanalysis of National Weather Service Estimates

Flood damage has increased in the United States, despite local efforts and federal encouragement to mitigate flood hazards and regulate development in flood-prone areas. To help researchers and policy makers assess national progress in reducing vulnerability to flood hazards, reasonably accurate assessments of flood damage are needed. Yet, accurate accounting for losses has historically received little attention, except in the case of insured property. The flood damage estimates presented in this website are compiled from NWS records and publications, supplemented by reports of other federal and state agencies. The accompanying report includes an evaluation of the accuracy of the estimates and recommendations for users of the data. Read more ...

Media, Ethics and Climate Change

Cultural Politics of Climate Change

Max Boykoff has examined the role of celebrity interventions at the interface with climate science, governance and the everyday (with Dr. Michael K. Goodman, Kings College London, and Dr. Jo Littler, University of Sussex). This examines how the (de)legitimisation of a particular set of “privileged” non nation-state actors influence unfolding considerations and actions to grapple with anthropogenic climate change. Read more ...

Dialing Down: Undoing the Climate Damage

Ben Hale’s research explores the ethics of climate change responses: Geoengineering, Ocean Fertilization, and the Problem of Permissible Pollution; Science, Technology and Human Values; Getting the Bad Out, The Environment; Non-Renewable Resources and the Inevitability of Outcomes; and Private Ownership and Moral Jurisdiction. Read more ...

Inside the Greenhouse

Max Boykoff and Beth Osnes of the CU Theatre Department will hold two "Inside the Greenhouse" events in Spring semester of 2012, held at Macky Auditorium, where high-profile public figures will speak to a live audience about their work on climate initiatives as well as reflect on their role in contemporary climate change. Read more ...

Media Coverage of Climate Change/Global Warming

Monthly updated figure tracking newspaper coverage of climate change or global warming in 50 newspapers across 20 countries and 6 continents. Max Boykoff (University of Colorado) and Maria Mansfield (University of Exeter) continue to track newspaper coverage of climate change or global warming in 50 newspapers across 20 countries and 6 continents. They update this figure on a monthly basis as a resource for journalists, researchers, and others who may be interested in tracking these trends. Max Boykoff also has a book coming out with Cambridge University Press in September 2011 titled Who Speaks for Climate? Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate Change. Read more ...

Energy, Carbon and Technology

Carbon Management and Land Use Decision Making

This NOAA-funded project examined the potential for carbon management through land use decision making in Colorado. Previous work has focused on the technical potential of vegetation or the economic incentives necessary to induce stakeholders to change practices, but thus far there has not been a focus on the ownership pattern across the landscape, and how it might affect whether the potential for additional carbon sequestration on land might be realized. Read more ...

Carbon Management on Public Lands

An interdisciplinary approach to position CU Boulder as a leader in adaptive biogeochemical management of federal rangelands and forests. Working with the San Juan Public Lands Center, Jason Neff and others have developed a carbon research plan intended to make Southwest Colorado a demonstration site for potential federal carbon management policy. The project’s goal is to initiate a joint federal/CU effort to design protocols for, and evaluate the implications of, emerging carbon management plans. Read more ...

Decision Making Under Uncertainty

Science Policy Assessment and Research on Climate

Each day, in the face of deep uncertainty, millions of decisions are made that respond to and influence the behavior of climate. How does the nation's multi-billion dollar investment in climate research affect those decisions? How can the societal value ofthis scientific investment be enhanced? These are the core organizing questions for the NSF-funded project, Science Policy Assessment and Research on Climate (SPARC). Read more ...

Understanding Demand for Climate Adaptation Information Across Scales

As part of the SPARC supplemental award, two new projects are being launched. These projects will focus on the demand function for climate information, as a complement to earlier work focusing on the supply and the reconciling functions. Christine Kirchhoff is a post-doc who will be examining how climate-related information is used in water management contexts across vertical scales, as well as in different contexts across comparable horizontal scales. Read more ...

Toward a Framework for Assessing Stakeholder Needs for Climate Information

In support of NOAA’s new Climate Service and moving toward a more ongoing national assessment function, the WWA was awarded additional funds to support the development of a database of stakeholder needs across the upper and lower Colorado Basin. Together with the Great Lakes and Carolinas RISAS, we will be developing this database from past and current stakeholder reports, meetings, and studies, coding the information for variables of interest. Read more ...

Science and Innovation Policy

Reconciling the Supply of and Demand for Research in the Science of Science and Innovation Policy

Reconciling the Supply of and Demand for Research in the Science of Science and Innovation Policy Workshop, 12-14 May 2009, Oslo, Norway. This workshop brought together academics, practitioners, and those with feet in both worlds to examine how science policy research does (or does not) support the information needs of science policy decision makers. Highlights from the workshop findings will be published as a Policy Sciences Special Issue in 2011. Read more ...