- Name: Josh Foster
- Location: Corvallis, Oregon
- Current position: Program Manager, Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (OCCRI)
- Interview date: 11 March 2014
Bio: Josh has over 25 years experience working on climate change science and policy issues in the federal and non-profit sectors, including over 19 years working on climate adaptation. He works with OCCRI as a program manager for both the NOAA-funded Climate Impacts Research Consortium (CIRC) and the Department of Interior-funded regional Climate Science Center. Josh has a BA in International Relations and Environmental Policy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and MA/MES degrees from Yale University in International Relations and in Environmental Management.
Interview
Jenny: When and why did you start working in adaptation?
Josh: Around the time I started out as an undergraduate – 1988 – there was a lot of public focus around climate change. Many of the first world climate conferences were happening or under development. There was a severe drought in the central U.S., with implications that it was related to global warming; Farmers were freaking out. NASA scientist Jim Hansen testified before then-Senator Al Gore’s committee in Congress on the connection between drought and climate change. There was a front page Newsweek story in June 1988 called “life in the greenhouse” with a family under a glass dome. I saw Steve Schneider speak on the role of scientists as advocates to stop global warming, and Senator John Kerry spoke on preventing global warming at my college graduation from UMASS. There was a lot of public discussion about climate change, but there was really no major public debate or conflict about whether it was happening or not.
As an undergraduate student, I wanted to be an environmental advocate, so I was taking a wide variety of interdisciplinary courses. Because of all of the public discussion, it became clear to me that climate warming was a global problem. Taking a wide variety of classes when this was happening was important because I saw climate change as integrating many topics.
I worked through internships at the UN Development Program in New York City and the White House Office on Environmental Quality, and eventually I ended up working in NOAA’s Climate Program Office on a small program management team focused on funding social science research. We primarily funded work on seasonal-to-interannual climate forecasting (e.g., El Niño) and what could be understood from predicting climate trends 3-6 months to a year out. It was tangible way to apply climate science to practicable, climate-related problems in a short enough timescale to be useful for adaptation. You could say something to farmers, fishermen, etc., about what the climate would be in the short-term future, which would then help them to start thinking about the implications of long term climate change and how they could prepare and adapt. We started thinking about how we could translate this type of relevant information about seasonal climate risk and make it useful to decision makers at all time scales and spatial scales.
One approach was to fund the work of university scientists, and get physical, natural, and social scientists together with decision makers. This whole approach has metastasized as a standard way to approach climate risk management: starting with what we know scientifically and working toward understanding the needs of decision-makers with regards to climate information. This type of process doesn’t require you to say whether climate changes are global warming or not – it just means using what we know and the resources we have to deal with the changes that are happening, whether now or in the future.
In 2005, a congressionally earmarked project came across my desk for ICLEI. They wanted to incorporate adaptation planning into their ongoing practices. At this time, the environmental community was still more interested in mitigating climate change via emissions reductions, and adaptation was still a “dirty word,” or seen as giving up the fight to prevent global warming. But, it was clear that we would have to adapt given the inevitability of some degree of warming. The urban sector of elected mayors was not a community NOAA had worked with before; we had mostly worked on agricultural, water, and rural resources, but not with the built environment or infrastructure. We saw this earmark as an opportunity to engage another sector.
I spent a year coaching ICLEI on how to write their initial proposal. Once approved, we eventually brought together elected officials, city managers, and planners with NOAA scientists, and worked on five pilot projects that explored how to incorporate climate into local planning, flood and drought management, etc. What came out of it was one of the first of the urban preparedness guides, which looked at standard activities and time tables, etc., for organizing local climate preparedness and adaptation.
It became clear that adaptation and mitigation needed to be addressed together. The 2007 IPCC report said that the climate was committed to two degrees of warming with a high likelihood. So, even though we still needed to slow down and stop the warming, we also needed to prepare for it. Ultimately, there is more legitimacy now for adaptation than even in the short time since 2005. The conclusion was that adaptation and mitigation strategies need to be complementary, not working against each other . They should both be included in a community’s portfolio of climate actions.
I left NOAA in 2008 to go to CCAP to manage the Urban Leaders Adaptation Initiative (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which provided funding to a number of organizations to explore adaptation in general). We were focused on working with 10 major metropolitan areas around the US. It turned out that cities were pretty well advanced already in terms of preparing for climate change, so our focus became more about helping them share best practices among the network of cities and promote local approaches to adaptation at the state and national policy levels.
This was a time when climate policy was gridlocked in Washington, and we were trying to get climate adaptation into the big congressional climate bills. There was a lot of language on land management, conservation, and wildlife, but little on urban adaptation and infrastructure, which was surprising given that urban areas have lots of people, money, votes, etc. This disparity may have been because the Federal government does not want to impinge on local land-use planning decisions, while they do have a mandate to manage Federal lands and resources—including managing impacts from climate change.
Wildlife and land conservation folks were already organized to promote adaptation within the climate bills, but nobody was linking urban infrastructure investment to climate change. The Urban Leaders Adaptation program proved that the best way to make a case in Washington was to bring examples of what’s already being done, so that’s what we did. CCAP extended the work of getting urban adaptation into policy, and the idea for the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP) came out of these activities. In general, we helped to spread the word about how to link climate adaptation to green infrastructure, sewer management, smart growth, local resilience, etc. We talked about how cities get multiple benefits from actions that help them adapt to climate change and make them more resilient.
Cities and local governments are really the ones who drove the focus on climate change adaptation. They have always been labs of fermentation and experimentation. They have to look at things from a practical perspective, and they have the major tools already. They stepped up and made linkages. Now, a guy who’s trying to get a new sewer system can go to Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and get money because the issue has become “sexy” - partly due to cities having experienced climate impacts (e.g., major floods) themselves that they relate to climate change (also known as triggering events), which drives communities to “soup up” portfolios around climate change.
What are you working on now?
I’m now at OCCRI at Oregon State University, managing two regional applied climate research centers funded by NOAA and the Department of Interior (the program I helped to develop while at NOAA), working to bring climate scientists together with stakeholders to make information more useful for climate impacts management. Both centers form a regional research cluster for Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and western Montana. We’re creating the next generation of climate scenarios by “downscaling” global climate models, getting down toward 4km resolution. We serve the region, but the things we tend to do are more localized. We support climate adaptation, but we don’t train municipalities or give them funding - we work much more in the science realm.
It’s good to see the threads coming together. In Portland, Oregon, some are referring to traditional stormwater management projects as climate adaptation projects. And people working in stormwater management now see themselves as working on climate adaptation and resilience – and we want to spread the word about this connection. People are also referring to adaptation because they are seeing it happen in other countries. There’s a global push that is influencing things here in the US, at both the state and local levels.
What do you see as the most pressing climate change-related issues?
We need to reinvest in urban infrastructure and incorporate or “mainstream” climate change into local decisions, but it will require a public discussion. Everyone will have ideas about the appropriate level of governance and where to spend money. It will be difficult to figure out what we should pay for as the needs metastasize and the available pot of money doesn’t get larger. I think it’s a debate worth having democratically. The need for the discussion shows that the issue is maturing.
The federal government needs to mainstream funding into existing programs. They have been taking a pragmatic approach, but have started to make more money available. In his first term, President Obama was implementing the budget of his predecessor. Now it’s all his agenda, and money is getting out the door and having impact in the climate policy realm.
We need to keep minds focused on the local level. Hurricane Sandy really got people thinking about business continuity, energy continuity, etc. Nature will be the proof in the pudding of whether we are right about preparing to adapt and becoming more resilient. If people lose their lives; homes, infrastructure, businesses, and livelihoods are damaged; areas don’t recover for years after events—it reminds people about the need to prepare. It might focus people on what we should have done better anyway, such as enforcing or amending existing building codes to better withstand climate impacts.
There are going to be legal conflicts: regulatory conflicts, conflicts over buyouts, NFIP rate, etc. There are still challenges to be addressed in the science. The issues are maturing or starting to mature. We’re going to have the same conflicts we had under the environmental laws of the 1970s and 1980s—but again, I think that shows a process maturing from “is it happening” to “what do we do about it?”
At some point, research organizations want to hand off their work to the private sector. We don’t have a strong government capability to provide “climate services” or handle climate resilience, in the same way we have weather services. Engineering firms and consulting firms need to be involved, too, but the challenge is that the business case (i.e., how to pay for or profit from solutions) is not quite there for climate change adaptation yet, and there always will be a role for government, non-profits, etc.
We’re starting to explore ideas - e.g., in working group conversations - about what adaptation success means. What happens when we start to have conflicts? What happens if the mitigation community gets revved up again and pushes adaptation to the side? ASAP is a peer support group - tying us together and allowing us to explore these questions .
What are your favorite adaptation-related resources?
The National Climate Assessment will have a huge number of case studies, which will reiterate that the problem is not just going to go away, and that people are working on it .
I consume a lot of media. For urban adaptation, there are various websites of cities conducting climate planning work (e.g., NYC, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and DC). The Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (CAKE) and Georgetown Climate Center’s Adaptation Clearinghouse bring together case studies and research knowledge. ASAP brings people together with the goal of having a searchable resource.
What does climate change adaptation in the future look like to you?
Climate change adaptation is not all about gloom and doom, but about managing the gloom and doom, and providing people viable solutions. There are solutions we can put in place to adapt to climate change and be resilient.
Hurricanes, droughts, cold snaps, etc., have all gotten people talking about resilience. It’s mind-boggling how fast things are moving. We have jumped right from climate change mitigation to climate resilience, and now it’s almost outstripping mitigation. But at the local level, everybody talks about everything that’s needed, the need for transformation of how society does things. Climate change has been a catalyst for action in conversations we’ve been having for awhile—i.e., since the 1970s environmental movement started. Planning, emergency management, health...they’re all getting tied together.
There’s a groundswell going on - slow and steady, but it’s taking off. Green infrastructure and biomimicry are the future. In 50 years, a city that has adapted to climate change will have transformed into an imitation of the natural environment with green roofs, energy generation, water filtration...like the hobbit shire, but within an urban environment.
Josh: Around the time I started out as an undergraduate – 1988 – there was a lot of public focus around climate change. Many of the first world climate conferences were happening or under development. There was a severe drought in the central U.S., with implications that it was related to global warming; Farmers were freaking out. NASA scientist Jim Hansen testified before then-Senator Al Gore’s committee in Congress on the connection between drought and climate change. There was a front page Newsweek story in June 1988 called “life in the greenhouse” with a family under a glass dome. I saw Steve Schneider speak on the role of scientists as advocates to stop global warming, and Senator John Kerry spoke on preventing global warming at my college graduation from UMASS. There was a lot of public discussion about climate change, but there was really no major public debate or conflict about whether it was happening or not.
As an undergraduate student, I wanted to be an environmental advocate, so I was taking a wide variety of interdisciplinary courses. Because of all of the public discussion, it became clear to me that climate warming was a global problem. Taking a wide variety of classes when this was happening was important because I saw climate change as integrating many topics.
I worked through internships at the UN Development Program in New York City and the White House Office on Environmental Quality, and eventually I ended up working in NOAA’s Climate Program Office on a small program management team focused on funding social science research. We primarily funded work on seasonal-to-interannual climate forecasting (e.g., El Niño) and what could be understood from predicting climate trends 3-6 months to a year out. It was tangible way to apply climate science to practicable, climate-related problems in a short enough timescale to be useful for adaptation. You could say something to farmers, fishermen, etc., about what the climate would be in the short-term future, which would then help them to start thinking about the implications of long term climate change and how they could prepare and adapt. We started thinking about how we could translate this type of relevant information about seasonal climate risk and make it useful to decision makers at all time scales and spatial scales.
One approach was to fund the work of university scientists, and get physical, natural, and social scientists together with decision makers. This whole approach has metastasized as a standard way to approach climate risk management: starting with what we know scientifically and working toward understanding the needs of decision-makers with regards to climate information. This type of process doesn’t require you to say whether climate changes are global warming or not – it just means using what we know and the resources we have to deal with the changes that are happening, whether now or in the future.
In 2005, a congressionally earmarked project came across my desk for ICLEI. They wanted to incorporate adaptation planning into their ongoing practices. At this time, the environmental community was still more interested in mitigating climate change via emissions reductions, and adaptation was still a “dirty word,” or seen as giving up the fight to prevent global warming. But, it was clear that we would have to adapt given the inevitability of some degree of warming. The urban sector of elected mayors was not a community NOAA had worked with before; we had mostly worked on agricultural, water, and rural resources, but not with the built environment or infrastructure. We saw this earmark as an opportunity to engage another sector.
I spent a year coaching ICLEI on how to write their initial proposal. Once approved, we eventually brought together elected officials, city managers, and planners with NOAA scientists, and worked on five pilot projects that explored how to incorporate climate into local planning, flood and drought management, etc. What came out of it was one of the first of the urban preparedness guides, which looked at standard activities and time tables, etc., for organizing local climate preparedness and adaptation.
It became clear that adaptation and mitigation needed to be addressed together. The 2007 IPCC report said that the climate was committed to two degrees of warming with a high likelihood. So, even though we still needed to slow down and stop the warming, we also needed to prepare for it. Ultimately, there is more legitimacy now for adaptation than even in the short time since 2005. The conclusion was that adaptation and mitigation strategies need to be complementary, not working against each other . They should both be included in a community’s portfolio of climate actions.
I left NOAA in 2008 to go to CCAP to manage the Urban Leaders Adaptation Initiative (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which provided funding to a number of organizations to explore adaptation in general). We were focused on working with 10 major metropolitan areas around the US. It turned out that cities were pretty well advanced already in terms of preparing for climate change, so our focus became more about helping them share best practices among the network of cities and promote local approaches to adaptation at the state and national policy levels.
This was a time when climate policy was gridlocked in Washington, and we were trying to get climate adaptation into the big congressional climate bills. There was a lot of language on land management, conservation, and wildlife, but little on urban adaptation and infrastructure, which was surprising given that urban areas have lots of people, money, votes, etc. This disparity may have been because the Federal government does not want to impinge on local land-use planning decisions, while they do have a mandate to manage Federal lands and resources—including managing impacts from climate change.
Wildlife and land conservation folks were already organized to promote adaptation within the climate bills, but nobody was linking urban infrastructure investment to climate change. The Urban Leaders Adaptation program proved that the best way to make a case in Washington was to bring examples of what’s already being done, so that’s what we did. CCAP extended the work of getting urban adaptation into policy, and the idea for the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP) came out of these activities. In general, we helped to spread the word about how to link climate adaptation to green infrastructure, sewer management, smart growth, local resilience, etc. We talked about how cities get multiple benefits from actions that help them adapt to climate change and make them more resilient.
Cities and local governments are really the ones who drove the focus on climate change adaptation. They have always been labs of fermentation and experimentation. They have to look at things from a practical perspective, and they have the major tools already. They stepped up and made linkages. Now, a guy who’s trying to get a new sewer system can go to Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and get money because the issue has become “sexy” - partly due to cities having experienced climate impacts (e.g., major floods) themselves that they relate to climate change (also known as triggering events), which drives communities to “soup up” portfolios around climate change.
What are you working on now?
I’m now at OCCRI at Oregon State University, managing two regional applied climate research centers funded by NOAA and the Department of Interior (the program I helped to develop while at NOAA), working to bring climate scientists together with stakeholders to make information more useful for climate impacts management. Both centers form a regional research cluster for Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and western Montana. We’re creating the next generation of climate scenarios by “downscaling” global climate models, getting down toward 4km resolution. We serve the region, but the things we tend to do are more localized. We support climate adaptation, but we don’t train municipalities or give them funding - we work much more in the science realm.
It’s good to see the threads coming together. In Portland, Oregon, some are referring to traditional stormwater management projects as climate adaptation projects. And people working in stormwater management now see themselves as working on climate adaptation and resilience – and we want to spread the word about this connection. People are also referring to adaptation because they are seeing it happen in other countries. There’s a global push that is influencing things here in the US, at both the state and local levels.
What do you see as the most pressing climate change-related issues?
We need to reinvest in urban infrastructure and incorporate or “mainstream” climate change into local decisions, but it will require a public discussion. Everyone will have ideas about the appropriate level of governance and where to spend money. It will be difficult to figure out what we should pay for as the needs metastasize and the available pot of money doesn’t get larger. I think it’s a debate worth having democratically. The need for the discussion shows that the issue is maturing.
The federal government needs to mainstream funding into existing programs. They have been taking a pragmatic approach, but have started to make more money available. In his first term, President Obama was implementing the budget of his predecessor. Now it’s all his agenda, and money is getting out the door and having impact in the climate policy realm.
We need to keep minds focused on the local level. Hurricane Sandy really got people thinking about business continuity, energy continuity, etc. Nature will be the proof in the pudding of whether we are right about preparing to adapt and becoming more resilient. If people lose their lives; homes, infrastructure, businesses, and livelihoods are damaged; areas don’t recover for years after events—it reminds people about the need to prepare. It might focus people on what we should have done better anyway, such as enforcing or amending existing building codes to better withstand climate impacts.
There are going to be legal conflicts: regulatory conflicts, conflicts over buyouts, NFIP rate, etc. There are still challenges to be addressed in the science. The issues are maturing or starting to mature. We’re going to have the same conflicts we had under the environmental laws of the 1970s and 1980s—but again, I think that shows a process maturing from “is it happening” to “what do we do about it?”
At some point, research organizations want to hand off their work to the private sector. We don’t have a strong government capability to provide “climate services” or handle climate resilience, in the same way we have weather services. Engineering firms and consulting firms need to be involved, too, but the challenge is that the business case (i.e., how to pay for or profit from solutions) is not quite there for climate change adaptation yet, and there always will be a role for government, non-profits, etc.
We’re starting to explore ideas - e.g., in working group conversations - about what adaptation success means. What happens when we start to have conflicts? What happens if the mitigation community gets revved up again and pushes adaptation to the side? ASAP is a peer support group - tying us together and allowing us to explore these questions .
What are your favorite adaptation-related resources?
The National Climate Assessment will have a huge number of case studies, which will reiterate that the problem is not just going to go away, and that people are working on it .
I consume a lot of media. For urban adaptation, there are various websites of cities conducting climate planning work (e.g., NYC, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and DC). The Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (CAKE) and Georgetown Climate Center’s Adaptation Clearinghouse bring together case studies and research knowledge. ASAP brings people together with the goal of having a searchable resource.
What does climate change adaptation in the future look like to you?
Climate change adaptation is not all about gloom and doom, but about managing the gloom and doom, and providing people viable solutions. There are solutions we can put in place to adapt to climate change and be resilient.
Hurricanes, droughts, cold snaps, etc., have all gotten people talking about resilience. It’s mind-boggling how fast things are moving. We have jumped right from climate change mitigation to climate resilience, and now it’s almost outstripping mitigation. But at the local level, everybody talks about everything that’s needed, the need for transformation of how society does things. Climate change has been a catalyst for action in conversations we’ve been having for awhile—i.e., since the 1970s environmental movement started. Planning, emergency management, health...they’re all getting tied together.
There’s a groundswell going on - slow and steady, but it’s taking off. Green infrastructure and biomimicry are the future. In 50 years, a city that has adapted to climate change will have transformed into an imitation of the natural environment with green roofs, energy generation, water filtration...like the hobbit shire, but within an urban environment.