Ray Rasker, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of Headwaters Economics, an independent, non-profit research group whose mission is to improve community development and land management decisions in the West. He earned a Ph.D. from the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, a M.Ag. from Colorado State University, and a B.S. in Wildlife Biology from the University of Washington.
Interview
Let’s start with some background information about how you got to where you are today.
I worked for various non-profits before we started Headwaters Economics about eight years ago. We thought there was niche for an organization that could produce independent, non-partisan research. As part of that, we started working a lot with the Bureau of Land Management and then with the Forest Service, because they had a need for ready access to economic information. We developed some software called the Economic Profile System (EPS), which has become the data standard for these agencies. EPS is now used by 25 universities, the National Park Service, county planning offices, and others. That’s how we started Headwaters, but we work on a whole variety of different things, from climate adaptation to wildfire to energy policy.
How did you take on that climate change adaptation portion of your work – did that come out of the wildfire research?
Yes, it started with some work we did on wildfire. One year, the Montana legislature (which meets every other year) ran out of firefighting funds, and they hired us to analyze the cost to defend private homes from wildfire. We had daily firefighting records and a whole variety of different variables, like terrain, temperature, wind speed, etc. and whether there was a home involved or not. We looked at a sample of fires that involved homes and a sample that didn’t, and we were able to figure out in detail what it costs to defend these homes. Because we also had climate records, we could tell what happened to the costs when it was warmer. We found that when it was 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer in the summertime, the cost of defending homes from fire doubled, and the acreage burned increased by 135%. We’ve since refined the methodology and replicated the study in the Sierra Nevada of California and the State of Oregon, and we’ve got a pretty good sense of the consequences of building more and more homes in harm’s way and the effect of climate change.
Because we also have a variety of tools to help people understand the economy, we were approached by a number of climate adaptation groups who wanted us to be part of their team and work with various communities to help them understand the relationship between their economy, how the local demographics have changed, and how climate change might impact certain vulnerable populations or certain sectors of the economy. That’s how we expanded into doing more and more community-based climate change adaptation work, including mapping socioeconomic and climate trends in the Great Lakes Region and analyzing Missoula County’s potential vulnerabilities to climate change.
The general public sees reports like the and (for the most part) seems to ignore them. Do you think that showing people the local socioeconomic impacts of climate changes could be could be a driver for them to take action? Is that what they need to see, or do catastrophes have to happen, or…? IPCC reports
Well, it depends on your audience. Let’s take one example: say that your audience is the Forest Service. And the Forest Service has identified that the continued building of homes on fire-prone lands is a significant problem. We document that wildland fire costs have gone from about a billion dollars a year on average a decade ago to three billion dollars a year, then we point out that most of the land next to forested federal land is not yet developed, so the potential for more home development could go up significantly. As a sort of seasoning, you sprinkle climate change on top of it, and then you ask yourself what type of response you are going to get when it gets warmer. Based on the studies we’ve done, we’ve been able to say, “You think you have a problem now? Wait until you see more home development and add climate change on top of it, and you have a problem that is many orders of magnitude bigger than what you currently have.”
Then you ask yourself what the agencies are doing about this: How are they anticipating and planning for it, and how are they changing their management prescriptions on fire-prone lands? And you realize that the response is very small in relation to the magnitude of the problem. That opens up the conversation about different policy solutions, and that’s the point where we are right now.
So, people will respond to climate science, but it helps to put it into a very specific context and within the realm of something the organization already does. The Forest Service produces multi-year forest plans, so now they incorporate climate science, and our economic data, into their planning efforts (for example, in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest). In a similar way, it is easier to work climate adaptation into a county comprehensive plan or a community wildfire protection plan than it is to ask the community to develop a separate climate adaptation plan. Work within existing processes.
Are you actively working on a research project on that topic?
Absolutely; we’ve been working the topic of forest fires and ways to reduce risk to homes since we started the organization. Our research has got the attention of top local fire managers. We’re working with one community in Colorado to demonstrate what it would look like if the Forest Service got more involved in land use planning.
Can you tell me the name of the community?
No, not yet. When it’s done, it’ll be a public case study.
Headwaters' 2009 “Solutions to the Rising Costs of Fighting Fires in the Wildland-Urban Interface” suggests many policy-based strategies. When I was reading through the document, I was wondering whether the 10 solutions were translatable to other threats from climate change. Sea level rise came to mind, since it also involves an interface between very different types of environments. Do you think they are translatable, or are the solutions posed in that report very specific to the wildfire issue? report
There are some general principles that translate into other hazards. One of those principles is asking the general question about whether there are any perverse incentives. In other words, who is responsible for the cost of defending homes, whether from wildfire or floods? If we set up a structure whereby the federal government pays for the defense of your home, then the natural behavior we can expect is that people will build anywhere. There’s a strong element of moral hazard, where you’ve set up national policy and you’ve got no local cost responsibility. That’s true whether we’re talking about fire or where people place homes where they’re at risk for flooding.
The policy solution at a very broad scale is to shift that cost responsibility from the federal taxpayer down to the level where the land use decisions are being made. Obviously, land owners and developers are making the land use decisions on privately-owned land, but it’s really under the control of county commissioners. It’s at that level of government where the decision is being made about where the next homes are going to be placed. Whether those homes are placed in harm’s way – again, whether from flood or from fire – depends a lot on what the consequences are to local governments. If a local government is responsible for the cost of defending those homes, they’re going to think differently about where they build those homes than if the taxpayer pays for those costs. So, one policy solution – the stick approach – is to shift the cost responsibility from the federal taxpayer down to local governments. The shifting of the cost is, politically, a very difficult thing to do.
There’s also a carrot approach, and I think the two need to be used simultaneously. The carrot approach is to set up a series of incentives to reward local governments for smarter development. What those incentives look like depends on what we’re talking about. In the floodplain program, there is national legislation (called the National Floodplain Insurance Program), and you have to buy insurance if you’re going to build in the floodplain. If your community does a good job of directing future home development away from floodplain areas, you rate higher in the Community Rating System, and FEMA will give you reduced rates on your insurance.
With wildfire, we don’t have a national insurance requirement. You can build anywhere and you aren’t required to have to have insurance. So, what might a series of incentives for wildfire risk management look like, and what lessons can we take from federal flood risk management programs?
In exchange for a community reducing their risk from wildfire by directly future home development into safer places, one of the rewards could be a grants program whereby communities are eligible to hire land use consultants and people who complete detailed fire cost mapping to help direct the community’s future planning efforts, so that their comprehensive plan and their community wildfire protection plan are the best they could possibly be and help reduce risk from wildfire. Another way you could reward communities is with really detailed risk mapping, which has the added benefit of alerting potential homebuyers about where the potential risks are, which might dissuade them from buying the most dangerous pieces of property.
The other thing you could do is use a rating system as a way to direct management priority to the land surrounding the communities that rate highly. The Forest Service and the BLM have identified a lot of land (about 230 million acres) in need of treatment because it is at risk of danger from wildfire, and they’re only able to get to about 3 million acres per year. With a community rating system, the communities that have done a good job of reducing their risk would also get management priority. There would be a higher chance that any type of controlled burning, prescribed fire, mechanical thinning, fuel reduction – any of those types of activities – would be much more likely to occur in and around a community that rates highly.
These different policy ideas came out of the research on the effects of climate change as it relates to home building on fire prone lands. The discussion’s not just about climate change, but it ends up underscoring the urgency of the issue. If people aren’t paying attention, then you talk about climate change, and suddenly you’ve got their notice. They say, “Wait, just one degree change and 135% increase in acreage burned?! Wow! And scientists are predicting it’s going to get a lot warmer than just 1 degree? I think we’re in trouble.”
It seems like years where there’s a drought and there are worse wildfires, those would be the years that you really want to point that out: You think this is really bad? This is what will happen regularly (and more often) in the future.
Exactly.
With regards to publishing risk maps – does that include projections of future risk, or is that focused more on the current risk as we know it?
This is one of the issues we’re working on in a place called the High Divide, which connects the greater Yellowstone ecosystem to north-central Idaho. There’s the potential for a lot of home development there, and it’s an area that has a large collaborative effort. Ranchers, land owners, environmentalists, and public land managers are all getting together, to try and figure out the threats to the region. Of course, one of the big threats is wildfire.
They are busy applying for federal Land and Water Conservation Fund grants, which they can use to buy the development rights for the most at-risk properties. It’s often cheaper to buy the land or development rights than it is to protect homes from wildfire. With some of the homes in California, for example, it costs $400,000-$600,000 per home to defend them from wildfire.
While they are applying for LWCF funds, we’re doing a build-out analysis. We’re showing them how the pattern of residential development has played out and how it will continue to play out over the next 20 years if they don’t do anything about land use planning. Then we’re showing how much of the future home building is on at-risk properties. Because we know from previous studies what it costs to protect those homes, we can project out what the cost is going to be of continued home building on land that is at-risk for wildfire. That helps strengthen their argument when they go to DC and say that they need some money from LWCF to buy the development rights. It’s an important to show how buying those development rights could save the agencies and local governments a tremendous amount of money.
I also looked at Headwaters’ 2012 publication “Implementing Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons Learned from Ten Examples,” which I thought was a great resource. One of the lessons learned is “Don’t wait to act until strategies are perfected. Plans can and will be revised over time.” At what point are things “good enough”?
There’s a fundamental truth that you’ll eventually run into when you’re working on climate adaptation: The actions that you would take to adapt to climate change are always good actions whether they are framed as climate change adaptation or not. Protecting watersheds and making sure you have viable natural ecosystems, making sure vulnerable populations of people have access to air conditioning and medical care – those are good things, no matter what. If climate change wasn’t an issue, you’d still be working on those issues. What climate change does is add urgency to the issues. It has made a lot of people realize that they need to know exactly where the vulnerable populations are. In Chicago, people have died during heatwaves – elderly, impoverished folks with no access to help. We need to know where the most vulnerable populations live so we can provide resources. Climate change puts a bright light on issues like these and accelerates the urgency to find solutions.
In a lot of communities, we don’t have to wait until we have perfect scientific information before we can move forward with things like climate change adaptation. What’s interesting to me, though – and this is what we were trying to show with the case studies – is the stories that people tell about the way they do climate adaptation. When you look at their website and their publications and you read their stories, they aren’t telling the whole story.
We would see on websites that the County Commission unanimously agreed that they were going to work on climate adaptation. And you call up the staff and you ask, “Really? Just like that, they unanimously agreed?” And you find out that, no, what really happened was there was this guy who kept showing up at all the county commission meetings, and he had these giant maps that showed downtown under water back in the 1940s. And he said “folks, we’ve been here before – downtown is below sea level, and if the climate models are right, we’re not going to be holding back the sea, and our downtown’s going to flood again.” And people laughed him off, and then he’d show up at the next meeting and they’d go, “Oh, damn, there he is again.” He was there over and over, and finally, one person from the Water Department (who happened to have a degree in land use planning) said, “I think they guy’s got something here,” and they started looking at what happens when the sea level rises. They didn’t do their own sea level rise monitoring, they just used data from a city way up the coast. Now they have ordinances in that town saying that refrigeration and heating equipment can’t be on the ground floor and they’ve built up the sea wall. They’re doing these great things, but it was one guy who showed up and was a pain in the butt year after year, and they finally paid attention to him. Those sorts of stories don’t show up on people’s websites. That’s what we were trying to uncover.
After that report, I was asked to moderate a day-long session of Metro in Portland. It was Metro’s first gathering related to climate adaptation. My job was to float around between breakout sessions and report back in the end about what I had found. It was fascinating! You had the roads department – the infrastructure folks – talking about the increased freezing and thawing and how the weather is less predictable due to more oscillations in the weather pattern. Because of that, they’re changing the mixture of what goes into the pavement, and they’re actually budgeting for it and incorporating climate adaptation into their budgeting process. I went over to the Parks & Recreation breakout session, and they were talking about trees and that some of the trees that are dying. Knowing how the climate is going to change, they are replacing the trees with those that are tolerant for what the climate’s going to look like in the next 20 years. Rather than planting the way they were historically, they’re planting toward the future.
Whether it was Health and Human Safety, Road, or Parks – the departments had incorporated climate change adaptation into their day-to-day business and into their budgeting process. That sort of institutionalization of climate change adaptation – incorporating it into your existing planning process, existing budgeting process, even individual performance reviews – to me, that’s what success looks like.
If you look at the climate adaptation world, there’s so much effort being put into, first of all, downscaled climate modeling, and trying to convince everybody that the climate’s changing and getting the science 100% right, which is never going to happen. There’s also a lot of trying to cajole people into writing a climate adaptation plan. What I’m seeing is that the climate modeling that people need is very cursory.
In my area, you can present people with a 30-page, detailed report, or you can present them with bullet points. They’ll pay attention to the bullet points, and the bullet points are: it’s getting warmer; it’s getting less predictable; we have fewer instances of extreme lows and more instances of extreme highs; the line tends to go upward and it’s oscillating; the oscillations are increasing, but it’s an upward oscillation. Then you tell people “remember how every winter you had to plug in your car every night or else your engine froze? Who’s doing that any more these days? Nobody does that anymore. And remember when we never used to have 100 degree days? Now we’re having them periodically.”
People get that. We’ve all noticed a lot less snow in the winter and a lot more in the spring. As a result, we’re getting rain on snow, and instead of the snow staying up in the mountains and becoming a permanent part of the snow pack that trickles out year long, the snow is getting washed off the mountains early in the spring, and we get flooding, and as a result we get drought at the end of the summer. End of story. That’s the climate story. So, then you can move forward in to what we’re going to do to adapt to that. I see a lot of effort going into really detailed climate modeling, but if you’re a part of the road department, your eyes kind of glaze over. What you need to know is that you get more freezing and thawing and it’s cracking your roads and you have more potholes.
When talking to people who work in adaptation, I usually ask what people need to really be able to address climate change, and many have told me that they need downscaled climate models. So, it’s interesting to hear you put less emphasis on the really detailed data and more on the trends and what you’re seeing and incorporating that into existing processes.
The science has to be there; I’m not telling the scientists to go away. But if I’m talking to a very conservative head of the road department in a very conservative county in Montana, I’m not going to bring him an IPCC report and a downscaled climate model. We’ll talk about the fact that they’ve experienced more freezing and thawing, and I’ll say “here’s what they’re doing in some cities – they’re actually adding rubber to their cement mix, and it’s addressing the problem, and it’s also a good way to recycle tires.”
If I start bringing in really detailed graphs and charts, it suddenly becomes a conversation about the science of climate rather than a conversation about what you are doing to deal with the problems that you’re seeing these days that you didn’t have to use to deal with.
In a lot of conversations, it’s not helpful and it doesn’t get anything done to argue the science of climate change, as opposed to discussing what you’re going to do about what you’ve already seen happening.
Exactly. For much of my work, if I come in talking about climate change, it’s a conversation stopper. Doors are closed. When I come in and I talk about a particular element of climate, that’s different. For example, the increasing cost of wildfire and how it’s gone from a billion dollars to three billon in less than a decade – I can get everybody talking about that, across the political spectrum, because we’re seeing it firsthand. And I don’t have to say “Well, do you know that it’s because of climate change?” I mean, I know climate change is making it worse, and for a lot of audiences, I don’t even need to mention that. With the Forest Service, it’s safe ground to mention climate change. With a county commissioner, not so much. You have to be clear about who your audience is.
I think that’s an important “lesson learned” for adaptation – know your audience and how you should talk to them.
Yeah. That’s kind of why we had the lessons learned summaries. We don’t want people to get trapped by the climate change debate, we want them to work directly with the right department and the right staff. Twenty years ago, the big issue was sprawl. The rural west had been discovered by people with lots of money and people were moving in to the outskirts of big cities or they were moving into small towns and they were building all these homes all over the place. A lot of the residential development was expensive, it was ugly, and it was kind of tearing into the quality of life. So, we decided to start working with local governments to help them do better land use planning – it was the growth of the Smart Growth movement.
The lessons we learned from that era are the exact same lessons that apply now with climate adaptation. Who’s the right person in that community – who are the right leaders? What motivates them? What language do they use – are they technocrats, are they rural people? Who is the right messenger – should the scientists be the messenger, or maybe the local rancher who has a lot of weight in the community? All those sorts of techniques that we learned are the same techniques you use for climate adaptation.
Let’s start with some background information about how you got to where you are today.
I worked for various non-profits before we started Headwaters Economics about eight years ago. We thought there was niche for an organization that could produce independent, non-partisan research. As part of that, we started working a lot with the Bureau of Land Management and then with the Forest Service, because they had a need for ready access to economic information. We developed some software called the Economic Profile System (EPS), which has become the data standard for these agencies. EPS is now used by 25 universities, the National Park Service, county planning offices, and others. That’s how we started Headwaters, but we work on a whole variety of different things, from climate adaptation to wildfire to energy policy.
How did you take on that climate change adaptation portion of your work – did that come out of the wildfire research?
Yes, it started with some work we did on wildfire. One year, the Montana legislature (which meets every other year) ran out of firefighting funds, and they hired us to analyze the cost to defend private homes from wildfire. We had daily firefighting records and a whole variety of different variables, like terrain, temperature, wind speed, etc. and whether there was a home involved or not. We looked at a sample of fires that involved homes and a sample that didn’t, and we were able to figure out in detail what it costs to defend these homes. Because we also had climate records, we could tell what happened to the costs when it was warmer. We found that when it was 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer in the summertime, the cost of defending homes from fire doubled, and the acreage burned increased by 135%. We’ve since refined the methodology and replicated the study in the Sierra Nevada of California and the State of Oregon, and we’ve got a pretty good sense of the consequences of building more and more homes in harm’s way and the effect of climate change.
Because we also have a variety of tools to help people understand the economy, we were approached by a number of climate adaptation groups who wanted us to be part of their team and work with various communities to help them understand the relationship between their economy, how the local demographics have changed, and how climate change might impact certain vulnerable populations or certain sectors of the economy. That’s how we expanded into doing more and more community-based climate change adaptation work, including mapping socioeconomic and climate trends in the Great Lakes Region and analyzing Missoula County’s potential vulnerabilities to climate change.
The general public sees reports like the and (for the most part) seems to ignore them. Do you think that showing people the local socioeconomic impacts of climate changes could be could be a driver for them to take action? Is that what they need to see, or do catastrophes have to happen, or…? IPCC reports
Well, it depends on your audience. Let’s take one example: say that your audience is the Forest Service. And the Forest Service has identified that the continued building of homes on fire-prone lands is a significant problem. We document that wildland fire costs have gone from about a billion dollars a year on average a decade ago to three billion dollars a year, then we point out that most of the land next to forested federal land is not yet developed, so the potential for more home development could go up significantly. As a sort of seasoning, you sprinkle climate change on top of it, and then you ask yourself what type of response you are going to get when it gets warmer. Based on the studies we’ve done, we’ve been able to say, “You think you have a problem now? Wait until you see more home development and add climate change on top of it, and you have a problem that is many orders of magnitude bigger than what you currently have.”
Then you ask yourself what the agencies are doing about this: How are they anticipating and planning for it, and how are they changing their management prescriptions on fire-prone lands? And you realize that the response is very small in relation to the magnitude of the problem. That opens up the conversation about different policy solutions, and that’s the point where we are right now.
So, people will respond to climate science, but it helps to put it into a very specific context and within the realm of something the organization already does. The Forest Service produces multi-year forest plans, so now they incorporate climate science, and our economic data, into their planning efforts (for example, in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest). In a similar way, it is easier to work climate adaptation into a county comprehensive plan or a community wildfire protection plan than it is to ask the community to develop a separate climate adaptation plan. Work within existing processes.
Are you actively working on a research project on that topic?
Absolutely; we’ve been working the topic of forest fires and ways to reduce risk to homes since we started the organization. Our research has got the attention of top local fire managers. We’re working with one community in Colorado to demonstrate what it would look like if the Forest Service got more involved in land use planning.
Can you tell me the name of the community?
No, not yet. When it’s done, it’ll be a public case study.
Headwaters' 2009 “Solutions to the Rising Costs of Fighting Fires in the Wildland-Urban Interface” suggests many policy-based strategies. When I was reading through the document, I was wondering whether the 10 solutions were translatable to other threats from climate change. Sea level rise came to mind, since it also involves an interface between very different types of environments. Do you think they are translatable, or are the solutions posed in that report very specific to the wildfire issue? report
There are some general principles that translate into other hazards. One of those principles is asking the general question about whether there are any perverse incentives. In other words, who is responsible for the cost of defending homes, whether from wildfire or floods? If we set up a structure whereby the federal government pays for the defense of your home, then the natural behavior we can expect is that people will build anywhere. There’s a strong element of moral hazard, where you’ve set up national policy and you’ve got no local cost responsibility. That’s true whether we’re talking about fire or where people place homes where they’re at risk for flooding.
The policy solution at a very broad scale is to shift that cost responsibility from the federal taxpayer down to the level where the land use decisions are being made. Obviously, land owners and developers are making the land use decisions on privately-owned land, but it’s really under the control of county commissioners. It’s at that level of government where the decision is being made about where the next homes are going to be placed. Whether those homes are placed in harm’s way – again, whether from flood or from fire – depends a lot on what the consequences are to local governments. If a local government is responsible for the cost of defending those homes, they’re going to think differently about where they build those homes than if the taxpayer pays for those costs. So, one policy solution – the stick approach – is to shift the cost responsibility from the federal taxpayer down to local governments. The shifting of the cost is, politically, a very difficult thing to do.
There’s also a carrot approach, and I think the two need to be used simultaneously. The carrot approach is to set up a series of incentives to reward local governments for smarter development. What those incentives look like depends on what we’re talking about. In the floodplain program, there is national legislation (called the National Floodplain Insurance Program), and you have to buy insurance if you’re going to build in the floodplain. If your community does a good job of directing future home development away from floodplain areas, you rate higher in the Community Rating System, and FEMA will give you reduced rates on your insurance.
With wildfire, we don’t have a national insurance requirement. You can build anywhere and you aren’t required to have to have insurance. So, what might a series of incentives for wildfire risk management look like, and what lessons can we take from federal flood risk management programs?
In exchange for a community reducing their risk from wildfire by directly future home development into safer places, one of the rewards could be a grants program whereby communities are eligible to hire land use consultants and people who complete detailed fire cost mapping to help direct the community’s future planning efforts, so that their comprehensive plan and their community wildfire protection plan are the best they could possibly be and help reduce risk from wildfire. Another way you could reward communities is with really detailed risk mapping, which has the added benefit of alerting potential homebuyers about where the potential risks are, which might dissuade them from buying the most dangerous pieces of property.
The other thing you could do is use a rating system as a way to direct management priority to the land surrounding the communities that rate highly. The Forest Service and the BLM have identified a lot of land (about 230 million acres) in need of treatment because it is at risk of danger from wildfire, and they’re only able to get to about 3 million acres per year. With a community rating system, the communities that have done a good job of reducing their risk would also get management priority. There would be a higher chance that any type of controlled burning, prescribed fire, mechanical thinning, fuel reduction – any of those types of activities – would be much more likely to occur in and around a community that rates highly.
These different policy ideas came out of the research on the effects of climate change as it relates to home building on fire prone lands. The discussion’s not just about climate change, but it ends up underscoring the urgency of the issue. If people aren’t paying attention, then you talk about climate change, and suddenly you’ve got their notice. They say, “Wait, just one degree change and 135% increase in acreage burned?! Wow! And scientists are predicting it’s going to get a lot warmer than just 1 degree? I think we’re in trouble.”
It seems like years where there’s a drought and there are worse wildfires, those would be the years that you really want to point that out: You think this is really bad? This is what will happen regularly (and more often) in the future.
Exactly.
With regards to publishing risk maps – does that include projections of future risk, or is that focused more on the current risk as we know it?
This is one of the issues we’re working on in a place called the High Divide, which connects the greater Yellowstone ecosystem to north-central Idaho. There’s the potential for a lot of home development there, and it’s an area that has a large collaborative effort. Ranchers, land owners, environmentalists, and public land managers are all getting together, to try and figure out the threats to the region. Of course, one of the big threats is wildfire.
They are busy applying for federal Land and Water Conservation Fund grants, which they can use to buy the development rights for the most at-risk properties. It’s often cheaper to buy the land or development rights than it is to protect homes from wildfire. With some of the homes in California, for example, it costs $400,000-$600,000 per home to defend them from wildfire.
While they are applying for LWCF funds, we’re doing a build-out analysis. We’re showing them how the pattern of residential development has played out and how it will continue to play out over the next 20 years if they don’t do anything about land use planning. Then we’re showing how much of the future home building is on at-risk properties. Because we know from previous studies what it costs to protect those homes, we can project out what the cost is going to be of continued home building on land that is at-risk for wildfire. That helps strengthen their argument when they go to DC and say that they need some money from LWCF to buy the development rights. It’s an important to show how buying those development rights could save the agencies and local governments a tremendous amount of money.
I also looked at Headwaters’ 2012 publication “Implementing Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons Learned from Ten Examples,” which I thought was a great resource. One of the lessons learned is “Don’t wait to act until strategies are perfected. Plans can and will be revised over time.” At what point are things “good enough”?
There’s a fundamental truth that you’ll eventually run into when you’re working on climate adaptation: The actions that you would take to adapt to climate change are always good actions whether they are framed as climate change adaptation or not. Protecting watersheds and making sure you have viable natural ecosystems, making sure vulnerable populations of people have access to air conditioning and medical care – those are good things, no matter what. If climate change wasn’t an issue, you’d still be working on those issues. What climate change does is add urgency to the issues. It has made a lot of people realize that they need to know exactly where the vulnerable populations are. In Chicago, people have died during heatwaves – elderly, impoverished folks with no access to help. We need to know where the most vulnerable populations live so we can provide resources. Climate change puts a bright light on issues like these and accelerates the urgency to find solutions.
In a lot of communities, we don’t have to wait until we have perfect scientific information before we can move forward with things like climate change adaptation. What’s interesting to me, though – and this is what we were trying to show with the case studies – is the stories that people tell about the way they do climate adaptation. When you look at their website and their publications and you read their stories, they aren’t telling the whole story.
We would see on websites that the County Commission unanimously agreed that they were going to work on climate adaptation. And you call up the staff and you ask, “Really? Just like that, they unanimously agreed?” And you find out that, no, what really happened was there was this guy who kept showing up at all the county commission meetings, and he had these giant maps that showed downtown under water back in the 1940s. And he said “folks, we’ve been here before – downtown is below sea level, and if the climate models are right, we’re not going to be holding back the sea, and our downtown’s going to flood again.” And people laughed him off, and then he’d show up at the next meeting and they’d go, “Oh, damn, there he is again.” He was there over and over, and finally, one person from the Water Department (who happened to have a degree in land use planning) said, “I think they guy’s got something here,” and they started looking at what happens when the sea level rises. They didn’t do their own sea level rise monitoring, they just used data from a city way up the coast. Now they have ordinances in that town saying that refrigeration and heating equipment can’t be on the ground floor and they’ve built up the sea wall. They’re doing these great things, but it was one guy who showed up and was a pain in the butt year after year, and they finally paid attention to him. Those sorts of stories don’t show up on people’s websites. That’s what we were trying to uncover.
After that report, I was asked to moderate a day-long session of Metro in Portland. It was Metro’s first gathering related to climate adaptation. My job was to float around between breakout sessions and report back in the end about what I had found. It was fascinating! You had the roads department – the infrastructure folks – talking about the increased freezing and thawing and how the weather is less predictable due to more oscillations in the weather pattern. Because of that, they’re changing the mixture of what goes into the pavement, and they’re actually budgeting for it and incorporating climate adaptation into their budgeting process. I went over to the Parks & Recreation breakout session, and they were talking about trees and that some of the trees that are dying. Knowing how the climate is going to change, they are replacing the trees with those that are tolerant for what the climate’s going to look like in the next 20 years. Rather than planting the way they were historically, they’re planting toward the future.
Whether it was Health and Human Safety, Road, or Parks – the departments had incorporated climate change adaptation into their day-to-day business and into their budgeting process. That sort of institutionalization of climate change adaptation – incorporating it into your existing planning process, existing budgeting process, even individual performance reviews – to me, that’s what success looks like.
If you look at the climate adaptation world, there’s so much effort being put into, first of all, downscaled climate modeling, and trying to convince everybody that the climate’s changing and getting the science 100% right, which is never going to happen. There’s also a lot of trying to cajole people into writing a climate adaptation plan. What I’m seeing is that the climate modeling that people need is very cursory.
In my area, you can present people with a 30-page, detailed report, or you can present them with bullet points. They’ll pay attention to the bullet points, and the bullet points are: it’s getting warmer; it’s getting less predictable; we have fewer instances of extreme lows and more instances of extreme highs; the line tends to go upward and it’s oscillating; the oscillations are increasing, but it’s an upward oscillation. Then you tell people “remember how every winter you had to plug in your car every night or else your engine froze? Who’s doing that any more these days? Nobody does that anymore. And remember when we never used to have 100 degree days? Now we’re having them periodically.”
People get that. We’ve all noticed a lot less snow in the winter and a lot more in the spring. As a result, we’re getting rain on snow, and instead of the snow staying up in the mountains and becoming a permanent part of the snow pack that trickles out year long, the snow is getting washed off the mountains early in the spring, and we get flooding, and as a result we get drought at the end of the summer. End of story. That’s the climate story. So, then you can move forward in to what we’re going to do to adapt to that. I see a lot of effort going into really detailed climate modeling, but if you’re a part of the road department, your eyes kind of glaze over. What you need to know is that you get more freezing and thawing and it’s cracking your roads and you have more potholes.
When talking to people who work in adaptation, I usually ask what people need to really be able to address climate change, and many have told me that they need downscaled climate models. So, it’s interesting to hear you put less emphasis on the really detailed data and more on the trends and what you’re seeing and incorporating that into existing processes.
The science has to be there; I’m not telling the scientists to go away. But if I’m talking to a very conservative head of the road department in a very conservative county in Montana, I’m not going to bring him an IPCC report and a downscaled climate model. We’ll talk about the fact that they’ve experienced more freezing and thawing, and I’ll say “here’s what they’re doing in some cities – they’re actually adding rubber to their cement mix, and it’s addressing the problem, and it’s also a good way to recycle tires.”
If I start bringing in really detailed graphs and charts, it suddenly becomes a conversation about the science of climate rather than a conversation about what you are doing to deal with the problems that you’re seeing these days that you didn’t have to use to deal with.
In a lot of conversations, it’s not helpful and it doesn’t get anything done to argue the science of climate change, as opposed to discussing what you’re going to do about what you’ve already seen happening.
Exactly. For much of my work, if I come in talking about climate change, it’s a conversation stopper. Doors are closed. When I come in and I talk about a particular element of climate, that’s different. For example, the increasing cost of wildfire and how it’s gone from a billion dollars to three billon in less than a decade – I can get everybody talking about that, across the political spectrum, because we’re seeing it firsthand. And I don’t have to say “Well, do you know that it’s because of climate change?” I mean, I know climate change is making it worse, and for a lot of audiences, I don’t even need to mention that. With the Forest Service, it’s safe ground to mention climate change. With a county commissioner, not so much. You have to be clear about who your audience is.
I think that’s an important “lesson learned” for adaptation – know your audience and how you should talk to them.
Yeah. That’s kind of why we had the lessons learned summaries. We don’t want people to get trapped by the climate change debate, we want them to work directly with the right department and the right staff. Twenty years ago, the big issue was sprawl. The rural west had been discovered by people with lots of money and people were moving in to the outskirts of big cities or they were moving into small towns and they were building all these homes all over the place. A lot of the residential development was expensive, it was ugly, and it was kind of tearing into the quality of life. So, we decided to start working with local governments to help them do better land use planning – it was the growth of the Smart Growth movement.
The lessons we learned from that era are the exact same lessons that apply now with climate adaptation. Who’s the right person in that community – who are the right leaders? What motivates them? What language do they use – are they technocrats, are they rural people? Who is the right messenger – should the scientists be the messenger, or maybe the local rancher who has a lot of weight in the community? All those sorts of techniques that we learned are the same techniques you use for climate adaptation.