- Name: Alexander "Sascha" Petersen
- Location: Austin, Texas
- Current position: Founder, Adaptation International & Senior Program Office (ASAP), Institute for Sustainable Communities
- Interview date: 2 June 2014
Bio : Sascha Petersen began working to address climate change in 2005, when he developed regionally-specifi c projections for sea-level rise in Washington State with the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington. In 2010, Sascha co-founded Adaptation International, a firm focused on helping communities prepare for the impacts of climate change. He is also a Senior Program Officer with the Institute for Sustainable Communities, focused on expanding and developing the American Society of Adaptation Professionals. Sascha was the lead author of the Great Plains Region for the recently-released National Climate Assessment, and he has worked with communities across the country to assess climate vulnerability and develop adaptation strategies to increase resilience. He has a Master's degree focusing on climate change science and policy from the University of Washington and a Bachelor's degree in physics from Pomona College.
Interview
Jenny: I know that you have been working in adaptation since around 2005, when you were at the University of Washington. Before that, you developed curriculum and trained astronauts in Houston?
Sascha: Yep.
That’s awesome. What prompted you to make the transition to working in climate change adaptation?
I grew up in Homer, Alaska, which is a ridiculously beautiful little fishing village on the ocean. Across the bay, there are mountains that go straight up to the water. They're snow capped year round and have glaciers coming down around the side. I think that growing up there, I developed a sense of connection to the environment.
I really enjoyed my job at the Johnson Space Center, where I was the space station instructor for the electrical and thermal systems of the space station. I knew a lot about those two aspects and the astronauts and cosmonauts needed to know a little bit about everything. We would develop curriculum and run simulations around those systems to teach the astronauts: “If this piece breaks, it's not a big deal, because you have two others and the system automatically recovers. But, if this other piece breaks, it's a really big deal, and you need to do this and this and this in order to be safe.” We could help them understand what they needed to know about those two components of the bigger system operation.
I liked the training aspect and using my science knowledge (I have an undergraduate degree in physics), but I felt like I could use that science foundation in a broader, more globally-applicable, context. I'm still a huge fan of the space program, and I think manned space flight is really important, but there are these other, larger needs facing humanity.
I started looking at how I could apply science-based information effectively and efficiently in the broader environmental context, and I came across the issue of climate change. It seemed like there was no better way to be involved in something that will continue to be an issue for the next number of decades, for the rest of my career. It's an exploration of new territory and making new solutions.
Adaptation also allows me to go back into that translational space that I was working in at NASA and help bridge the gap between the science and the policy worlds. There are great climate scientists and there are a lot of people working on urban planning and municipal policy, but they're not speaking the same language most of the time. You need people who can translate between those two to make sure the science is useful and usable by those other individuals.
I assume that interest in translation of information led to your work with Adaptation International, which you co-founded in 2010. With them, you're focused on helping communities prepare for climate change and bridging the gap between climate science and action, and the website notes that you all have experience translating climate science so it’s useful and actionable for local decision makers. Do you have any specific examples or some major lessons learned for how you can bridge that gap between science and policy for decision makers? Everyone that I’ve talked to for this project has mentioned the need for translation and people who can do it effectively.
Oh, good. [Laughs]
One piece to fill in is that after graduate school, where I worked on sea-level rise and adaptation response options in the Pacific Northwest, I worked with the City of Austin’s climate program for about three years. That work was primarily mitigation-focused; we just barely started to get the ball rolling on adaptation while I was there. I felt that the need for adaptation was urgent - is urgent - and there weren't enough people working in that space to help move it forward, whereas I felt like we were getting traction on the mitigation side. So, that adaptation piece is really where my passion is and where I felt that I could provide the most value.
One example of being effective in that translation space comes from a recent project that Adaptation International did with the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe, on the Olympic Peninsula. In working with them to frame the project, we didn’t take the traditional approach of first downscaling climate models to create information then showing the decision makers those projections, then starting to talk about the vulnerabilities. Instead, we shifted it around and started by working collaboratively with the community to identify their key areas of concern - the things that matter most to their community, that they’ve already started to see affected by environmental changes. Then, we looked at how climate change plays into that. So, by flipping that around, I think we made the climate information more useful to them, and that made it resonate more because we’re already talking about the things that they identified as their key areas of concern.
Some of the key areas of concern were things that you would probably expect for a tribal community in the Pacific Northwest. Salmon and shellfish have economic, cultural, and social significance for the community, so we looked at how those areas would be impacted. I think that framing of first asking them to identify the things they cared about and then looking at how those things are affected provides a better foundation for discussing what you are going to do about the impacts.
Do you think that approach would work at a larger scale? You’ve worked with Austin and Seattle - at that scale, it seems like you could get a lot of different groups telling you that a lot of very different things are very important. When you’re working with a variety of communities together at a larger scale, do you think that requires looking at the projections first - the traditional approach that you mention - or do you think you can still take the ground-up approach and ask what’s important to the communities and then look at what’s affected?
I think it might be a hybrid approach in a larger, more diverse community, where you go in with a general sense of what’s probably going to happen with climate change and then you identify, within the affected areas, what are the things you care about most, and then come back and refine your projections about what’s going to happen by focusing on how they’ll be impacted.
For the National Climate Assessment, we did that on a broader, regional scale, looking at the key messages for each region. Frequently, that would tap into things that the region is already concerned about or already identifies as their potential vulnerabilities during extreme weather events or chronic stressors. I was the lead author for the Great Plains Region for the Assessment. Water resource availability and the potential future competition between sectors for that water are already starting to be an issue. We looked at how climate change will affect those areas, by either making the issues potentially worse or better or more stressful on the vulnerable populations in the region that are already vulnerable to extreme weather and are likely to become more vulnerable.
So, the bottom up approach is especially tangible at a community-specific scale, but can also be useful at a broader scale.
You’ve worked with several communities, at a variety of scales. I’m wondering if there are any opportunities that you think planning efforts should be jumping on more readily. Acknowledging that they all have very different impacts that they’re facing, have there been any common barriers that these places are having to address as they move forward in planning and implementing adaptation plans?
One of the things I’ve seen in the field is that there’s still a large gap between the planning/assessing stage and moving to implementation or taking action on those issues. There are a number of communities who have started thinking about the issue and have only made it as far as doing a climate vulnerability assessment or identifying potential impacts, or maybe some high-level adaptation strategies, but there’s still a gap in moving to the implementation piece. There are a couple of exceptions to that. I think some communities are dealing with extreme weather events already just because they have to, and not necessarily as part of a big climate vulnerability assessment.
In the south central U.S., we’re in the 3rd (almost 4th) year of an ongoing drought. In Texas, you can’t really talk about climate change at the state level, but you can talk about water availability and water supply issues in a different way than you could three years ago before the drought happened. They’re beginning to take action to reduce their risk from a continued drought or future droughts, and that will be useful in helping them prepare for climate change, but they're not necessarily calling it “climate preparedness” or “building resilience” or “adaptation”.
At the regional scale, I think there’s a really big opportunity to expand collaboration. It has worked in several parts of the country. There’s the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, which is a collaboration of four counties.The primary motivator for the SE Florida Regional Climate Compact was the different sea-level rise projections across the different counties. Each county was talking with their congressman, or they were looking at issues, and all four counties had different sea-level rise projections they were looking to plan for, and they were like, “wait a second...” There might be some vertical land movement differences, but there’s not going to be that much variation across county boundaries, so they all came together and created a sea-level rise task force and determined the set of projections they would all work from. They’ve now updated the projections. Providing that consistency across political jurisdictions seems critical.
There’s also the Western Adaptation Alliance, which is a group of 13 cities across the desert south, from the intermountain west (like Boulder) down through the south west (like Tucson and Phoenix) that are looking at shared climate impacts of concern and sharing promising practices and lessons learned across that scale. In California, there are larger metro regions with climate collaboratives (for example, San Diego, LA, Sacramento, and the Bay Area), and they’re all working at the regional scale to coordinate efforts and share information. I think there’s a lot of promise in the type of approach that encourages local communities to work with their neighbors in order to develop solutions.
You’re working with the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) as a Senior Program Officer. Am I correct that your primary focus is working with the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP) and building it into an organization that can really support the people working in adaptation across the US?
Yes - ISC is basically serving to incubate ASAP as it gets off the ground. It provides the non-profit structure so that we can focus specifically on the content for ASAP and make sure that’s functioning before having to worry about the administrative side of creating a non-profit. The idea is that ISC provides that structure now, and then - a year from now, or a year and a half, or whatever makes sense - ASAP would spin off and become its own, standalone organization.
How many members does ASAP have right now?
We currently have a little over 400 members, and they are pretty broadly distributed geographically and across sectors. The membership stretches all the way from Alaska to Maine and Florida to Hawaii - there’s really a pretty broad geographic section. Sectorally, about 35% are government (federal, state, local, tribal government reps), 30% are non-profit reps, 20% are affiliated with academic institutions, and a little more than 15% are from the private sector. But I don’t know if that’ll necessarily be representative of the split as it rolls out.
We just launched a new website - . It’s really easy to join - you just have to click the “Join Us” button and then register and create a profile on the site. adaptationprofessionals.org
With the generous support of the Kresge Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, there are no member fees at least for the next year. We’ll be looking to get people signed up and build off member suggestions; we want it to be a member-driven organization. Over the course of the next year, we’ll fine-tune the benefits and services that ASAP provides in order to make it as valuable as possible in the field of adaptation for the people who are members.
Why do you think it’s so important for the field to have this group? Is it primarily a networking group, information sharing group, etc? It can obviously have a lot of functions, but are there certain functions that ASAP is focused on providing?
We have two key pillars - to connect and support people who are building climate resilience across the country - and the exact form of what we do in both of those pillars is still a little bit to be determined.
What we’ve found is that there's a lot of valuable information out there about climate change and climate impacts. There are reports on what people are doing to adapt, and there are some really great clearinghouses and libraries of that information. For example, there’s the Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (CAKE) and Georgetown Climate Center’s Adaptation Clearinghouse. But there’s no single organization at the national scale that’s focused on the people who are doing the work. And I think if we’re going to be successful, then we need to support the people who are going to drive the change that helps build resilient communities.
We want to build a professional network so that people can draw on others' experience. We want to share the policy and practices of what’s working and not working in building climate resilience. It’s that connection between people and sharing information so that will move the field forward and hopefully more quickly than if we continued in isolation.
You don’t want people to keep making the same mistakes, so you help them to get better information.
Especially in these early stages. In some ways, we’re running a huge number of experiments with the different communities who are trying to address this issue and we need to learn from those experiments and share information and build on what’s working and move away from what’s not working. Hopefully ASAP will help provide a platform to do that.
Another thing I’ve been hearing is that there needs to be more integration between adaptation and mitigation. Are any of the ASAP working groups focused on that or thinking about how that might be part of the ASAP network?
That's great question that we haven't yet focused on. If ASAP is focused on the climate preparedness side, we can bring that piece of the discussion up to the level of the mitigation discussion and look at how they integrate. I definitely agree that they should no longer be thought of as either/or options; we need to be doing both simultaneously. There has already been a lot of great progress made on the greenhouse gas reduction side whereas the adaptation side is still a little bit earlier in that development curve. And it’s different in adaptation in that you can’t just have a Top 10 list of “Here are the 10 things you need to do to your building to reduce energy costs or energy usage or greenhouse gas emissions.” It’s a little more nuanced, but there are ASAP members who have been talking about that.
Going back to the website, I noticed you can categorize yourself into interest areas. Are there other new functions on the website, or anything that might be added in the future for people who add on their profile?
There are definitely opportunities for growth and change based on input from the membership. We’re rolling it out as a soft launch at this point, and we’re looking for feedback into what we can strengthen and improve.
The interest areas are going to do two things, one of which is probably apparent already. There’s a member-specific dashboard, so as new members join and match your interest, they’ll be brought into your member dashboard and you’ll be alerted that they have joined and share your interest in wildfire or public policy or urban planning (or whatever your interest areas are) so you could potentially connect with them.
The other piece that’s still coming and isn’t quite in there yet is integration of information resources by curating and tailoring them based on your interests. We’ll be developing a partnership with the Georgetown Adaptation Clearinghouse, and other content providers, so that as new information is added into their databases that matches your interests, you’ll get a little summary of that information and it’ll be displayed on your dashboard. Then you can go to their website to read the details or find the full report.
ASAP is really trying to work more collaboratively within the adaptation space. We don’t want to duplicate efforts that are already on the ground, but we want to find ways to add value for the membership and professionals working in the field to build off of the existing resources.
Seems to be like a Google Reader sort of thing - you can sign up for a different interest areas, and it will tell you when there’s something new that has been released in your interest areas.
Right, as opposed to having to go to the clearinghouse and search through it and try find resources that are valuable to you and trying to remember to do that on a weekly basis.
The other thing that we’ll continue to build up are the affinity groups that are focused on some cross-cutting themes and issues in adaptation. There are five groups and they allow for a deeper level of conversion between members who are interested in that particular topic (whether it’s communication, policy, research, etc). The new website will allow for the co-creation of working documents and things like that within the groups.
One area we’re exploring is a Prize for Progress in adaptation. Over the course of the next year, we’re going to use the expertise of the membership to think about how and where we can award the Prize - what would it look like, what are the categories, what are the criteria, and how do projects/people/locations get nominated. Then, at next year’s National Adaptation Forum (which will be in St. Louis in May 2015), we’ll present the finalists and winners.
I think what will be cool about that is that it’ll be a peer-to-peer award. It’ll be the ASAP membership who will determine the criteria and then ultimately decide on the winners. It’ll give us an opportunity in the field to celebrate some successes. Frequently, in climate change, everyone’s focused on the dire potential consequences of it and we don’t do enough to celebrate the opportunity and the progress we’re making in certain key areas. So, I’d love to bring that piece to the National Adaptation Forum. It’s not as though these winners demonstrate the one-and-only way to adapt to climate change, but it’ll still highlight some of those promising practices and demonstrate that we’re making progress, and hopefully build off of them as we keep getting more resilient.
Is there any other resource or tool or service that you don’t have or that doesn’t exist that you think would be valuable for people looking to address the impacts of climate change? For example, in speaking with someone recently, they mentioned that they needed better mapping tools for local governments.
I feel like there is broadly enough information on climate change and impacts out there, but we need a suite of tools to help get that information into the hands of decision makers when they need it, to help them take action and move forward in building resilience. Sometimes the tools are available, but they’re at too big of a scale or they’re too broad. If a decision maker is looking for information about climate impacts because they’re worried about flooding in the local context, how do we get climate information to them at the point where they're developing a floodplain ordinance for their community, so that they can incorporate climate change as they plan for the future? There’s a lot of information out there, it’s finding out ways to filter it and distribute and get it to people when they need it that is a broad need across the field.
Data seems to be a problem, both in terms of getting it to people easily and people who have data getting it out. There’s a lot of data gathering going on, but it’s not being used for anything and the data could be put to work in a much more useful way.
I definitely agree. And we need to find ways to incorporate learning into our climate preparedness work, so that as we develop processes to increase our resilience (whether it’s creating flood risk zones or whatever it is), we ensure that there is some monitoring of how successful that is, and then have opportunities to adjust it. If we find out that climate changes are happening faster or slower than we expected, we want to be able to fine-tune our practices. It’s not a “one-and-done,” but a continuous circle, and we have to start thinking that way as we do our planning.
It’s a non-trivial change to make in the way we do planning or create policies. We’re used to setting a specific standard and then requiring people to meet it. So, how do we mainstream thinking about climate impacts into what we’re doing, but then also allow some opportunities for that threshold or number to change over time more efficiently?
Right. You put standards into place so that you have a rigid benchmark in place to work with, and then if you’re talking about changing the standards too often, it kind of throws off what it means to be a standard, I guess.
It’s just going to take a big shift. Hopefully some incremental steps will get us there.
Is there anything else you’d like to share? Anything you think I should have asked?
I’ll just say that I’m eternally optimistic – that’s how I can continue to work in this field. I am optimistic about the state of adaptation and the people who are building resilience across the U.S. I think we’re almost at an inflection point, where a professional society like ASAP could really take hold. The circle of people involved in climate preparedness and adaptation is going to expand dramatically over course of the next couple of years, and that’s definitely what we need in order to be successful.
Interview
Jenny: I know that you have been working in adaptation since around 2005, when you were at the University of Washington. Before that, you developed curriculum and trained astronauts in Houston?
Sascha: Yep.
That’s awesome. What prompted you to make the transition to working in climate change adaptation?
I grew up in Homer, Alaska, which is a ridiculously beautiful little fishing village on the ocean. Across the bay, there are mountains that go straight up to the water. They're snow capped year round and have glaciers coming down around the side. I think that growing up there, I developed a sense of connection to the environment.
I really enjoyed my job at the Johnson Space Center, where I was the space station instructor for the electrical and thermal systems of the space station. I knew a lot about those two aspects and the astronauts and cosmonauts needed to know a little bit about everything. We would develop curriculum and run simulations around those systems to teach the astronauts: “If this piece breaks, it's not a big deal, because you have two others and the system automatically recovers. But, if this other piece breaks, it's a really big deal, and you need to do this and this and this in order to be safe.” We could help them understand what they needed to know about those two components of the bigger system operation.
I liked the training aspect and using my science knowledge (I have an undergraduate degree in physics), but I felt like I could use that science foundation in a broader, more globally-applicable, context. I'm still a huge fan of the space program, and I think manned space flight is really important, but there are these other, larger needs facing humanity.
I started looking at how I could apply science-based information effectively and efficiently in the broader environmental context, and I came across the issue of climate change. It seemed like there was no better way to be involved in something that will continue to be an issue for the next number of decades, for the rest of my career. It's an exploration of new territory and making new solutions.
Adaptation also allows me to go back into that translational space that I was working in at NASA and help bridge the gap between the science and the policy worlds. There are great climate scientists and there are a lot of people working on urban planning and municipal policy, but they're not speaking the same language most of the time. You need people who can translate between those two to make sure the science is useful and usable by those other individuals.
I assume that interest in translation of information led to your work with Adaptation International, which you co-founded in 2010. With them, you're focused on helping communities prepare for climate change and bridging the gap between climate science and action, and the website notes that you all have experience translating climate science so it’s useful and actionable for local decision makers. Do you have any specific examples or some major lessons learned for how you can bridge that gap between science and policy for decision makers? Everyone that I’ve talked to for this project has mentioned the need for translation and people who can do it effectively.
Oh, good. [Laughs]
One piece to fill in is that after graduate school, where I worked on sea-level rise and adaptation response options in the Pacific Northwest, I worked with the City of Austin’s climate program for about three years. That work was primarily mitigation-focused; we just barely started to get the ball rolling on adaptation while I was there. I felt that the need for adaptation was urgent - is urgent - and there weren't enough people working in that space to help move it forward, whereas I felt like we were getting traction on the mitigation side. So, that adaptation piece is really where my passion is and where I felt that I could provide the most value.
One example of being effective in that translation space comes from a recent project that Adaptation International did with the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe, on the Olympic Peninsula. In working with them to frame the project, we didn’t take the traditional approach of first downscaling climate models to create information then showing the decision makers those projections, then starting to talk about the vulnerabilities. Instead, we shifted it around and started by working collaboratively with the community to identify their key areas of concern - the things that matter most to their community, that they’ve already started to see affected by environmental changes. Then, we looked at how climate change plays into that. So, by flipping that around, I think we made the climate information more useful to them, and that made it resonate more because we’re already talking about the things that they identified as their key areas of concern.
Some of the key areas of concern were things that you would probably expect for a tribal community in the Pacific Northwest. Salmon and shellfish have economic, cultural, and social significance for the community, so we looked at how those areas would be impacted. I think that framing of first asking them to identify the things they cared about and then looking at how those things are affected provides a better foundation for discussing what you are going to do about the impacts.
Do you think that approach would work at a larger scale? You’ve worked with Austin and Seattle - at that scale, it seems like you could get a lot of different groups telling you that a lot of very different things are very important. When you’re working with a variety of communities together at a larger scale, do you think that requires looking at the projections first - the traditional approach that you mention - or do you think you can still take the ground-up approach and ask what’s important to the communities and then look at what’s affected?
I think it might be a hybrid approach in a larger, more diverse community, where you go in with a general sense of what’s probably going to happen with climate change and then you identify, within the affected areas, what are the things you care about most, and then come back and refine your projections about what’s going to happen by focusing on how they’ll be impacted.
For the National Climate Assessment, we did that on a broader, regional scale, looking at the key messages for each region. Frequently, that would tap into things that the region is already concerned about or already identifies as their potential vulnerabilities during extreme weather events or chronic stressors. I was the lead author for the Great Plains Region for the Assessment. Water resource availability and the potential future competition between sectors for that water are already starting to be an issue. We looked at how climate change will affect those areas, by either making the issues potentially worse or better or more stressful on the vulnerable populations in the region that are already vulnerable to extreme weather and are likely to become more vulnerable.
So, the bottom up approach is especially tangible at a community-specific scale, but can also be useful at a broader scale.
You’ve worked with several communities, at a variety of scales. I’m wondering if there are any opportunities that you think planning efforts should be jumping on more readily. Acknowledging that they all have very different impacts that they’re facing, have there been any common barriers that these places are having to address as they move forward in planning and implementing adaptation plans?
One of the things I’ve seen in the field is that there’s still a large gap between the planning/assessing stage and moving to implementation or taking action on those issues. There are a number of communities who have started thinking about the issue and have only made it as far as doing a climate vulnerability assessment or identifying potential impacts, or maybe some high-level adaptation strategies, but there’s still a gap in moving to the implementation piece. There are a couple of exceptions to that. I think some communities are dealing with extreme weather events already just because they have to, and not necessarily as part of a big climate vulnerability assessment.
In the south central U.S., we’re in the 3rd (almost 4th) year of an ongoing drought. In Texas, you can’t really talk about climate change at the state level, but you can talk about water availability and water supply issues in a different way than you could three years ago before the drought happened. They’re beginning to take action to reduce their risk from a continued drought or future droughts, and that will be useful in helping them prepare for climate change, but they're not necessarily calling it “climate preparedness” or “building resilience” or “adaptation”.
At the regional scale, I think there’s a really big opportunity to expand collaboration. It has worked in several parts of the country. There’s the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, which is a collaboration of four counties.The primary motivator for the SE Florida Regional Climate Compact was the different sea-level rise projections across the different counties. Each county was talking with their congressman, or they were looking at issues, and all four counties had different sea-level rise projections they were looking to plan for, and they were like, “wait a second...” There might be some vertical land movement differences, but there’s not going to be that much variation across county boundaries, so they all came together and created a sea-level rise task force and determined the set of projections they would all work from. They’ve now updated the projections. Providing that consistency across political jurisdictions seems critical.
There’s also the Western Adaptation Alliance, which is a group of 13 cities across the desert south, from the intermountain west (like Boulder) down through the south west (like Tucson and Phoenix) that are looking at shared climate impacts of concern and sharing promising practices and lessons learned across that scale. In California, there are larger metro regions with climate collaboratives (for example, San Diego, LA, Sacramento, and the Bay Area), and they’re all working at the regional scale to coordinate efforts and share information. I think there’s a lot of promise in the type of approach that encourages local communities to work with their neighbors in order to develop solutions.
You’re working with the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) as a Senior Program Officer. Am I correct that your primary focus is working with the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP) and building it into an organization that can really support the people working in adaptation across the US?
Yes - ISC is basically serving to incubate ASAP as it gets off the ground. It provides the non-profit structure so that we can focus specifically on the content for ASAP and make sure that’s functioning before having to worry about the administrative side of creating a non-profit. The idea is that ISC provides that structure now, and then - a year from now, or a year and a half, or whatever makes sense - ASAP would spin off and become its own, standalone organization.
How many members does ASAP have right now?
We currently have a little over 400 members, and they are pretty broadly distributed geographically and across sectors. The membership stretches all the way from Alaska to Maine and Florida to Hawaii - there’s really a pretty broad geographic section. Sectorally, about 35% are government (federal, state, local, tribal government reps), 30% are non-profit reps, 20% are affiliated with academic institutions, and a little more than 15% are from the private sector. But I don’t know if that’ll necessarily be representative of the split as it rolls out.
We just launched a new website - . It’s really easy to join - you just have to click the “Join Us” button and then register and create a profile on the site. adaptationprofessionals.org
With the generous support of the Kresge Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, there are no member fees at least for the next year. We’ll be looking to get people signed up and build off member suggestions; we want it to be a member-driven organization. Over the course of the next year, we’ll fine-tune the benefits and services that ASAP provides in order to make it as valuable as possible in the field of adaptation for the people who are members.
Why do you think it’s so important for the field to have this group? Is it primarily a networking group, information sharing group, etc? It can obviously have a lot of functions, but are there certain functions that ASAP is focused on providing?
We have two key pillars - to connect and support people who are building climate resilience across the country - and the exact form of what we do in both of those pillars is still a little bit to be determined.
What we’ve found is that there's a lot of valuable information out there about climate change and climate impacts. There are reports on what people are doing to adapt, and there are some really great clearinghouses and libraries of that information. For example, there’s the Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (CAKE) and Georgetown Climate Center’s Adaptation Clearinghouse. But there’s no single organization at the national scale that’s focused on the people who are doing the work. And I think if we’re going to be successful, then we need to support the people who are going to drive the change that helps build resilient communities.
We want to build a professional network so that people can draw on others' experience. We want to share the policy and practices of what’s working and not working in building climate resilience. It’s that connection between people and sharing information so that will move the field forward and hopefully more quickly than if we continued in isolation.
You don’t want people to keep making the same mistakes, so you help them to get better information.
Especially in these early stages. In some ways, we’re running a huge number of experiments with the different communities who are trying to address this issue and we need to learn from those experiments and share information and build on what’s working and move away from what’s not working. Hopefully ASAP will help provide a platform to do that.
Another thing I’ve been hearing is that there needs to be more integration between adaptation and mitigation. Are any of the ASAP working groups focused on that or thinking about how that might be part of the ASAP network?
That's great question that we haven't yet focused on. If ASAP is focused on the climate preparedness side, we can bring that piece of the discussion up to the level of the mitigation discussion and look at how they integrate. I definitely agree that they should no longer be thought of as either/or options; we need to be doing both simultaneously. There has already been a lot of great progress made on the greenhouse gas reduction side whereas the adaptation side is still a little bit earlier in that development curve. And it’s different in adaptation in that you can’t just have a Top 10 list of “Here are the 10 things you need to do to your building to reduce energy costs or energy usage or greenhouse gas emissions.” It’s a little more nuanced, but there are ASAP members who have been talking about that.
Going back to the website, I noticed you can categorize yourself into interest areas. Are there other new functions on the website, or anything that might be added in the future for people who add on their profile?
There are definitely opportunities for growth and change based on input from the membership. We’re rolling it out as a soft launch at this point, and we’re looking for feedback into what we can strengthen and improve.
The interest areas are going to do two things, one of which is probably apparent already. There’s a member-specific dashboard, so as new members join and match your interest, they’ll be brought into your member dashboard and you’ll be alerted that they have joined and share your interest in wildfire or public policy or urban planning (or whatever your interest areas are) so you could potentially connect with them.
The other piece that’s still coming and isn’t quite in there yet is integration of information resources by curating and tailoring them based on your interests. We’ll be developing a partnership with the Georgetown Adaptation Clearinghouse, and other content providers, so that as new information is added into their databases that matches your interests, you’ll get a little summary of that information and it’ll be displayed on your dashboard. Then you can go to their website to read the details or find the full report.
ASAP is really trying to work more collaboratively within the adaptation space. We don’t want to duplicate efforts that are already on the ground, but we want to find ways to add value for the membership and professionals working in the field to build off of the existing resources.
Seems to be like a Google Reader sort of thing - you can sign up for a different interest areas, and it will tell you when there’s something new that has been released in your interest areas.
Right, as opposed to having to go to the clearinghouse and search through it and try find resources that are valuable to you and trying to remember to do that on a weekly basis.
The other thing that we’ll continue to build up are the affinity groups that are focused on some cross-cutting themes and issues in adaptation. There are five groups and they allow for a deeper level of conversion between members who are interested in that particular topic (whether it’s communication, policy, research, etc). The new website will allow for the co-creation of working documents and things like that within the groups.
One area we’re exploring is a Prize for Progress in adaptation. Over the course of the next year, we’re going to use the expertise of the membership to think about how and where we can award the Prize - what would it look like, what are the categories, what are the criteria, and how do projects/people/locations get nominated. Then, at next year’s National Adaptation Forum (which will be in St. Louis in May 2015), we’ll present the finalists and winners.
I think what will be cool about that is that it’ll be a peer-to-peer award. It’ll be the ASAP membership who will determine the criteria and then ultimately decide on the winners. It’ll give us an opportunity in the field to celebrate some successes. Frequently, in climate change, everyone’s focused on the dire potential consequences of it and we don’t do enough to celebrate the opportunity and the progress we’re making in certain key areas. So, I’d love to bring that piece to the National Adaptation Forum. It’s not as though these winners demonstrate the one-and-only way to adapt to climate change, but it’ll still highlight some of those promising practices and demonstrate that we’re making progress, and hopefully build off of them as we keep getting more resilient.
Is there any other resource or tool or service that you don’t have or that doesn’t exist that you think would be valuable for people looking to address the impacts of climate change? For example, in speaking with someone recently, they mentioned that they needed better mapping tools for local governments.
I feel like there is broadly enough information on climate change and impacts out there, but we need a suite of tools to help get that information into the hands of decision makers when they need it, to help them take action and move forward in building resilience. Sometimes the tools are available, but they’re at too big of a scale or they’re too broad. If a decision maker is looking for information about climate impacts because they’re worried about flooding in the local context, how do we get climate information to them at the point where they're developing a floodplain ordinance for their community, so that they can incorporate climate change as they plan for the future? There’s a lot of information out there, it’s finding out ways to filter it and distribute and get it to people when they need it that is a broad need across the field.
Data seems to be a problem, both in terms of getting it to people easily and people who have data getting it out. There’s a lot of data gathering going on, but it’s not being used for anything and the data could be put to work in a much more useful way.
I definitely agree. And we need to find ways to incorporate learning into our climate preparedness work, so that as we develop processes to increase our resilience (whether it’s creating flood risk zones or whatever it is), we ensure that there is some monitoring of how successful that is, and then have opportunities to adjust it. If we find out that climate changes are happening faster or slower than we expected, we want to be able to fine-tune our practices. It’s not a “one-and-done,” but a continuous circle, and we have to start thinking that way as we do our planning.
It’s a non-trivial change to make in the way we do planning or create policies. We’re used to setting a specific standard and then requiring people to meet it. So, how do we mainstream thinking about climate impacts into what we’re doing, but then also allow some opportunities for that threshold or number to change over time more efficiently?
Right. You put standards into place so that you have a rigid benchmark in place to work with, and then if you’re talking about changing the standards too often, it kind of throws off what it means to be a standard, I guess.
It’s just going to take a big shift. Hopefully some incremental steps will get us there.
Is there anything else you’d like to share? Anything you think I should have asked?
I’ll just say that I’m eternally optimistic – that’s how I can continue to work in this field. I am optimistic about the state of adaptation and the people who are building resilience across the U.S. I think we’re almost at an inflection point, where a professional society like ASAP could really take hold. The circle of people involved in climate preparedness and adaptation is going to expand dramatically over course of the next couple of years, and that’s definitely what we need in order to be successful.
If you’re interested in signing up for an American Society of Adaptation Professionals membership, please visit https://adaptationprofessionals.org/ and click on “Join Us.”