May 6

Stewart Cohen, Adaptation and Impacts Research Group, Environment Canada/University of British Columbia
http://www.ires.ubc.ca/nav.php?page=cohen_stewart

Stewart Cohen said that while he was “optimistic about the future of our research community in Canada,” he wanted to offer a perspective on “why we seem to have difficulty mainstreaming what we do.” Cohen started with an overview of “our pedigree.” Canadian researchers have been doing a lot in adaptive research. Cohen referred to The Environment as Hazard (Burton et al., 1978, 1993) as one example of early literature in the field. He noted Burton’s familiar choice tree, which 25 years later is being used by the IPCC.

The concept of interactions between society and environment, for example, is also not novel, having been discussed in Kellogg and Schware’s Climate Change and Society (1981). Cohen noted that these ideas led to a book in 1985—Climate Impact Assessment—with chapters on economics, social analysis, and integrated assessment. This was published long before the first integrated assessment models.

Cohen led participants through the evolution of adaptive climate change research and how the streams of climate impact assessment and top-down/bottom-up models eventually fed into the current IPCC working groups.

Hazards research has been around for a long time, yet experiences like the 1998 ice storm in developed countries bring into question an assumed high adaptive capacity. “Are we creating hazards or are they surprising us?” pondered Cohen. Showing a graph of the trend in annual frequency of great natural catastrophes between 1950 and 2004, Cohen noted that “we’re doing a good job of earthquake disaster management but we are not holding the line on extreme weather events.”

Cohen quoted Hare (1981) “We desire to export our convictions, but the buyers are reluctant.” Cohen suggested that the apathy about climate change is because climate impacts are buffered by trade and relief efforts (i.e., “it’s been taken care of”), and technological, social, and political changes have altered climate-society relationships (i.e., “the ground is shifting under our feet”).

There are several schools of thought of how to look at this shifting ground of technological change. One school suggests that society should react and adapt well to climate change with increased technology. Another school proposes a decline in synchronicity where seasons and climate play smaller roles in people’s schedules. The lessening hypothesis put forth that climate events do not have the same impact as in earlier times.

If past climate can be a guide to the future, what about past societal reaction to climate change? Cohen noted that historical or cross-cultural analogies can fail because technological advances alter relationships as do different political and social organization.

“The research field we are part of is not a linear process,” said Cohen. Researchers pursuing models have realized this for a long time. Cohen suggested some of the following questions be considered by the impact and adaptation assessment community:

How can the problem be defined? Cohen suggested looking at the role of researchers and actors. He added that he was not comfortable with the ambiguous terms “bottom-up” and “top-down.”

How will it be possible to scale from global to regional?

Are scenarios useful?

How can biophysical impact models be chosen and at which scale?

Which ones are right for the purposes?

Cohen admitted that “yes, buyers are reluctant” and suggested a need to merge science with laws, policy, economics, ethics, and equity, referring to Climate Affairs (Michael Glantz). Furthermore, climate change must be placed in a human context and partnerships should be developed in a shared learning environment.

Cohen suggested the community can offer its past experience and responses to climate change while science can offer its analyses, models, and scenarios. The two together can form a dialogue with stakeholders. Cohen told participants of his work in the Okanagan where local professionals and practitioners—the past president of a fruit grower association, a regional planner, and a flood control officer—came together to ultimately include climate change adaptation and implementation in the local water management plan.

This approach was successful because, in a process that started five to six years ago, “we explained scenarios, hydrographs, and showed them changes in risk,” said Cohen. “We also looked at the adaptation experience of the community—how did community organizations respond?”

“Yes, it is important to learn from the past,” said Cohen, “but scenarios need to be included in explicit ways.” Part of that avoids using labels that are too ambiguous. Cohen emphasized that shared learning sets the stage for creating extension agents, which in turn creates a sustainable research effort and increases the probability of moving climate change adaptation research into local decision making.

2005-04-05