Help us map the impact of Cyclone Bianca on WA beaches

January 29th, 2011 by coastaladmin

Cyclone Bianca will be the first cyclone to hit the Perth region since social media was invented.

“One of the most powerful types of data in understanding the impact of cyclones and storms on the coast are photos taken before and after the storm event passes,” said Dr. Robert Kay Director of Coastal Zone Management – a Perth based company specialising in managing coastlines around the globe.

Dr. Kay is encouraging anyone who can get to the beach before the cyclone hits to collecting as many photos as possible.  Then go back to the same place over the next several days to help map the impact of the cyclone.

“If we can collect photos of the WA coastline from as far north as Jurien Bay to as far south as Cape Naturaliste they can be matched with other data – like the wave heights and tide data – to gain a complete picture” said Dr. Kay.

Of course it goes without saying to heed all warnings about not putting yourself or others into danger just to get a photo!

When you upload your photos please tell us exactly where you took them (name of beach/town; the aspect – looking west – looking north – looking south and the time the photo was taken). By loading up your photos we will assign credit to you but will need your name.  We would also like to use the photos in other publications online and offline.

Upload to: http://www.facebook.com/cyclone.bianca

If your not on Facebook, then email us your photos direct, and we can upload to the site. Of course, the idea is that all the photos will be available for the WA coastal community to help with research and management.

Thanks in advance for your help.

The Coastal Zone Management team

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Rising Seas: A Property Dilemma

January 25th, 2011 by Robert Kay

After reading a colleague’s article in the Australian Financial Review (AFR Weekend 8-9 January 2011) about rising sea levels and property, I was moved to write to the AFR editor. I invite you to read Professor Bruce Thom’s original article (Rising seas create property dilemma), as well as my response (below), and contribute your thoughts.

Professor Bruce Thom’s article “Rising seas create property dilemma” could not be better timed.  It’s almost a year since the Federal Government convened the first National Climate Change Forum: Adaptation Priorities for Australia’s Coast.

During last years’ National Climate Change Forum there was a sense of cautious optimism from those participants responsible for making decisions and from those advising on decisions to manage the transition to a climate-impacted coast.  Professor Thom advocates eloquently for a renewed emphasis on improved research, planning and engagement with coastal communities and their investors on this critical issue.  Such engagement can’t be delayed –on a daily basis I work closely with people who live and work at the coast and who want answers – to help navigate them through how best to work through to this complex, multifaceted transition.

During this time of year where many of us are holidaying on the coast it’s timely to take heed of Professor Thom’s call for action and also to reflect on Mayor Paddi Creevey’s (City of Mandurah, WA) speech at last year’s Forum “I think we’re up for a huge culture shock when part of where we’ve lived our recreational lives won’t be there in some form.”

It would surely be remiss of us to wait for the next climate-change-fuelled natural disaster on the coast to act as a trigger for change.  Rather we must take counsel and be prepared to act and face the challenge of proactively managing our climate-impacted coasts.

Managing Director, Coastal Zone Management Pty, Ltd

Posted in Adaptation general, Climate change general, Oceania | 1 Comment »

Adaptation Funnels and Bottlenecks

January 5th, 2011 by Robert Kay

By Robert Kay & Carmen Elrick

The more we work with governments to help them assesses their climate change adaptation options, and to help implement those options, the more it seems to us that there are often unseen (or at least under-reported) ‘pulls’ towards the choice of particular options over time.  For example, the ‘adaptation by ribbon cutting’ effect (see Kay, 2009) would seem to skew adaptive decision-making towards structural/built adaptive actions.  This is analogous to pouring water into a funnel. The water swirls around in the funnel and is inevitably drawn down by the unseen force of gravity into the funnel’s stem.

It seems to us that in extremely vulnerable coastal settings such as in low-lying coral atolls, there is a ‘pull’ towards one of two adaptive options:

1               Protect – through hard coastal engineering structures

2               Migrate – the population moves out as atolls are abandoned.

The pull towards these two adaptive di-poles (mixing analogies of gravity and magnetic forces) would appear to be strong and reveals a potential mismatch between technical assessments of adaptation options (that consider a whole range of vulnerability reduction and resilience building measures) and focussing on what is practically achievable.

This funnel concept links with the notion of adaptation ‘bottlenecks’ – namely “the challenge of moving beyond acknowledgement of a changing climate in a general sense into the implementation of context-specific adaptation policies and measures that can have an appreciable influence on vulnerability” (Preston and Stafford-Smith 2009). Preston and Stafford-Smith acknowledge that what they term the ‘adaptation bottleneck’ is to some extent reinforced by traditional climate change research methods that are often undertaken with weak links to particular decision-making contexts.  Preston pointed out this work in his comment on last year’s post The Adaptation Cube.

Such bottlenecks may also apply in constraining how adaptation assessments are apparently failing to recognise that, in the long-term, choices for decision-makers in highly vulnerability settings are limited (the bottlenecks turn into funnels).  Or maybe the overall metaphor centres on seeking analogies for constrained adaptive decision-making?

It would seem to us that senior decision makers, such as respective Presidents of the Maldives and Kiribati, have realised that climate change projections and associated impacts on their nations are dire. Once critical thresholds are passed they are effectively left with binary protect/migrate options. To prepare for implementation, resilience-building measures are vital. In Kiribati, education and skills training for young people broadens economic opportunities, and helps them to migrate through the Governments ‘migration with dignity’ policy (recognised only as a last resort).

Perhaps by recognising this adaptation ‘funnel effect’ we can better plan for adaptation. We can critically examine the progression back up the funnel to review how adaptation evaluations are undertaken – and then further back up the funnel to review how vulnerability assessments (and underpinning scientific analysis) are carried out. This is similar to ‘working backwards from impact’ (see for example, comments on a previous blog post, the vulnerability framework presented by Turner et al 2003 and the presentation by the late Steve Snider at the 2010 NCCARF conference). Perhaps such an approach will provide the opportunity to un-block bottlenecks and metaphorically speaking, to broaden the funnel. This would expand the choice of adaptive responses in critically vulnerable areas, and in doing so, help establish an effective pipeline of critically needed adaptation projects and programmes.

Posted in Adaptation Strategies, Adaptation general, All regions, Climate change general | No Comments »

Can we address climate change if we cannot meet development objectives?

November 29th, 2010 by Carmen Elrick

Within the Vulnerability and Ecosystem-based Adaptation session at the Asia Pacific Climate Change Adaptation Forum,  the provocateur, Gernot Laganda, UNDP Regional Technical Advisor (Asia Pacific), posed three questions to the panel and the audience. One in particular, seemed to be almost unnoticed in the discussion that followed.

When countries cannot address baseline development problems does it make sense to address additional climate change risk through adaptation projects?

Given the importance of this issue in progressing the adaptation agenda, I found this puzzling. Maybe this issue was not considered by the broader group to be a problem, with the perception that climate change adaptation projects achieve their objectives exclusive of development challenges? Or maybe this is an issue that poses too many questions and limited answers? If decades of development assistance have not yet achieved their objectives, what hope is there for climate change adaptation?

Regardless of the reason for this limited response,  I thought it valuable to pause and reflect.

In many cases, our work in supporting coastal climate change adaptation is undertaken in developing countries where baseline development objectives are also being addressed.

Coastal management in Kiribati, for example, was largely reactive in response to issues as they appear at the local scale. A key lesson from work in Kiribati was that climate change adaptation must be a component of an integrated approach to coastal management (see CZM White Paper 1 for more detail). While project based activities focused on supporting climate change adaptation can result in positive benefits, sustainability and long-term implementation of such activities is unlikely if they remain outside of the scope of standard operational procedures and mechanisms.

Consequently, in Kiribati, ensuring long term sustainability and achievement of coastal development objectives, was necessitated by institutional reform to enhance the priority of coastal management and demonstrate how more effective coastal management supports achievement of other development objectives. Only then could climate change adaptation be effectively mainstreamed into practice.

In short, without a solid foundation for achievement of broader development objectives, the sustainability of climate change focussed initiatives is unlikely. The staged approach to achieving such a foundation (see CZM White Paper 1), provides a mechanism to commence this transition.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Vertical and horizontal integration – an elusive objective in coastal management.

November 17th, 2010 by Carmen Elrick

I was recently invited to discuss the issue of vertical and horizontal integration at the Asia Pacific Climate Change Adaptation Forum held in Bangkok. Vertical and horizontal integration was a key theme at the forum, with a number of sessions dedicated to tackling this important issue. The Mangroves for the Future (MFF) focus event discussed this issue to stimulate dialogue on innovative steps to enhance the integration of climate change adaptation into coastal management and development.

The opportunity to discuss vertical and horizontal integration made me reflect on the difficulties of managing across scales in coastal areas. This is an issue that coastal managers have been struggling with for decades. The fact that this issue remains a concern provides both opportunities and challenges for climate change adaptation in the coastal zone. Opportunities in that there are a number of good lessons, and not-so-good lessons, that can be drawn on; and challenges, in that coastal management has had ‘patchy‘ success. Fully integrated coastal systems are the exception rather than the rule and it is within this environment that we are trying to mainstream climate change adaptation, and from an MFF perspective, ecosystem based adaptation (EbA).

In an ideal world integration would be easy. We would all have the same objectives; for example, to ensure sustainable coastal development and maintain ecosystem goods and services. However, in the current paradigm of conflicting use, priorities and objectives, there is the need to further communicate the values of ecosystem goods and services, and in turn, the benefits of ecosystem based adaptation. Only then will a shared agenda for transformative change be delivered.

Consequently, information sharing is essential to support vertical and horizontal integration. When considering ecosystem based climate change adaptation a number of information ‘gaps’ come to mind:

  • information to evaluate the tradeoffs between EbA and hard adaptation measures;
  • costs and benefits of different adaptation approaches (social, environment and economic costs and benefits)
  • the ‘effectiveness’ of EbA approaches in reducing vulnerability to climate change
  • thresholds for change – determining at what point ecosystems will fail?

Although there is some valuable work progressing this agenda (e.g. a recent report on Mainstreaming Ecosystem Goods and Services into International Policies, and the World Bank Partnership for Ecosystem Services Valuation), a gap between theory and practice remains, i.e. moving from an understanding of the importance of ecosystem based adaptation actions to implementing such actions. Whilst this is successful in initiatives focused on ecosystem restoration, in other coastal adaptation arenas there remains a preference for what may be considered more ‘concrete’ adaptation measures.

Consequently, there remains a challenge, and an opportunity, for initiatives such as MFF to fill these identified gaps and to enhance awareness and appreciation of the success of EbA measures. Importantly, dissemination must be beyond the environmental community to a broader audience (i.e. other government departments and private industry), to enhance opportunities for a shared agenda and remove some of the barriers to integrated coastal management.

Posted in Adaptation general, Climate change mainstreaming, ICZM | 2 Comments »

Risk perceptions and Adapting to Climate Change

September 15th, 2010 by Carmen Elrick

Whilst analysing the outputs of a strategic climate change risk assessment undertaken for local communes in western Albania I was interested to note a clear differentiation between the risk levels assigned to physical resources (i.e. impacts on infrastructure and land) versus social resources (i.e. impacts on local livelihoods).

In all cases, risk levels assigned to physical objects or items were higher than the risk levels assigned to social impacts.

Does this represent a failure in clearly communicating risk? Are the links between livelihoods and physical impacts unclear? Or is this a reflection of the temporal understanding of risk, where respondents consider the physical impact as the first step (or frontline), with social impacts a secondary component?

What in turn does this mean for adaptation? Is the focus solely on reducing physical impacts? When do we start to balance consideration of the social component – which is real driver of change? If social impacts were a higher priority, would the approach to adaptation planning be different? Or would managing the physical change remain the focus of adaptation efforts – on the assumption that physical changes underpin or drive social adaptation?

I believe that focusing efforts on disentangling the complex relationships between climate change and social, cultural, and institutional systems may result in a differential response to climate change adaptation. In such a response, behavioural and institutional change would be an equally valuable component of climate change adaptation; rather than a strategic response taken in the absence of detailed information on the nature of physical impacts.

Understanding how perceptions of risk influence decision-making and, ultimately, how to effectively communicate climate change risk to facilitate adaptive action, is an integral step in achieving this objective (see work, for example, by Lisa Schipper, Anthony Leiserowitz and David Etkin). Tools such as the Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF) provide a useful starting point in this regard.

Posted in Adaptation general, All regions, Europe, Risk assessment | 1 Comment »

Beyond the Horizon

September 6th, 2010 by Robert Kay

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about those who inspire me personally and help face the future and present day challenges to the coast – including climate change.  Those individuals who motivate us to help read what the coast and the people that live there are telling us about change.

And then I read the moving, eloquent obituary in The Economist (22 July 2010) of Pius Mau Piailug, a master navigator of the Pacific who died on 12 July 2010 aged 78.

Mau Piailug was a traditionally trained ocean navigator who became famous for both his skill and teaching ability in the use of indigenous Micronesian navigation techniques.

Part of his obituary read: “He could detect shallower water by colour, and see the light of invisible lagoons reflected in the undersides of clouds. Sweeter-tasting fish meant rivers in the offing; groups of birds, homing in the evening, showed him where land lay.”

He could navigate beyond the horizon, using indicators around him to help define the best way forward by applying both his knowledge and experience gained over many years.

It is such navigators that we need to find (and foster their work) to help us in our journey into a greenhouse-gas modified future. And, if leaders like Mau Piailug can inspire us, we may not need to panic about the future of our coasts.

Learn more about the inspirational life of Mau Piailug and see videos of his teachings:

Posted in Adaptation general, Climate change general, ICZM, Oceania | No Comments »

42

August 4th, 2010 by Robert Kay

In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 42 is the number from which “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything” could be derived. In a twist of creative genius in Hitchhiker’s, it took 10-million years to build the ultimate computer to work out what the actual question was.  The computer, otherwise known as Earth, was destroyed (to make way for a hypersteller bypass) minutes before the answer was reached.

Funded adaptation – it’s the answer to climate change impacts!

Or is it? Are we indeed in Hitchiker’s mode and giving the answer before we know the question?

Many are searching for a simple answer to climate change impacts, now that we’ve realised there are a plethora of serious and potentially irreversible changes coming (or in many cases already upon us). We don’t have 10 million years, like Adams’ computer builders of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, to figure out what we’re really trying to answer.  At best we have a generation.

While funded adaptation is clearly AN answer to the question (and a clearly critical answer at that), it’s not THE answer – at least perhaps as we’re currently defining adaptation – and most importantly funding adaptation.  Just as emission mitigation is AN answer, especially to reducing the potential of impacts, it too was never THE answer.

As Martin Parry eloquently described this year in the journal Nature and in his presentation at the recent International Climate Change Adaptation Conference, there is an increasing understanding of the ‘gap’ between funded adaptation and committed mitigation efforts (impacts avoided by funded adaptation and emission reduction pledges as per the Copenhagen Accord), “which is likely to result in substantial unavoidable impacts”.  That is, even with action towards adaptation and mitigation, there will remain unavoidable impacts – the ‘adaptation gap’. So, as things stand, climate change impacts avoided by financed adaptation, and those impacts reduced by mitigative action, won’t be THE answer.

The fundamental question is: what are we trying to adapt to, and why? And then, how do we work out how to measure how well we’re doing at adapting?  This explicitly recognises that our ability to consciously adapt is limited by our societal, financial, and institutional capacities (which are underpinned by a clear set of ethical principles – see the recent post by Donald A. Brown for example). There are also inherent system thresholds that when exceeded will lead to ‘state changes’ and ‘emergent behaviours’. Hence, all we can do is hope to have worked out in advance, and tried to manage, the transition between state changes – or at least be aware of (or bear) the consequences.

It would seem timely to pause, post-Copenhagen and pre-Cancun, and think about what the ultimate questions are with respect to climate change adaptation. And then to refocus on addressing the questions.

Posted in Adaptation general, Climate change general | 1 Comment »

When is a car not a car?

July 9th, 2010 by Robert Kay

Back in the mists of internet time in the mid 1990s, one of the key problems in trying to set up new web services for coastal managers was simply explaining them.  The problem was that there were very few similar services to compare them to.

Of course, this is much easier now.  I would be able to talk about what other web services do, what they look like and how they interact with users.  For example:

‘Imagine a web system that combines Google Docs, Facebook, YouTube and Flikr’.

This is because these web services are now very much part life in the developed world, and increasingly in developing countries.  In other words, these web services are socially embedded.

So it’s easy to explain to most people what a particular type of car looks like, even if they have never seen that model before.  This is because the starting point (Imagine a car…) is already socially embedded.

The trouble with explaining potential coastal climate change impacts in 2010, for me, is similar to explaining web services 15 years ago.  The concept of chronic impacts outside of long-term natural variation is both difficult to explain and difficult to visualize.

I often try to explain this by using analogies such as: “Remember when that storm came in and removed sand from the beach, but then the beach came back again after the storm?  Climate change is a bit like that, but with the sand not coming back’.

The risk is that these analogies can get stretched too far. For example, “It’s like a car, but with no wheels, engine, or anywhere to sit.”

Stretching the analogy becomes counter productive.

When it doesn’t work, we most often want to use visualization tools and show computer-generated pictures and animations of potential impacts.

Turns out, what I’ve been trying to do stretching the car analogy, is the difference between an ‘analogy’ and a ‘literal similarity’.

Those that market new products and services to us know this difference very well. In essence, it’s the “Conceptual distance between the base and the target of the comparison” (Houssiet al, 2005).  Interestingly, this study suggests that the greater this conceptual distance, the more effective the ability to sell the benefits of a new product.  Maybe this means that we shouldn’t worry about stretching the analogies (like my disappearing beach example) and rather go way out there with a completely different set of analogies. For example: ‘It’s like when your pet goes out one night and never comes home.’

This perhaps leads me to think that there is mileage (pardon the car pun) in exploring notions of socially constructed meaning – in the sense that for climate change adaptation to be effective, it must be socially embedded.

I’m not pushing the line of the social constructivists here, rather making the point that this issue is something coastal managers need to collectively explore.

This was one of the recurring themes of last week’s Climate Adaptation Futures Conference on the need for ‘Climate Change Conversations’ to develop a shared understanding of the challenges ahead.  In doing so, we’ll need to be able to develop effective mental models and good clear analogies for engaging with communities regarding coastal climate change impacts.

Perhaps then we will be able to be clear when a car is not a car.

Posted in Capacity building and training, Climate change general | 3 Comments »

The Adaptation Cube

June 11th, 2010 by Robert Kay

The Rubik’s Cube is 30 years old this year, a fiendishly ingenious 3-D puzzle, invented by the Hungarian architectural engineer Erno Rubik.  Hands up all of you old enough to remember trying to solve the puzzle during the height of its craze in the early 1980s, only to find it years later unsolved in the bottom of the toy box?  I remember how annoyed I was when my brother solved the thing before I did!

Watching the celebrations on the news coincided with my work with a new client, trying to explain the complexities and intricacies of climate change adaptation. How do I quickly communicate the message without being overly simplistic or patronising? For years now I’ve been using a Rubik’s Cube style diagram to do this.

  1. Climate change adaptation is a multi-dimensional issue.  To think about the issue effectively means thinking about all the complexities of space (e.g. geographic scale, location, biophysical variability), economic and social sectors (e.g. transport, health care, agriculture, energy). It also means thinking about so called ‘cross cutting issues’ (to use climate change jargon) – like poverty alleviation, infrastructure, gender considerations, settlements, social marginalisation and so on. And then, we need think about all of this over time, and within a context of uncertainties inherent in climate change adaptation planning.
  2. If you try to implement an adaptation project, programme or activity, without understanding this complexity and then ‘slicing’ through, you are bound to run into problems. The way I like to think about this is pictorially (so out comes the pencil and paper or whatever is at hand. One time I drew this in the sand with a stick).
  3. It’s best to think about adaptation as a series of dimensions: like a three-dimensional cube. Looking at the cube from different angles gives different perspectives on the adaptation challenge. Even then this looks really complicated, like an unsolved Rubik’s Cube. Our job as adaptation experts is to try and unscramble the puzzle – and in doing so find a ‘slice’ which ensures the coherence of adaptation actions.

I call this the Adaptation Cube and I’ve found it to be a really useful explanatory tool.

It’s really only the standard two-dimensional view of ‘sectors vs cross-cutting’ with a third spatial dimension added. But with an increasing trend towards integrated spatial climate change adaptation assessments, it’s useful to explain the methodological, policy and logistical challenges of working across different scales. And then to explain how scale-dependent adaptation thinking affects interactions with sectoral and cross-cutting issues.

Explaining the unscrambling of the puzzle is also useful because it begins in the time dimension – we have to carefully chose what to unscramble and in what order. This introduces issues of needs prioritisation in adaptation decision-making, adaptive planning systems and so on.

While the Adaptation Cube works for me, I’m keen to hear your views.  Even more so as this is my first blog post!

Rob


Posted in Adaptation Frameworks, Climate change general | 2 Comments »