Moving from "What" to "How"

I'm writing this post from the International City/County Management Association's Annual Conference in Phoenix, which has me thinking about the role of local policy in people's carbon footprints and, ultimately, our climate change destiny. The more I talk to people the more I realize how situation-specific sustainable solutions have to be--tailored to the opportunities and needs in individual communities. But, that doesn't mean that a basic understanding of climate change and the general tools we have to address it aren't necessary too.

The Carl Vinson Institute of Government (CVIOG), housed within the University of Georgia, provides research and policy analysis services to support government action across a range of topics. One of their projects is focused on sea level rise (SLR) along the Georgia coast as a result of climate change, with the main goal of working with local governments to prepare to deal with the consequences of SLR.

As part of the background research to apply for the grant for the aforementioned project, Vinson conducted a survey of key stakeholders in Glynn County, one of Georgia's 10 coastal counties. A main goal of the survey was to assess the community's perceptions of the threat of SLR compared to scientific predictions. To do this, they gave participants a blank outline of the county and asked them to color in the areas they thought would be underwater given 1 foot (yellow), 3 feet (green), and 5 feet (orange) increases in sea level. Here are some representative responses.

    

As you can see, people got creative. By having an intern (me, in this case) digitize all the drawings into GIS, an aggregate "community impression" of the effect of SLR in Glynn County could be created and then compared to scientific SLR predictions. Results are below, with blue indicating that there is more projected SLR risk than perceived by stakeholders and red indicating there is less risk than perceived by stakeholders, with the in-between shades ranging along that continuum in a logical manner.

     

1 ft SLR 

5 ft SLR

There is some over/understating under the 1 ft SLR scenario, but misperceptions are much greater as the severity of SLR increases to 5 feet. This seems to indicate that as the magnitude of climate change effects increase, communities are less and less capable of fully comprehending them. (This extrapolation is not scientifically sound and is based only on this very limited dataset, so take it with a grain of salt.) 

This method is interesting to me for two reasons. The first is academic: community perceptions of the impacts of climate change are important to consider when talking about moving toward climate change mitigation and/or adaptation. It goes back to the foundations of community-based marketing--we have to understand where people are coming from before we can design an effective intervention. (Plus I like things that combine community input and data analysis in general.) Despite the fact that I've seen about a billion climate change talks, for many communities (and perhaps more importantly government officials) communicating the "what" of climate change is still a necessity before we can get to the "how" of fixing it. But how much more time and energy can we afford to spend explaining climate change and waiting for people to understand the importance of acting? 

Which brings me to my second reason for being interested in this research: my grandparents live in Glynn County, Georgia, right next to a marsh along one of those river-fingers you can see reaching into the county. That's where SLR will cause problems first, unless someone takes some kind of adaptation or mitigation action. The beaches that I played on in the summer, the house where I celebrated Christmases and Thanksgivings, the town where my grandfather was born and has lived his whole life...it's right there.

There is a lot to learn from methods like the one employed by CVIOG. By using the best available scientific consensus to put climate change into understandable terms for a community, be it as rainfall changes, sea level rise risks, etc., we can begin to frame the discussion in a way that is relevant to the majority of community members. (This climate change communications guide by ICLEI also supports this approach.) Then we can couch the actions that need to be taken in this more personal understanding of climate change impacts, moving beyond the "whats" of climate change and devoting our energy to the "hows" of large-scale adaptation and mitigation.