EarthLab announced today that theProgram on Climate Change (PCC) has become an EarthLab Affiliate Organization. EarthLab Affiliates are University of Washington-based organizations that are similarly seeking to address critical and complex environmental issues. EarthLab and Affiliates support each others’ programs by sharing information, ideas and networks in order to catalyze new relationships and research projects.
The PCC was founded in 2001 to further research and education in climate science through a framework of intense cross-disciplinary collaboration. Steeped in the belief that together, we are greater than the sum of our parts, the PCC is home to an engaged community of graduate students, research scientists and faculty from across the UW, including in the College of the Environment, the College of Engineering, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Global Health, the Evans School of Public Policy, and beyond.
Becky Alexander is the director of the Program on Climate Change (PCC)
“EarthLab has become both a home and a resource for faculty and students who are working on environmental issues and want to build connections outside of the UW community,” said Becky Alexander, director of the PCC. “This stronger connection between PCC and EarthLab will help us broaden the opportunities we can provide to our students as we continue to nurture their education and their careers.”
Members of EarthLab and the Program on Climate Change will meet regularly to share ideas and opportunities. One key goal for PCC is to expand its reach to support graduate student interest in developing small, applied research projects with community partners. For EarthLab, the opportunity to share more climate knowledge to different communities is a benefit.
“We hope that by working closer together we will build broader connections for the PCC participants and community organizations seeking to engage on the increasingly important issues surrounding climate change,” said Ben Packard, EarthLab executive director. “PCC has a sterling reputation for their commitment to collaboration, community and student training, and we believe that there is an opportunity to share this knowledge and resource more broadly throughout our community.”
For more information about the Program on Climate Change, clickhere.
While we may be specialists in our respective areas of knowledge, we are not necessarily experts in the skills necessary to bring that knowledge together in joint solutions.
EarthLab aims to address complex environmental challenges by leveraging the collective wisdom of academia, partners, and communities.
Each month, we invite two or more individuals from different backgrounds, i.e. sectors/disciplines/communities/geographies, who learned lessons about how to collaborate while working together on a project. For example, last year we hosted artist Rachel Lodge and her scientist collaborator, Dave Peterson, on an arts-science project. On a separate month, Climate Impacts Group Meade Crosby and Tribal leader Don Sampson presented on co-producing a climate Tribal tool. Visit our webpage to learn more information about the program, including all of our past presenters.
Next available date is November 10
To nominate yourself or another team, please email EarthLab Communications Lead Constance McBarron at cmcbar@uw.edu. Nominations are accepted on a rolling basis and we will work with the team directly to secure the date. Typically, we will host the series on the second Tuesday of each month starting at 12:30 p.m. Pacific Time.
EarthLab has selected Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi for our equity and justice book club this quarter. EarthLab staff and member organization members will meet on Friday, November 6 to discuss the themes of intersectionality, colonialism and imperialism, and slavery– and how they relate to the environmental and conservation field.
The publisher writes, “Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.”
About Homegoing
Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
Read more about the EarthLab Equity and Justice book club here.
“The insurance buying public wants to know that insurance is going to be available and affordable to them when they need it.”
That was the take-home message from Washington Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler, who hosted a half-day virtual summit on climate change on Wednesday.
“We expect to see the area burned by wildfires in Washington quadruple by the 2040s.” – Amy Snover
The Climate Summit 2020 featured a host of experts talking about climate change, its impact on the Pacific Northwest, and the globe, as well as steps being taken to mitigate the impacts of a warming world.
Kreidler has in the past pushed the insurance industry to do more to address climate change, including calling for greater insurer disclosure on climate risk. He founded the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ Climate Risk and Resilience Working Group in 2007 and has been the chair since its inception.
He said he worries about insurance consumers, and that as large wildfires continue to become the norm, and flooding becomes more frequent, the insurance industry may look at withdrawing from risker areas.
“At that point, you become very vulnerable,” Kreidler said.
Other presenters at the conference included Kara Hurst, head of worldwide sustainability for Amazon.
Hurst discussed the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, which is intended to accelerate sustainability research in partnership with organizations like NOAA, NASA and the U.K. Met Office.
She said Amazon’s goal is to reach zero carbon emissions in the next few years. As part of that goal, the company has launched 90 solar and wind projects globally, and is on a path to do more each year.
“We’re going to reach 100% renewable by 2025,” Hurst said.
Michelle Lancaster, director of sustainability for Microsoft Corp., said the software giant is working on addressing four areas: carbon, water, waste and the ecosystem.
The company plans to operate “carbon negative” by 2030.
“That’s a big target,” she said. “Somewhere on the order of 16 million metric tons of carbon that we have to reduce or replace by 2030.”
Another Microsoft goal is to be “water positive,” replenishing more water than used, by 2030, and be zero waste by 2030, she added.
She also talked about the company’s “planetary computer,” also being called AI for Earth, to help the world become more sustainable.
“We think that’s really the tip of the spear of what Microsoft can do in this marketplace,” Lancaster said.
Amy Snover is the director of the Climate Impacts Group and the university leader of Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center. Both organizations are members of EarthLab.
Dr. Amy Snover, director of the Climate Impacts Group and Northwest Climate Adaption Science Center at the University of Washington, said temperatures in the Northwest have been increasing since 1800s, the snowpack is declining, glaciers are shrinking, the timing of stream flow is changing in rivers, sea level rise is affecting Washington’s coast, and coastal waters are warming and acidifying.
“We’re also seeing a large number of fires and area burned has increased in the Northwest in the last couple of years,” she said, noting that dryer fuel is leading to worse wildfires because of human-caused warming. “We expect to see the area burned by wildfires in Washington quadruple by the 2040s.”
What’s worse, she added, is “we’re headed for significant change.” She also said models suggest increased flooding should be expected inland.
Projections show that the river flows in Puget Sound’s 12 largest rivers are expected to rise between 18% to 55% by the 2080s.
Other summit speakers included Fawn Sharp, president of the Quinault Indian Nation and the National Congress of American Indians, Francis Bouchard, Group Head of Public Affairs and Sustainability for Zurich Insurance, Sherri Goodman, with the Polar Institute and U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer.
Faisal Hossain, executive committee member of Future Rivers at UW EarthLab
Faisal Hossain, UW professor of civil and environmental engineering and executive committee member of Future Rivers at UW EarthLab, has published two books for young readers: “The Secret Lives of Scientists, Engineers, and Doctors,” volumes one and two, from Mascot Books.
The books will showcase “the struggle, growth and success” of 12 professionals in STEM fields, including a geneticist, a biologist, a cancer researcher and a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, among others. They will be written especially for readers from second to fifth grades.
With more volumes planned, the book series is a spin-off from a National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine effort called New Voices, aiming to widen access to science education. Read an article on the Civil & Environmental Engineering website.
Published in September, the book is available for order and will be in stores soon. To learn more, contact Hossain at fhossain@uw.edu.
The COVID-19 pandemic, catastrophic on many levels, has starkly exposed the structural, social, economic and political factors that prevent equitable health outcomes for people around the world.
While communities everywhere grapple with the devastating losses of life, livelihoods and connection, another catastrophe is well underway. Climate change continues to devastate the health and well-being of people all over the planet.
To commemorate the opening of the UW’s new Hans Rosling Center for Population Health, we asked five of the University’s leading voices on climate change and decarbonization to discuss how we can move forward from the pandemic in ways that deliver environmental resilience and positive health outcomes for all.
Accelerating our global response to a worsening crisis
Colockum Tarps Fire / WA Department of Natural Resources
As pandemic stay-at-home orders went into effect around the world, we saw headlines celebrating clean air and drops in global greenhouse gas emissions. These changes seemed a thin silver lining during a dark time.
But they were only temporary improvements, not actual success in addressing the root cause of climate change: the centrality of fossil fuels in the global economy. In fact, many responses to the pandemic have slowed our responses to climate change. The next international conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was postponed, and essential funding to tackle climate risks in California and Washington is at risk.
Unfortunately, climate change is not on hold; it continues to accelerate. The year 2020 is on track to be the second warmest year on record. Climate change–fueled wildfires, hurricanes and heat waves affect much of the country, the Greenland ice sheet is reportedly melting past the point of no return, and until we eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions (not just release them more slowly), it will only get worse.
The current global unraveling has shown how we, and the systems we depend on, are all connected. Weaknesses in our health-care system, in social and economic justice and in the stability of our climate make life more precarious for us all.
Rebuilding our collective lives post-pandemic requires attending to all of the intertwined systems that we depend on. Responses to COVID-19 must incorporate solutions for climate change and racial justice. Recovery investments must accelerate decarbonization, not pause it — and advance preparation for rising climate stresses, not punt on it. In a world of compound risks, we must insist on compound solutions. We don’t have enough time, money or planet to do it any other way.
From our economy to our culture and health, our interactions with the ocean are a part of our daily lives in Newfoundland and Labrador.
PHOTO: RICH BLENKINSOPP
It is only fitting, then, that Memorial University is one of the research universities that is part of the Ocean Nexus Center.
Based at the University of Washington EarthLab and in collaboration with the Nippon Foundation, Ocean Nexus is an international network of interdisciplinary researchers with a focus on justice and sustainability.
“I’m leading some of the Nexus work primarily thinking about the oceans as they relate to our planning for sustainable development and achievement of sustainable development goals,” said Dr. Gerald Singh, who began as faculty in the Department of Geography, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, in August 2019. Dr. Singh is deputy director of research and represents Memorial in Ocean Nexus, a 10-year, (USD)$32.5-million project.
“Memorial will kind of be the hub for a lot of the international work on that,” he said.
Ocean Nexus
Ocean Nexus focuses on five major themes: ocean and human health; ocean economy and livelihood; ocean people and society; fair ocean governance; and ocean climate and extreme events.
Dr. Singh’s work with PhD students and post-doctoral researchers at Memorial will focus on ocean governance in Canada. The interdisciplinary scope includes fisheries management related to climate change and potential environmental impact of offshore oil and gas development.
Interdisciplinary work is valuable, says Dr. Singh, who is also a former fellow of the Nippon Foundation in Japan.
“I do a lot of work on risk and human impacts on the ocean, and what that means for the benefits people derive from ocean ecosystems and marine systems,” he said. “I also increasingly do a lot of work at the intersection of fisheries and planning for sustainable development.”
‘Collegial’
Dr. Singh moved to St. John’s and Memorial from Vancouver to join the Ocean Frontier Institute, a research network of Atlantic Canadian universities. That was an exciting opportunity, he says. But meeting his colleagues in the Department of Geography and across the university also influenced his decision.
“It was one of the most collegial working environments I’ve ever experienced.”
Environmental changes in our oceans have widespread effects across all sectors of society, he says. Studying those effects reveals solutions that don’t further marginalize those at risk when oceans change. Dr. Singh’s role with Ocean Nexus helps place Memorial at the forefront of those important discussions.
“There’s a lot of good work done out here on emerging coastal development and ways to use different sustainable development planning tools,” Dr. Singh.
“We’ll definitely be able to use some of that existing expertise.”
“Voices Unbound: Enviro-Amplify” is a podcast created by EarthLab and UW Tacoma, and hosted by Robin Evans-Agnew associate professor in the school’s Nursing and Healthcare Leadership Program. The podcast has now published its second season.
“In this series opener we go way-deep into the social tensions of our time,” show notes say, “discussing how racism in law enforcement and governmental responses to the COVID-19 epidemic contribute important environmental threats to communities in our region and elsewhere.”
The podcast also will continue to report on its analysis of answers to questions posed since 2019 about public attitudes toward environmental challenges.
Principal investigators for the work are Evans-Agnew and Christopher Schell, urban ecologist and assistant professor in UW Tacoma’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences.
Read an earlier UW Notebook story about this podcast. For more information, contact Evans-Agnew at robagnew@uw.edu.
Through thick haze from fires, a plane taxis to a runway at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport Sept. 15. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)
SEATAC — As massive clouds of smoke from wildfires throughout the region obscured the sky last week, SeaTac Deputy Mayor Peter Kwon filtered the air in his own home by attaching a furnace filter to a box fan and then duct-taping a triangular piece of cardboard over the gaps. When the air quality index (AQI) rose to 225 last week, Kwon said that his contraption reduced the living room to below 50 AQI.
The ultrafine particles from aviation and roadway traffic had long concerned Kwon, who lives about a half-mile from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport: While recent wildfires have forced residents across Western Washington to experience the hazards of poor air quality, Kwon and others who live in communities surrounding the airport say they’ll continue to face a year-round threat to their air from aviation-related pollution.
Three months ago, Kwon joined three other residents who had installed air monitors on their properties near the airport by placing one outside of his home. Their findings, documented in the citizen-gathered Purple Air Map, came as no surprise to him: “The air quality around the airport is not as clean as areas farther away,” he said.
He believes the addition of smoke pollution could form a toxic cocktail that would exacerbate respiratory diseases such as COVID-19. “One of the problems is that SeaTac has historically had poor air quality. So with the wildfires, the poor air quality has just skyrocketed,” Kwon said.
As wildfires become more common along the West Coast, residents of airport communities such as SeaTac, Burien and Des Moines fear they will be harder hit by pollution. In the future, cities under flight paths will need to become “smoke ready,” said Elena Austin, an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s department of environmental and occupational health sciences. “But they’re also going to have to develop ways to be resilient to the air and road traffic impact on their communities.”
Local politicians, residents, and researchers are working with airport communities throughout the nation to study the effects of air pollutants, as well as brainstorm solutions for homes and schools. For the Port of Seattle’s part, the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport has electrified hundreds of ground vehicles and encouraged Uber and Lyft to reduce carbon emissions by switching to hybrid or electric cars.
“We recognize that the local communities have the impact from the airport,” said Perry Cooper, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport’s media relations manager.
Still, concerned residents say more drastic changes are needed to address the potentially harmful effects of particles seeping into windows and doorways.
“The impact that’s difficult for people living near the airport is that they already experience and perceive poorer air quality,” said Austin. “So that creates challenges in a search for safe and healthy spaces.”
Wildfire smoke particles are much larger than pollutants emitted from airplanes. For that reason, the aircraft ultrafine particles are more likely to infiltrate the indoors, said Austin, adding that smoke still seeps in.
It is difficult to measure the combined effects of various pollutants during wildfire seasons. Air quality index monitors mostly measure the largest particles in the air, which is the wildfire smoke, said Austin, while ultrafine particles from aviation and ground traffic do not influence the value.
Still, the particle pollution has widespread impacts. SeaTac ranked 14 for 24-hour particle pollution out of 216 cities in The American Lung Association’s State of the Air report. Exposure to air pollution has been shown to cause “delays in psychomotor development, lower IQ in elementary school children, increased risk for autism, greater anxiety, depression, and attention-deficit related problems during childhood,” cited a recent state Department of Health summary of health research on ultrafine particles.
Meanwhile, SeaTac has among the highest percentage of positive COVID-19 cases in the county, according to Public Health – Seattle & King County, at 2,070 per 100,000 compared to King County’s 964 per 100,000.
Environmental advocates argue that the area’s shorter life expectancy compared to King County’s average indicates that residents are living in unhealthy conditions.
“We have a perfect chemical zoo of potential respiratory problems,” said former Burien City Councilmember Debi Wagner. She’s now a member of the Burien Airport Committee, where she advises the City Council on matters concerning the airport, as well as the nonprofit Quiet Skies Coalition.
Wagner started researching airport emissions about two decades ago, when she said she awoke in her quiet Des Moines home to a “war zone” as hundreds of jets suddenly flew overhead every day.
A two-year UW study released last December study shows that ultrafine particles emitted by aircrafts impact communities under their flight paths. This graphic is from the report. (University of Washington)
“As wildfires are becoming the norm, airport communities need mitigation more critically than other areas because we’re living with a much lower quality of air and life,” said Wagner, now a Burien resident.
About three years ago, SeaTac lobbied the State of Washington to fund an air quality study in the vicinity of the airport. That led to a two-year UW study co-authored by Austin and released last December, funded by the Washington State Legislature and the Port of Seattle. The study showed that ultrafine particles emitted by aircrafts impact communities under their flight paths.
UW plans to launch a second phase of the study that will rely on drones to measure the effect of vegetation on ultrafine particles. Researchers hope the study will offer insight on the role of urban planning programs that use greenery to mitigate particulate air pollution.
Last year, the state Legislature voted to create another commercial airport in Washington, which Kwon hopes will reduce layover flights at Sea-Tac that contribute to air pollution. “The reality is that Sea-Tac airport is so small: There’s a physical size limit of the airport because it’s surrounded by developed land,” he said.
As the wildfires burn up and down the West Coast and the thick smoke finally departs Seattle skies, I plea for unity in our discussion of the causes of these fires — unity as a way to move forward on solutions to the wildfire problem in the West.
A firefighter in Jamul, California, battles the Valley Fire along Japatul Road on September 6. Sandy Huffaker/AFP/Getty Images
As a climate adaptation specialist and fire ecologist who has studied wildland fire for 15 years, I have been asked many questions in the last weeks about why the fires and air quality got so bad this September. Is it that the forests are too dry or that there are too many trees? Is it the winds or careless human mistakes? Is it forest management or climate change? To all these questions I answer yes, yes and yes.
These are tragic times with lives lost, homes destroyed and air so unhealthy we can’t let our children play outside. These are not times to be arguing about the causes when science has clearly established that the answer is “all of the above.” As humans, we want a simpler answer, one explanation, but to have any hope of tackling the problem, we need to recognize all the factors colliding to make the wildfire situation so widespread. If we don’t act now on all of these causes, it will only get worse.
In Washington, our dry east-side forests, wet west-side forests, grasslands and sagebrush ecosystems are all naturally fire-prone. These ecosystems have burned in the past, and they will burn again. But science has shown that we humans are changing the game in several ways.
A legacy of forest management excluding fire from dry forest ecosystems has resulted in too many trees, leading to larger and more severe fires.
Development has rapidly expanded into the wildland-urban interface across the state, increasing the number of ignitions and of people and homes in harm’s way when the wildfires do burn. Some people do not even realize that they live in fire-prone environments, especially in wet west-side forests that haven’t burned in a century. And they might not know how to prepare or how to give their homes a fighting chance when the wildfires burn.
Climate change is increasing temperatures, leading to drier summers and increased aridity across the western U.S. In many forests and grasslands, tinder-dry fuels are ready to burn. So when the red flag warnings go out for impending severe fire weather and ignitions spark, climate change is setting the stage for larger and larger fires.
Science has given us evidence of the causes of the wildfire problem, and now we need to turn to science for insights into the solutions. It’s time to connect our understanding of the relative importance of these causes in different places with our efforts to solve the problem.
We can use science to tailor our solutions and minimize impacts to resources, communities and people. Many good examples are in progress — such as creating Fire Adapted Communities, thinning forests and enhancing emergency plans — but not nearly to the extent that they need to be to prevent the 2020 fire season from becoming the norm. And these actions may matter little if we aren’t also reducing emissions sufficiently to prevent dangerous climate change.
So what I want people to be asking me is: Should we address the wildfire problem by changing forest management or suppressing fires? By building fire-smart communities or preparing for fire emergencies? By adapting to climate change, or reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases that are causing climate change? And my answer would be yes for some forests, yes for some places and undoubtedly yes if we want this situation to stop getting worse in the future.
The east winds that pushed the large fires as temperatures hit record highs for early September will blow again. My question to you is: Next time these winds blow, will we be any more prepared, or will we still be fighting about the causes?
Crystal Raymond Ph.D. is a climate adaptation specialist with the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington EarthLab. She has conducted research on fire science and climate change for more than 15 years.
While we may be specialists in our respective areas of knowledge, we are not necessarily experts in the skills necessary to bring that knowledge together in joint solutions.
“In this series opener we go way-deep into the social tensions of our time,” show notes say, “discussing how racism in law enforcement and governmental responses to the COVID-19 epidemic contribute important environmental threats to communities in our region and elsewhere.”
