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Adapting to Climate Change while Planning for Disaster: Footholds, Rope Lines, and the Iowa Floods

2011; Brigham Young University; Volume: 2011; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

0360-151X

Robert R.M. Verchick, Abby Hall,

Climate change impacts on agriculture

I. INTRODUCTION If you have never seen a pig swim, you have never been in Iowa during a flood. When the rivers jump their banks in southeastern Iowa they flood thousands of acres of hog farms. With a little planning and enough trucks and skiffs, hog farmers have been able to evacuate th.se animals in surprising numbers.1 But pigs that miss the boat must take their chances in the waves or on the corrugated roofs of buildings.2 A few unlucky ones caught scrambling up the tops of levees will, out of concern for the structures' integrity, be shot.3 The state of Iowa has experienced catastrophic flooding three times in the past seventeen years - 1993, 2008, and 2010.4 Those disasters threatened considerably more than livestock. The 2008 Midwest floods, sometimes called Katrina, inundated Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, and several other smaller communities, displacing families, flooding thousands of homes, and causing millions of dollars in property damage.5 So many calamitous floods over so short a period of time spurred a federal and state effort to rebuild Iowa's devastated communities and to increase resilience through improved disaster planning and mitigation.6 At the same time, local experts concerned about climate change saw floods like these as consistent with prevailing climate models.7 Perhaps it was time for the state's disaster planning mechanism to factor in the science of climate change. In 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) convened a pilot project on behalf of the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force (Adaptation Task Force) to bring together stakeholders from all levels of government to understand how such a fusion might occur.8 The lessons learned through this experience have relevance to many climate change adaptation efforts around the country. In particular, the Iowa Pilot Project helped focus attention on three challenges often cited by experts in adaptation policy: coordinating efforts across government sectors, coordinating efforts among levels of government, and developing an action model that can successfully move forward in the context of great uncertainty. One promising way to address these concerns, we believe, is to pay close attention to what we metaphorically call and lines. A foothold is a preexisting law or standard that, while not specifically intended to abet adaptive efforts, may be successfully used that way, thus allowing the integration of important climate concerns into an existing public or private mission. A rope line refers to the dynamic network of public and private stakeholders - across many relevant sectors and levels of government - that can support the adaptive effort and guide it flexibly through a process of evolutionary learning in the face of uncertainty. The lessons we glean from the Iowa Pilot Project are necessarily tentative: its work, and the work of the Adaptation Task Force, has only begun. But trends are emerging, and we think they can shed light on future endeavors. Part II of this Article will briefly describe how climate change is increasing the risk of catastrophic events and thus making climate trends relevant to traditional disaster mitigation policies. This Part also introduces the concept of climate change adaptation and notes the structural challenges of scope, scale, and uncertainty. Part III describes the federal government's recent efforts toward climate adaptation and introduces the work of the Adaptation Task Force, which supports the Iowa Pilot Project. Part IV introduces the ideas of footholds and rope Unes, which we believe helps conceptualize the coordination problems inherent in adaptation policy; as a bonus, the reader is apt to learn a little about ice climbing too. Part V describes in detail the process and findings of the Iowa Pilot Project, emphasizing the issues presented by scope, scale, and uncertainty. Part VI concludes with a summary of lessons learned and our thoughts about next steps. …