Resilience to climate change Local vulnerabilities and strategies for response
By Alana Linderoth Climate change is a global phenomenon, but the changes it’s projected to bring are unique to every region and each community. To better understand the anticipated changes for the North Olympic Peninsula with a local focus on the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Hood Canal side of Jefferson and Clallam counties, a collaborative effort began nearly two years ago. The effort, spearheaded by the North Olympic Peninsula Resource Conservation & Development (NOPRC&D) and grant funded by the Washington Departments of Commerce and Ecology, resulted in a localized report released in late 2015 “Climate Change Preparedness Plan for the North Olympic Peninsula.” The 87-page document, coinciding appendices and supplementary information provide the relevant science, tools and strategies to build traction and direction toward the next steps needed to adapt locally to climate change. “The goal was to create a climate change preparedness plan for our little slice of the world,” Ian Miller, project partner and coastal hazards specialist for Washington Sea Grant and faculty member at Peninsula College, said. “The idea being to inform comprehensive and strategic, adaptation planning processes.” The project brought together a diverse representation of the North Olympic Peninsula with more than 175 participants from federal, state, local and tribal governments, nonprofits, academic institutions and private businesses. Additionally, a “Core Team” with representatives from Green Crow Corporation, Puget
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Sequim Gazette photo by Alana Linderoth
Ian Miller, coastal hazards specialist for Washington Sea Grant and faculty member at Peninsula College, and Cindy Jayne, North Olympic Peninsula Resource Conservation & Development project manager, were among the primary partners leading the multi-year project to produce a localized climate change adaptation plan. Sound Partnership, Port Angeles City Council, Clallam County, Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, Port Townsend Marine Science Center, Makah Nation, Port Townsend City Council, City of Port Townsend, Olympic Climate Action and a peninsula citizen, collaborated monthly to help guide and refine the project. The project also sought input
and assistance from experts with Adaptation International, a consultant firm aimed at helping communities become more climate resilient. “It was really a diverse group of people that contributed to this project,” Miller said. “This made it as powerful as it is in hopefully kick starting some adaptation implementation in our community.”
CLIMATE CHANGE OVERVIEW “Our communities, our societies premise in a lot of ways on this idea that long-term climate is essentially stable and that we can have perturbations around a mean or an average condition, but they happen within this known range and we can plan for them,” Miller said. “Well, the idea of climate change is that assumption may no longer be valid and that we’re working in a situation where we have changing mean conditions.” The physical properties of carbon dioxide, a naturally occurring gas vital for life on earth, along with the addition of other greenhouse gases, has a large role in anthropogenic (human) influences of the climate. Since at least the 1800s scientists have studied carbon dioxide and its ability to absorb heat energy. By 1864, scientist Svante Arrhenius “connected the dots” between the burning of fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution and the ability of atmospheric carbon dioxide to retain heat energy, Miller said. The science and fundamental forces driving climate change may be well-known, but the “big uncertainty of climate change is how we evolve in the future,” he said. “As we look forward and try to know what the future may be like, we have to use difference scenarios, or ‘potential stories.’” The stories are created through modeling, which consider a variety of assumptions, like the amount of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere, technology and fossil fuel supplies, Cindy Jayne, NOPRC&D project manager, said. Those stories are then used to help communities plan and predict climate change impacts.
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