Nebraska Legislature - Special Committee - Climate Change Seminar - NDMC

Ms.Kelly Helm Smith Author

06/08/2016 Added

186 Plays

Description

Seminar on Climate Change for the Climate Change Seminar for Elected Officials of the Nebraska Legislature - National Drought Mitigation Center

Searchable Transcript

Search:

[00:00:00.181]Yeah, I'm Kelly Smith.
[00:00:01.986]I wear a couple of different hats
[00:00:04.821]at the National Drought Mitigation Center.
[00:00:06.993]I am honored to say that I was one
[00:00:08.580]of the original six employees,
[00:00:10.389]along with Don Wilhite back in 1995
[00:00:12.830]when the center was first established.
[00:00:16.035]I joined the center with a background in journalism
[00:00:18.987]and public relations and so the world wide web
[00:00:21.912]was new territory just ripe for filling up
[00:00:24.372]with all this great information.
[00:00:26.092]We ended up with a website that has been described as
[00:00:28.650]like an online textbook for drought planning.
[00:00:31.201]So that was kind of a fun initial project.
[00:00:33.407]I also, eventually, went and added a degree
[00:00:37.115]in community and regional planning to my CV or resume.
[00:00:41.104]Because I realized that quite a lot of
[00:00:44.629]drought resilience is being built
[00:00:46.336]in all these different meetings
[00:00:47.776]and, you know, city hall meetings,
[00:00:49.169]natural district resource meetings
[00:00:50.727]of course in the unicameral.
[00:00:52.204]And all these different kind of
[00:00:53.297]political decision-making contacts,
[00:00:54.986]so then I wanted to understand more about that.
[00:00:58.910]At the time, you know, 20 plus years ago,
[00:01:01.809]climate change was not the well-known
[00:01:04.006]concept that it is now.
[00:01:06.186]You know, people were kind of bat-ing
[00:01:07.780]this term "global warming" around,
[00:01:09.649]but as a little bit more controversial,
[00:01:11.413]not quite as widely accepted as it is now.
[00:01:14.711]But the Drought Center still had a lot of work to do.
[00:01:18.506]It seems like if I can dare to capsulize
[00:01:21.590]Don's message with him sitting right here, you know,
[00:01:26.782]Congress tended to treat every single drought back
[00:01:29.357]in those days like a separate act of God,
[00:01:31.906]when in fact climatology tells us
[00:01:34.066]that droughts are a recurring feature
[00:01:36.183]of nearly every climate on the planet.
[00:01:38.386]So really, you don't know when the next drought is coming,
[00:01:41.709]but you can be very sure that it is coming at some point,
[00:01:45.344]and that you can take some actions
[00:01:46.848]to reduce the effects of the next drought.
[00:01:49.629]So that's really what the Drought Center is about,
[00:01:51.452]to reduce societal vulnerability to drought.
[00:01:55.574]One of our best known products is the US drought monitor,
[00:01:58.557]as you were mentioning.
[00:01:59.969]It's on, you have an eight-page brochure
[00:02:01.977]somewhere in your folder.
[00:02:03.874]It's on page five of that brochure,
[00:02:05.430]if you're not familiar with it.
[00:02:07.236]That's the map that comes out every Thursday morning,
[00:02:10.059]showing the location and the intensity
[00:02:12.482]of drought across the United States.
[00:02:16.561]Back, this is maybe hard to imagine,
[00:02:18.370]if you follow the drought monitor,
[00:02:19.802]back before that existed,
[00:02:21.192]in order to find out if we were having a drought
[00:02:23.630]you had to know the name of something
[00:02:25.475]kind of obscure to most people,
[00:02:27.009]like the Palmer drought severity index,
[00:02:29.396]or you had to know to go check a
[00:02:31.044]US geological survey stream gauge,
[00:02:33.208]or how to figure out if you were in drought.
[00:02:35.699]And, you know, as a communications person
[00:02:38.433]at the time trying to put together a newsletter
[00:02:41.033]showing where a drought was,
[00:02:42.311]I said to my, my climatologist colleagues,
[00:02:45.154]"You know guys, you should really just
[00:02:46.417]put this all on one map,
[00:02:47.675]this is kind of hard."
[00:02:48.928]And so the drought monitor was born,
[00:02:51.387]or that's, at least, how I like to tell it.
[00:02:53.047]You know, that's this kind of simplification.
[00:02:56.172]But really it's been quite a hit.
[00:02:57.657]You know, it's written into tax code now,
[00:02:59.952]the US Department of Agriculture
[00:03:02.185]and Small Business Administration use it
[00:03:04.355]to trigger a variety of relief programs.
[00:03:07.396]Certainly, media use the drought monitor widely
[00:03:10.616]to talk about drought.
[00:03:11.614]It literally serves to get people
[00:03:14.920]kind of all on the same page,
[00:03:16.441]looking at the same product.
[00:03:18.263]And, you know, we see a tremendous spike in web hits
[00:03:21.480]every Thursday when the drought monitor come out.
[00:03:23.744]So it's been a very interesting product to watch develop
[00:03:27.296]and watch its evolution into something
[00:03:30.164]that is really quite prominent.
[00:03:32.184]Countries around the world look
[00:03:33.704]to emulate the, the process and to come up
[00:03:36.538]with something with similar credibility and validity,
[00:03:41.210]but for all of that monitoring drought,
[00:03:45.306]the scientific part is actually the easy part.
[00:03:49.398]Knowing what to do about it ahead of time,
[00:03:52.382]and when you do detect drought, is the hard part,
[00:03:55.657]and that's where it gets back to the drought planning
[00:03:58.698]that, that Don has always talked about.
[00:04:02.786]In one way, the crux of a drought plan is
[00:04:05.003]knowing how drought affects you.
[00:04:06.709]Starting with the impacts, who does it affect?
[00:04:09.601]Whose livelihood?
[00:04:11.095]Who bears, bears the brunt?
[00:04:13.270]Is it affecting environmental habitat?
[00:04:15.923]Is it affecting the economy of the estate?
[00:04:18.702]Is it having a disproportionate affect
[00:04:20.733]on disadvantaged populations?
[00:04:24.863]If you understand where those impacts are,
[00:04:27.236]then you can start to look for the underlying vulnerability
[00:04:30.081]and take advantage, take opportunities,
[00:04:33.366]ahead of time to reduce vulnerability
[00:04:35.688]to drought before it happens again.
[00:04:37.244]So that's, that's kind of our core message.
[00:04:39.067]That's what we talk about.
[00:04:41.349]So if you fast forward for 20 years,
[00:04:44.995]we're up to about 16 employees now,
[00:04:47.734]who have quite a variety of expertise.
[00:04:50.695]Although, we do have our preponderance
[00:04:51.936]of climatologists still.
[00:04:54.422]We, last summer, began work on something called
[00:04:57.282]"The Drought Risk Management Research Center,"
[00:04:59.523]a big five-year project,
[00:05:01.603]three to five years, through NOAA,
[00:05:04.283]the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
[00:05:06.587]that lets us work really hand and glove with drought.gov,
[00:05:10.648]sort of the federal unifying drought monitoring presence.
[00:05:14.111]We're very involved in that.
[00:05:15.998]And as you know,
[00:05:17.739]climate change is well-recognized now as an issue
[00:05:21.237]and discussions of drought are very much
[00:05:25.167]within that context,
[00:05:26.456]but the thing that we point out to people a lot
[00:05:30.216]is that drought can kind of serve
[00:05:32.212]as a capacity-building issue for planning
[00:05:34.397]for climate change because it is slow,
[00:05:37.138]it is a little bit hard to detect compared with the flood
[00:05:40.423]or a hurricane or a tornado or something like that.
[00:05:43.299]It requires people working together,
[00:05:45.501]people working collectively to talk
[00:05:47.539]about how you're going to manage resources.
[00:05:49.459]And I think all of the things that you would do
[00:05:53.136]to be better prepared for drought,
[00:05:54.982]to reduce your vulnerability to drought,
[00:05:57.020]also help reduce carbon emissions and serve
[00:06:00.711]as mitigation or adaptation actions for climate change.
[00:06:05.849]So drought is kind of a good starter issue
[00:06:08.217]if you're trying to get a community
[00:06:10.320]or group of people going on climate change.
[00:06:13.894]And that's I think it in a nutshell.
[00:06:15.752]Twenty years in a nutshell?
[00:06:16.966]Twenty years in a nutshell.
[00:06:17.948](laughter)
[00:06:18.831]Read the brochure if you want the rest.
[00:06:21.140]Any other questions?
[00:06:22.335]Any quick questions?
[00:06:25.246]Thank you, I...

The screen size you are trying to search captions on is too small!

You can always jump over to MediaHub and check it out there.

Comments

0 Comments

Nebraska Legislature - Special Committee - Climate Change Seminar - NDMC

Description

Searchable Transcript

Comments icon comment

Related Channels

Comments