By Romany Webb Two days after making landfall in the Florida Panhandle, Hurricane Michael has now moved out to sea, leaving behind damage that could take years to repair. In Florida’s Mexico Beach, where Michael first hit as a category four storm, entire blocks of homes and businesses have been […]
Adaptation
20 posts
by Jessica Wentz On October 9, 2017, the Tubbs Fire ripped through Sonoma County, California, destroying nearly 5,000 homes and killing 22 people. It was the most destructive wildfire in California’s history and the largest urban conflagration in the United States since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake fires. And it […]
The second week of COP22 – the 22nd Meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – got underway yesterday in Marrakech. The mood at the conference center is notably different from last week. The number of attendees seems to […]
Jessica Wentz Associate Director and Postdoctoral Fellow Although it has become more common for agencies in preparing environmental impact statements (EISs) to acknowledge the impacts of climate change on a project and its affected environment, it is still quite rare for agencies to accurately incorporate this knowledge into final decisions […]
by Michael Gerrard A great deal has been said about what Hurricane Sandy was. Quite a few superlatives have appropriately been used. But I would like to list six things that Hurricane Sandy was not: 1. Hurricane Sandy was not a worst case event. It was a Category 1 hurricane […]
By Michael Gerrard Director, Center for Climate Change Law Yesterday Edvard Munch’s 1895 painting The Scream sold for a record $119.9 million at auction. The painting is famous — not so its potential link to climate change. Mount Krakatoa in Indonesia erupted in 1883. It was one of the largest […]
Gregory E. Wannier Deputy Director [Reposted with permission from China Dialogue: available at https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/4398-Deserted-islands] In December 2008, a series of swells coinciding with seasonal high (“king”) tide engulfed the island atoll of Majuro, capital of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. These waves […]
The last day of the conference began with a panel that analyzed the adaptation needs and strategies for threatened islands. Professor Klaus Jacob of Columbia University presented a risk assessment model using the variables of hazards, assets, and vulnerability. He outlined two approaches to the model: 1) using loss estimates […]