Reminder:  Smallwood Distinguished Scholar Seminar Today

 

Speaker:  Edward L. Miles, Virginia & Prentice Bloedel Professor of
Marine & Public Affairs, and Senior Fellow Joint Institute for the Study
of Atmosphere and Oceans, School of Marine Affairs, University of
Washington <http://www.sma.washington.edu/faculty/e_miles.html>  

Seminar Title: From the Global to the Local: Managing Climate Change
Impacts across Scales
Time: 3:00 pm Thursday October 18, 2007 
Location: Room 282 Reitz Union

 

ABSTRACT

 

Human responses to the fact of human-caused climate change fall along
two dimensions: mitigation of changes induced by greenhouse gases and
adaptation to the changes and their impacts to which we are already
committed. This presentation will deal solely with the adaptation
problem because we must learn how to manage changing rates of change,
particularly those that occur on seasonal-interannual to decadal time
scales. Impacts also differ on spatial scales, which add to the
management challenges. Since place is important as well as time I shall
focus on the Pacific Northwest (PNW), set in a context of the American
West, using regional hydrology and the water resources sector as my
major domain of explanation. This choice reflects the fact that water is
perhaps the most powerful trans-sectoral regulator of climate impacts.
Analytically, the explanation will be developed in terms of the dynamics
of social-ecological systems as panarchies originally developed by
Holling (1973), and elaborated more recently by others.