New Directions (Asynchronous Session)
Building Climate Resilient Communities in Recovery from COVID-19 and Moving to a Green and Resilient Society View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gordon Mc Bean
Responding to the issue of climate change as a security issue, there is need for an integrated energy-climate policy. The UNSG (2021), stated: As we rebuild, we cannot revert to the old normal. Pandemic recovery is our chance to change course. SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant enabled an interdisciplinary team to come together to address how communities across Canada can proactively advance climate- resilience to effectively reduce the risk of adverse climate impacts, loss and damage. For a climate resilient society and communities, there are challenges across multi-level governance levels and sectors of society. There is need for integrated early warning systems and better prevention strategies with collaboration between governments, Indigenous communities, and societies to implement integrated risk reduction actions. The expert community has developed proven tools, based on best practices, to proactively improve climate resilience with a major issue being lack of funding and direction for governments and indigenous communities to address climate resilience. Indigenous communities in Canada and groups of municipalities are at the forefront of climate change adaptation in Canada and bringing them together for effective knowledge translation is necessary for adaptation. The Report (McBean, PI) assesses the academic and government information and provides guidance and the proposed first-ever National Adaptation Strategy needs to move the agenda ahead.
Climate Change Influence on Wildlife Tourism in Maasai Mara National Game Reserve, Kenya View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Laban Kipkemoi Rotich, Richard Makopondo
Climate change impacts through erratic rainfall and temperature have the potential to affect wildlife population in parks and reserves. These parks and reserves are critical in supporting wildlife tourism. Possible impacts of erratic rainfall and temperature patterns on vegetation and wildlife population in Maasai Mara National Reserve (MMNR) were investigated. Explanatory research design including GIS and Earth observation technologies were adopted. Vegetation cover changes were ascertained by satellite imagery using Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) method from (1975 to 2018). The Raw Landsat data was processed to generate NDVI from Erdas Imagine Software. Geographical representation of the NDVI was produced by ArcGis. The mean annual rainfall and temperature patterns for the period 1977-2016 were analyzed by time series. Findings reveal that rainfall and temperature variations affect wildlife populations by controlling vegetation distribution as there could be other factors too. Also, Elephant, Wildebeest and Rhino population declined with declines in NDVI as well as rainfall patterns. Therefore, extremely high and low rainfall trends characterized by floods and drought result in declines in vegetation and water. This results to starvation of wildlife and increase wildlife mortality. With declines in Wildlife population, wildlife tourism is highly likely to be negatively affected as tourists could prefer other destinations with abundant wildlife. Kenya Wildlife Service needs to adopt emerging technologies to locate carnivorous wildlife that are undercover during the day and can not be counted. More importantly, focus on robust Wildlife conservation models under changing climatic conditions.
The Impact of Preemptive Investment on Natural Disasters View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jhorland Ayala García
Extreme rainfall events are expected to become more frequent and more intense in the future. Because their mitigation is a challenge and their cost to human life is large, this paper studies the impact of preemptive investment against natural disasters on the future occurrence of landslides and the losses associated with it. Based on a panel of 746 Colombian municipalities with medium and high risk of landslides and an instrumental variable approach, we find that preemptive public investment can reduce the number of landslides, the number of people who die, are injured, or disappear after a landslide, as well as the number of people affected. However, we do not find any effect on the number of houses destroyed. The results reveal that local governments focus their preventive measures on saving the lives and the physical integrity of their citizens, but they pay less attention to the direct market losses of natural disasters. These results are relevant in the presence of imperfect private insurance markets and increased informal settlements.
The Deep Listening Project: Co-Designing Communication Tools and Procedures with Indigenous and Frontline Communities for Collaborative Climate Adaptation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mona Vijaykumar, Gabriela Degetau Zanders
Over the next decade, an estimated 100 million people will need to adapt where and how they live to accommodate the changing climate. Although mitigation strategies can slow the pace of climate change, change is inevitable. Government and intergovernmental institutions will need to lead the way in facilitating adaptation processes; but for these to be successful, equitable, and not lead to maladaptive outcomes, institutions need to collaborate with frontline and Indigenous communities, the first and often most impacted by climate change. Currently, the communication infrastructure for collaborative adaptation planning does not exist. Frontline communities lack the mechanisms and institutional support to communicate well with institutions. Likewise, institutions lack the capacity to understand communities’ values or to integrate their lived experiences and visions into concrete decision-making scenarios. At the conference, we will focus on the theme of climate justice that presents a need for a theoretical framework for communication infrastructure for climate action. The Deep Listening Project (TDLP) is a multidisciplinary, and multi-university effort to create a sustainable communication infrastructure for collaborative adaptation. We aim to present our framework that is built on five components of the deep listening project- Knowledge sharing, Holding space, Co-production and sharing of climate imaginaries, Sensemaking with a diversity of perspectives, Evaluation and monitoring support to assure accountability. We will highlight the gaps in current communication infrastructure by inferring from adaptation case studies and explore how the application of tools and procedures for effective communication can contribute towards procedural justice, leading to fewer maladaptive outcomes.
Effect of Integrating Systems Thinking in an E-learning Module for Climate Change View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Trixstan Ignacio
Climate change is a problem that concerns all countries. When Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) surveyed 5,184 Filipinos in 2017, the result shows that 59.9 percent are reported having some awareness about climate change on a low to inadequate level and only 11.7 percent are well informed about this global issue (Bollettino et al., 2020). Science literacy is vital for understanding climate change and building climate literacy for citizens to know and understand climate, impacts of climate change, and ways to adapt and mitigate. Making connections between human action and its effect on climate change is an essential step that can be attained in PISA's learning competencies. Systems thinking is an approach that looks at the relationship of each variable in a system. It is critical to integrate systems thinking to comprehend climate science and manage climate change (Ballew, 2019). This research study utilizes a mixed method research design and the objective is to determine if systems thinking affect global climate literacy of teacher- participants as they translate climate information to their students. Participants are divided into two groups, the systems thinking group and the non-systems thinking group. An e-learning module with similar content is implemented to both groups for 15-hours. Quantitative data is analyzed using paired t-test to identify if there is a significant difference between the results, ANOVA is used to compare and contrast the level of knowledge, depth of learning and reasoning of both groups while qualitative data is analyzed using content analysis.
Current Trends in Air Quality and Cancer Prevalence Across the Sub-Saharan African Regions View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Omolola Okunromade, Atin Adhikari
Poor air quality and environmental pollution remain one of the main etiological factors leading to cancers and cancer-related deaths worldwide. As a result of human activities and changes in the climate, deleterious airborne chemicals can be dispersed not only in the environment but also released in occupational and industrial areas. Air pollutants and cancer links are now established through various oxidative stress-related mechanisms and related Deoxyribonucleic acid damages. As air pollution dramatically approaches an upward trend in the Sub-Saharan countries, interestingly we found cancer rates and burden also rise here between 1.5 and 4-fold higher than in developed countries. The Sub-Saharan region is predicted to have over 85% rise in cancer burden by 2030, with high rates of especially breast, prostate, and cervical cancer. Approaches to monitoring, minimizing, and creating awareness of the trends in some specific pollutants in sub-Saharan Africa will help ameliorate cancer prevalence and support the reduction of air pollution level safe margin, thereby relieving the burden from all cancer types. This study examines the trends and correlations of carbon dioxide emissions, greenhouse effect in the changing climate, and PM2.5 levels in some highly populated Sub-Saharan countries recently noticed to have higher cancer burden. Utilization of the findings from the study support public health efforts to improve the reduction of all cancer types in the African ancestry especially in the Sub-Saharan region having the poorest outcome and the shortest survival rates from cancer globally.
