In the capital city of Salem, lawmakers are tapping the expertise of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute to help communities adapt to the state’s changing climatic landscape. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

[Editor's Note: To learn how Oregon is coping with climate change, Terra magazine's Lee Sherman and OSU Extension photographer Lynn Ketchum traveled across the state talking to stakeholders in seven sectors identified in the Oregon Climate Assessment Report.]

The signs may be subtle so far, but the science is conclusive: Climate change is upon us. Even in the Pacific Northwest — this mythologized place of swirling ocean mists, moss-soft rainforests, crystalline rivers jumping with trout, reedy lakes teeming with waterfowl, juniper-perfumed grasslands bounding with pronghorns, shining cities wedded to sustainability — elevated levels of carbon dioxide are altering natural ecosystems and affecting human well-being year by year.

Globally, the science has been mounting for decades. A panel of more than 1,300 scientists worldwide has forecast a temperature rise of 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. The effects on individual regions will vary over time, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

To better understand those effects on Oregon, the Legislature charged the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (OCCRI) in 2007 with making a biological, physical and sociological survey of existing climate-change research from Oregon’s coastal oceans to the Cascade Mountains to the high desert. The evidence was unequivocal.

“We are already experiencing the impacts of climate change in Oregon,” concludes the Oregon Climate Assessment Report (OCAR), edited by OSU researcher Kathie Dello and OCCRI Director Philip Mote, and presented to the Legislature in December 2010.

Since 1920, Oregon’s average temperature has gone up 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, says OCCRI, a network of more than 100 researchers across the Oregon University System, housed at OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (formerly COAS). That may not sound like much. But for ecosystems and organisms that have adapted to distinct niches over countless millennia, it can be huge.

“Small changes in temperature correspond to enormous changes in the environment,” explains NASA on its climate change website. “For example, at the end of the last Ice Age, when the Northeast United States was covered by more than 3,000 feet of ice, average temperatures were only 5 to 9 degrees cooler than today.”

And temperatures will keep rising through the end of the century — faster if carbon emissions continue unabated, slower if significant cutbacks are made, the researchers say. As the thermometer climbs, summers will get hotter and drier, snowpack will shrink, wildfires will spark up, rising seas and coastal floods will speed erosion. Plant and animal populations will shift across the landscape as they struggle to adjust. Pathogens will find new niches. Novel diseases will emerge.
Regions and communities that take active measures to adapt will fare best, the IPCC counsels.

Hearts and Minds

The iconic image of global climate change is a polar bear poised on a shrinking scrap of ice. This symbol of Earth’s fragility and life’s vulnerability — a floe adrift in the ocean, disintegrating under great white paws — works because it embodies a maddening complexity in a single, searing picture. You can wrap your heart around it, as well as your mind. It helps, too, that the basic science is easy: Heat melts ice. You don’t need a physics degree to grasp cause and effect.

Unfortunately for the scientists and environmentalists sounding the alarm for climate change, clear-cut images are hard to find. That’s because threats to human survival suggested by long-term data and projected by computer models are as complex as the systems they attempt to characterize. Rarely can they be reduced to a picture as stark, or as haunting.

Neither can clarity be found in America’s popular media. Images with the power to persuade — say, villagers being inundated by seawater in low-lying places like Madagascar and the Maldives Islands — rarely make the evening news. And when catastrophes of nature are reported, coverage lurches from natural disaster to natural disaster, offering little insight into the forces that connect and drive them. Monstrous storms crush small towns in Hurricane Alley. Heat waves sizzle across the Rust Belt. Wildfires blacken homes in California and the Southwest. Drought bakes the ranches and rangelands of Texas. People who rely on cable or network news for their information may perceive such events as random and unrelated — as short-term weather dynamics rather than long-term climate indicators.

Early Adapters

In the Pacific Northwest — this temperate corner of the country where extremes of heat, cold, wind, flood and fire are uncommon — the signs of change are less evident than in some other regions. Oregon’s relatively benign climate presents a predicament for planners and policymakers, according to public health expert Kari Lyons-Eubanks.

“We’re not in Chicago, where people are dying from heat,” notes Lyons-Eubanks, a policy analyst for the Multnomah County Health Department. “We’re not in Florida, where people are suffering from dengue fever. When dengue is happening, people pay attention to the issue.

“In Oregon, we don’t have a destructive hazard that’s causing a big problem right now. With slow, creeping climate change, it’s a little bit more challenging.” But it also presents an opening — if communities have the foresight to walk through it.

“We’re lucky in the Pacific Northwest because we have more time to figure this out,” she says. “We have an opportunity to do this really well if we add some urgency to it. We can adapt if we pay attention now.”

All over Oregon, government agencies and private companies are doing just that. Using scientific data from OCCRI and elsewhere to craft policies and create plans to help people and ecosystems adapt to climatic shifts now and in the future.

“Prudent measures to adapt should be taken now,” Dello and Mote caution. “Resilience needs to be built into human communities and fostered in natural communities to deal with the adverse impacts of climate change.”

Click on the Terra Up Close sidebars on this page to read what stories from stakeholders in a range of economic and environmental sectors. You will meet a wheat farmer in Eastern Oregon, a public-health professional and a green-construction expert in Portland, a sustainability official in Salem, an ornithologist in Ashland, a city planner in Florence and a forest geneticist in Bend.

For Oregon BEST, Johanna Brickman brings university researchers and businesses together to develop new solutions to environmental problems. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

PORTLAND, Oregon – Oysters and clams build their shells locally. Using only the most immediate minerals, chemicals and organic compounds to craft their shelters, the mulluscs are masters of waste-free, energy-efficient, life-sustaining construction.

A group of humans led in part by the Oregon University System has embarked on a similarly molluscan task: to construct a “living building” that taps directly into nature. Like a biological organism, the Oregon Sustainability Center in downtown Portland is designed to create energy from the sun, capture water from the sky and recycle outputs to the Earth. Workspaces will be alive with sensors giving continuous feedback to tenants on the fundamental questions driving the project: How are we protecting the planet? How can we do better?

“The built environment, as a form of both art and problem-solving, is a real, tangible expression of human connection to the Earth,” notes Johanna Brickman, an expert in sustainable architecture and a key participant in the endeavor. “It’s the shell that we build for ourselves.”

The center’s planned use of 100-percent local, eco-friendly materials is just the beginning. More broadly, its creators envision it as a crucible for innovation. A “triple-net-zero” building — one that emits no carbon, generates its own energy, and produces no waste — it could showcase the world’s most advanced technologies in green construction.

The center is the serendipitous brainchild of the Oregon State Board of Higher Education, the City of Portland, the Oregon Environmental Council and Earth Advantage Institute, all of which were heading down the same built-environment path in 2008 when they bumped into each other and decided to join forces. The university researchers, architects, engineers, urban planners, environmentalists and entrepreneurs leading the project anticipate its role as an internationally recognized seedbed for life-sustaining technologies when it opens, possibly as early as 2013. But with a price tag of $62 million, it has hit a stumbling block: strapped state and city budgets. Financial support for the project will remain uncertain, The Oregonian reported in December 2011, until the Legislature votes in February and the Portland City Council votes in the spring.

Synergies of Energy

Johanna Brickman is all about the synergies of design, construction and adaptation to a rapidly changing environment. When she arrived in Portland in the late ‘90s, her resume featured degrees in studio art and environmental studies, four years of organic farming, and a stint as an artist for a Southern California architect. It all coalesced in a new position created for her at one of Portland’s leading firms, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects, to “inform their design from a sustainability perspective.” She began digging into alternative materials. “Organic farming taught me a lot about systems thinking — the interconnectedness of things,” she says. “In my work, I’m always looking at the intersection of culture and natural systems — anthropology, policy, biology — and how all of that merges with self-expression.”

With LEED certification just emerging as the “industry’s catapult” toward sustainability, Brickman grew her team at ZGF to eight before taking on her current challenge: speeding up commercialization of emerging technologies and spurring technical solutions to environmental problems by bringing university researchers and private businesses together. “If you push these two groups together as much as possible and force that interaction, you’d be surprised at what pops out,” says Brickman.

Brickman manages the Sustainable Built Environment Program for Oregon BEST (Built Environment & Sustainable Technologies Center), a legislatively created research center that drives innovation in green building and renewable energy by connecting businesses with more than 200 researchers from Oregon State, Portland State, University of Oregon and Oregon Institute of Technology. Nearly half are from OSU. Rick Spinrad, OSU’s vice president for research, sits on BEST’s board of directors.
“Of the folks who have been involved in our research team, OSU has been disproportionately represented,” Brickman says.

“They’ve had a lot of interest and a lot of engagement. In terms of doing applied research, it’s been really rewarding to work with the OSU folks.”

Extending Resources

Scott Shull is Intel’s liaison with Oregon BEST. “We’re looking at closing the loop with the office worker, with the individuals who are in the building,” says Shull, a director in Intel’s Eco-Technology program and a member of Oregon BEST’s university-industry research consortium. “Intel, having spent 30 years making computing personal said, ‘Well, we can lead the way in making energy personal, too.’”

The “concept vehicle” Intel has developed is a PC equipped with light- and climate-sensing devices. “We call it POEM — personal office energy manager,” says Shull. “It detects ambient conditions — What’s the light? What’s the temperature? What’s the humidity? We’ll be able to integrate all this information, report it to the user and coach them if they want to do better.”

Oregon’s preeminence in life-sustaining policies, especially in transportation and land-use planning, is unquestioned, Brickman says. “We’re a state that has long relied on its natural resources for its success. Along with that comes an awareness of the need to preserve, to extend, to care for those resources — and an understanding of how that’s tied to your own sustainability.”

John Alexander tracks shifting bird migration and reproductive patterns for the Klamath Bird Observatory in Ashland. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

ASHLAND, Oregon – As he treads a footpath in the Bear Creek watershed, John Alexander is telling a story about the riparian zone’s recent restoration when he stops abruptly. “There’s a rail!” he whispers, pointing at a clump of cattails. His visitor whirls to see, but the bird has melted into the vegetation. “Just wait,” he says softly. “It’s coming out the other side!” Seconds later, the long-legged bird slips between the tall dry stalks and vanishes once again. “They’re not called ‘secretive marsh birds’ for nothing,” says Alexander, executive director of the Klamath Bird Observatory. “That’s where the expression, ‘skinny as a rail’ comes from. When you look at them head-on, you can hardly see them.”

The Virginia rail is one of the species Alexander and his fellow ornithologists monitor in the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion, a biodiversity hot spot straddling the Oregon-California border. Spanning 10 million acres, the region is home to more than 400 resident and migratory avian species, 200 of which breed in the area. Some are abundant (song sparrows, Canada geese). Others are rare or threatened (rosy finches, marbled murrelets).

Whether common or scarce, each is an important indicator of ecosystem health. That’s why Alexander’s organization is committed to “all-bird” conservation, monitoring clusters or “suites” of species whose habitats mix or overlap. Scientists have discovered that a more accurate ecological picture emerges from monitoring suites of “focal species” rather than monitoring individual species.

“Instead of focusing on how one species responds to management, we take a community-composition approach,” explains Alexander, who collaborates with OSU forest ecologist Matt Betts on modeling projects. “If you put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, you can miss a lot of confounding factors. By looking at five or six associates, you diversify your understanding of what’s happening on the landscape, whether it’s an oak woodland, an old-growth forest or a wetland.”

Heating Up

A birdcall pierces the wintry air. “Is it a hawk?” a visitor asks Alexander.

“It sounds like a red-tail,” he says. “Then again, Steller’s jays can mimic hawks to scare away competitors.” Looking up, he scans the leafless branches. “There it is!” he points. At that moment, a winged form rises effortlessly above the treetops and disappears into the cold blue sky. “Yep, it’s a red-tail.”

This rich riparian habitat at Bear Creek is both a data source for scientists and a living lab for kids. The Klamath Bird Observatory shares space with the Willow Wind Community Learning Center, an old farmhouse that the local school district now runs as an educational facility.

At the top of a narrow staircase plastered with wildlife posters, Alexander and his colleagues labor in a warren of shoebox-sized offices that belie the scope of their work. To the observatory’s vast collection of bird data, the mother of all variables is soon to be added: climate change. As a partner in a mega-study on North Pacific birds, the Klamath group is working with two other conservation groups — PRBO Conservation Science and the American Bird Observatory — to create computer models of species distribution under three climate scenarios: low, medium and high temperatures for the Northwest. Ecologist Sam Veloz of PRBO drew on OCCRI’s 2010 analysis in the lead-up to the study. “I used the Oregon Climate Assessment Report for background while preparing the grant proposal and for identifying data sets to use for our project,” says Veloz.

Landscapes are holistic. They flow across Earth’s surface, one into another, seamlessly. Boundaries of jurisdiction — county, state, nation — are human artifacts, irrelevant to the foraging, nesting and migrating of birds. Overcoming the artificial lines on the regional map is a main mission of the study’s sponsor, the North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperative (one of 22 regional public-private cooperatives in the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife). Hosted by the OSU-based Northwest Climate Science Center, the cooperative represents yet another break from tradition in environmental science and management.

By knocking down barriers between the usual silos — government agencies, NGOs, scientists, land managers, tribes, universities — conservation efforts can better address the urgent needs of species and ecosystems. “This partnership is helping to link science and management more tightly,” Alexander says.

What If?

The study’s endgame is a tool: an interactive, online program for land managers. It will help them better understand current conditions and also look into possible futures. Alexander calls them “what-if” scenarios.

“It will be a decision-support tool that ties our science directly to their challenges,” says Alexander, who has devoted his career to what he calls the science-management interface. “They will be able to click on any pixel on the regional map and find out the probability that a number of different bird species will be there. It will help them make more informed broad-scale decisions that will benefit birds and people.”

If current predictions are right, bird communities could shift dramatically as temperatures warm. Alexander warns of a potentially massive species re-shuffling that could upset the equilibrium of coexistence. The current project, he hopes, will help mitigate such challenges. “All-bird conservation is something that is going to benefit everybody. Birds are our tool for moving toward healthier landscapes,” says Alexander.

In her public health focus for Multnomah County's climate change action plan, Kari Lyons-Eubanks of the Environmental Health Services Department considers a full array of community needs. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

PORTLAND, Oregon – Some time after paddling the pristine inlets of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, a kayaker came down with a severe headache. Within months the 45-year-old woman was blind and bedridden. She died of a massive brain infection in 2002.

Health workers traced her illness to a strain of deadly fungus called Cryptococcus gattii, once found only in hot spots like Australia, Asia and South America. When inhaled, C. gattii’s tiny spores can lodge in the lungs, attacking respiratory and neurological functions. Over the past dozen years, it has sickened nearly 200 people in the region and killed more than 40. One survivor, a robust Portland outdoorsman named Bob Lewis, told NPR that he’s “one of the lucky ones,” even though his heart, lungs and kidneys were permanently damaged when he was stricken by one of Oregon’s earliest cases in 2007.

Experts point to climate change as a likely culprit for C. gattii’s emergence in the moist soils and decaying trees of the Northwest. As greenhouse gasses warm the region, scientists expect once-tropical fungi and other hot-weather pathogens to migrate northward. “The pathogen emerged as the cause of an outbreak on the east coast of Vancouver Island beginning in 1999,” writes Oregon Public Health Division Director Mel Kohn in a recent article, “Climate Change and Communicable Diseases in the Northwest,” in Northwest Public Health, a University of Washington publication. “Environmental sampling … unveiled an ecological berth among several tree species there, notably our beloved Douglas fir. The researchers hypothesized that the establishment of the fungus in this area may have been due to climate changes.”

Longer summers and hotter temperatures are giving a leg up to other communicable diseases, such as West Nile fever and Lyme disease, according to Kohn, who served with OSU’s Mark Abbott on the Oregon Global Warming Commission and the Governor’s Climate Change Integration Group. That’s because many viruses, bacteria, protozoa, funguses and parasites can survive longer in warmer climates, shifting and expanding their ranges in response.

Heat Islands

Communicable diseases are just one health threat linked to climate change. Others include “heat islands” — patches of concrete and asphalt devoid of greenery — that concentrate solar energy and pollutants to create ground-level ozone. That’s why city dwellers are especially vulnerable to asthma and other lung maladies. In small towns and woodland communities, wildfires can create physical and mental stress. Laborers who harvest crops in the blazing sun risk heat-related illnesses. Floods can contaminate drinking water and displace families.

The young, the old, the sick, the poor and the disabled suffer disproportionately during heat waves, storms and other climate-related events. And linguistic and cultural minorities face extra obstacles. Kari Lyons-Eubanks ranks social justice as a top priority in her role as a policy analyst for Multnomah County Environmental Health Services. She likes to paraphrase the “father of environmental justice,” Robert Bullard, saying: “Sustainability cannot be simply a green or environmental concern.”

So Lyons-Eubanks, who coordinates the public-health piece of the agency’s local climate action plan, pays close attention to the full array of needs across the entire spectrum of neighborhoods — food, transportation, housing, heating, cooling, emergency preparedness — in short, anything that impinges on human health and well-being.

“We need to really engage the impacted communities,” says Lyons-Eubanks, whose background includes HIV prevention work in Kenya, Zimbabwe and Portland’s Somali-Bantu community.

Reaching Out

Making sure human health is folded into climate-change planning initiatives is taking on new urgency for the health division. “Public health has a huge role that often is overlooked,” says Julie Early-Alberts, Office of Environmental Public Health. “It’s important to have a public-health professional at the table, someone who has that lens.”

Of eight states to receive climate-adaptation grants in 2010 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Oregon is one of four to get a “Category 2” grant for higher levels of implementation. That’s because Oregon is a frontrunner in building “climate-resilient communities,” says Lauren Karam, former grant coordinator. “Some states are just getting started laying the groundwork,” she says. “We already have a lot of the baseline data.”

Early-Alberts and her colleagues have held “Ready for Change” workshops for public-health workers and emergency-preparedness personnel in Hillsboro, Newport, Bend and Grants Pass to gauge readiness for local climate impacts and help lay the groundwork for future planning. Also, five Oregon locales — Multnomah, Benton, Crook and Jackson counties, along with the north-central region of the state — have gotten “mini-grants” for two-year pilot projects. The idea is to raise awareness and build local capacity for keeping residents healthy during climate-related events.

Science — particularly science pertaining to Oregon’s unique mix of ecological and climatic niches — underpins the division’s outreach. For that reason, OCCRI’s Oregon Climate Assessment Report is a key document informing the workshops. The report also is highlighted on the division’s climate-change website. “We see OCCRI as a key partner,” says epidemiologist Mandy Green. “As we work with local public health departments, the localized data collected by OCCRI will be essential for them.”

From the Governor's office in Salem, Lynn Peterson helps translate river science into policy through a partnership known as Willamette Water 2100. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

SALEM, Oregon – The on-screen image looks like a network of arteries, veins and capillaries. Down the middle of the page snakes a thick, bluish cord. Flanking it is a twisting web of red threads.

The illustration posted on OSU’s Oregon Explorer is indeed a picture about human health. But it’s not about blood circulation. Rather, it’s about the lifeblood of a region: the Willamette River. The bluish cord represents the river as it looks today, straight and tamed. The red threads show the intricate braid of channels, wild and rambling, that once flowed from the main stem. That was in 1850 before settlers and developers began draining and diking and damming to make way for human activities.

Our gains from reshaping the river (flood control, transportation, agriculture) are being weighed against the losses (despoiled habitat, destroyed wetlands, degraded riparian zones) more acutely than ever, now that climate change is raising the stakes. For in those iconic waters, which touch more than 11,000 square miles of the state, shimmers a reflection of who Oregonians are and who they aspire to be. The Explorer website puts this notion eloquently: “The Willamette River is one of the defining features of the Valley; a sinuous thread which binds us together and readily reveals our civilization’s successes and failures.”

Another eloquent voice for the river is Lynn Peterson. “The social and economic impact of the river’s health is priceless,” says Peterson, Gov. John Kitzhaber’s policy adviser on sustainable communities and transportation.

Her capitol-mall office sits just a few blocks from where the river flows, silvery and serene. Before coming to Salem, she worked in another place tightly bound to the river, Clackamas County, which bumps into I-5 and Portland on the west and wraps around Mt. Hood on the east. As chair of the county commission, Peterson wrestled with water over and over.

“Clackamas County is a microcosm of the state of Oregon,” she observes. “On one hand, it has a vast forest and watershed ecosystem. On the other, it’s part of the largest metro area in Oregon. So its water issues are very complex.”

Water, Wheels and Rails

What do streetcars have to do with rivers? What do freeways have to do with fish? What does high-speed rail have to do with the ice cubes that tumble out of your fridge? Everything, says Peterson, who started her career as a highway engineer before shifting to transportation planning for Metro, TriMet and 1000 Friends of Oregon. More cars on Oregon’s roads equal more stress on the state’s watersheds, she says. More suburbs sprawling across the landscape create grave threats to the purity and quantity of groundwater. More dwellers crowding into cities mean spiraling demands on the snow-fed, fish-filled streams that symbolize what is best about the Pacific Northwest. “We know that the way we manage population growth, transportation and land use will influence the risk of water scarcity,” Peterson notes. “But right now, we do not have the tools to plan for a future that is likely to be strongly affected by climate change.”

Enter Envision, a new software system for looking into the future of the Willamette River Basin from all sorts of angles. Developed at OSU, Envision not only can create climate scenarios based on geography, hydrology, ecology, sociology and economics, it can toss all sorts of hypothetical human decisions into the mix and see how those might play out over time.

The pressing need for powerful predictive tools prompted Peterson to lend her voice to a multi-university project called Willamette Water 2100. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and managed by OSU’s Institute for Water and Watersheds, the project uses Envision to capture the complexities of climate change, population growth and water availability in the river basin. Faculty at Portland State and the University of Oregon are collaborating with OSU’s team, led by hydologist Jeff McDonnell and engineer John Bolte, creator of Envision.

“Envision is the best available tool for answering this question: How can we protect ecosystems and better manage and predict water availability for future generations given alterations to the water cycle caused by climate variability and change, and by human activity,” McDonnell and Bolte assert.

Voicing the viewpoint of a local stakeholder in the researchers’ funding proposal to NSF, Peterson argued for “workable tools to pave the way for adaptive planning.” She says: “If you want a cleaner, greener Oregon, a computer model can help you play with the levers. But you need to run more than one model. You need to run a lot of different scenarios in order to weigh all the alternatives, to compare and contrast so that you get the best outcome — the one that’s closest to your articulated goal. That’s what Envision lets you do.”

Ramping It Up

As Oregon’s cities, counties and other jurisdictions seek climate adaptation strategies, its universities contribute what Peterson calls the “spirit and culture of experimentation.” Toss in Oregon’s status as the “planning mecca of the United States,” she says, and you have a potent force for effective action.

“No state has pushed sustainability as far as Oregon has,” Peterson asserts. “Oregon has been working on clean air and clean water for 35 years. Now, with global climate change, we’ve raised the goals higher. We know how to do it. We just need to ramp it up.”

Walter Powell grows wheat near Condon and participates in a three-state study to develop varieties adapted to warmer, drier conditions. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum: OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

PENDLETON, Oregon – Technology rules. Oregon’s wheat country is no exception. Today’s farmers use precision electronics for site-specific applications of seed, fertilizer and pesticides. Many of the advances are geared toward ecosystem protection. But farmers are nothing if not pragmatic. Few would invest in the expensive, environmentally friendly equipment if it didn’t pencil out on their balance sheets.

So says Walter Powell, vice president of the Oregon Wheat Growers League. On his farm, which rambles across 380 acres in the hamlet of Condon, tractors are fitted with the latest in electronic sensors and GPS software. His “auto-steer” and “auto-boom” devices are fine-tuned to prevent over-use of chemicals.

Powell is more than happy to give nature a break. But in his day-to-day operations, new technologies have to make sense economically. Turns out, they do. Adopting precision equipment has saved Powell significant costs on fuel and “inputs” — materials that growers add to soils and crops to boost yields, repel pests and block weeds.

That’s what he told Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley when they sat face to face in Merkley’s Washington, D.C., office last spring. With the new Farm Bill making its way through Congress, Powell was lobbying for continued government support for EQIP, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which he regards as a life-support system for precision agriculture.

“Sen. Merkley is a tech guy,” Powell says. “He got really interested when I started telling him about the impact of precision technology for cutting down on pesticide residue and nitrate leaching. All of a sudden, this grower from Eastern Oregon and the senator from Portland were speaking the same language.”

On climate change, Powell is equally forward-looking. “I’m less skeptical about climate change than most growers,” he says. Off the top of his head, he cites recent climate studies by the International Energy Agency and “ex-skeptic” Richard Muller of the University of California, Berkeley. Then he chuckles. “Farmers do read, you know.”

Any Other Name

Steve Petrie has worked with Powell and other growers for decades. A soil scientist and director of OSU’s Columbia Basin Agricultural Research Center, which has experimental farms at Pendleton and Moro, Petrie knows wheat like the back of his sun-browned hand. He also understands the staunchly conservative community that produces that wheat, which in Oregon grossed $354 million in 2010. On climate change, he reports, their attitudes range from “full acceptance to healthy skepticism to outright rejection.”

But the range of views doesn’t worry him. Even though growers are key participants in a $20 million USDA-funded study of climate impacts on cereal crops in the Pacific Northwest, they don’t have to buy into the science or terminology of global warming in their role as stakeholder advisers, argues Petrie, who served on the Agricultural Technical Committee of the Oregon Global Warming Commission. After all, adapting to nature’s fluctuations is what farmers do every day to survive. It’s in their DNA.

“We’re doing research into better farming practices under changing conditions,” says Petrie, one of the managers for the Oregon portion of the three-state study. “If some of our stakeholders are skeptical about it, that’s OK because they’ll still benefit from the practices that are developed through this research.”

Stephen Machado agrees. “The term ‘climate change’ has been so politicized,” says the OSU agronomist and crop physiologist who grew up in Zimbabwe. “Growers have been adapting to changing conditions all along. Right now we just have a fancy name for it.”

The growers on the stakeholders advisory committee aren’t shy about challenging the scientists. “The stakeholders come to our meetings and ask really tough questions,” says Petrie. “It helps ground us. In our world of science, sometimes we forget about the practicality of things. For the growers, everything is really down to earth.”

Amber Waves

The Palouse is an ancient landscape of ice-carved hummocks and hollows rippling across northeastern Oregon, southeastern Washington and north-central Idaho. In all but a few spots, native grasses long ago gave way to fields of wheat, along with some dry peas, lentils and alfalfa.

For 80 years, OSU has studied wheat from every angle. Disease resistance, yield potential, milling and baking qualities, soil erosion and pesticide use are just a few. Now, along with neighboring land grants Washington State and the University of Idaho, OSU is expanding those experiments to look at how grain crops will fare under future climate conditions. By feeding their data into WSU-designed computer models, the researchers will generate a range of possible scenarios.

Petrie anticipates that growers could wind up with more invasive plants, more destructive pests and new disease outbreaks as winters become warmer and summers become wetter.

“We can begin to make inroads in our understanding with this five-year study,” says Petrie. “But we really have to look at this as part of a 50-year process or, actually, a forever process — always adapting our cropping practices to fit the world in which we’re growing crops, whether the conditions are due to climate change or some other factor.”

In Florence, Oregon, Sandra Belson, the city's director of community development, links the health of the Siuslaw Estuary with the economy. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

FLORENCE, Oregon – Several dozen people cluster under the Siuslaw River Bridge, colorfully zipped into fleece and Gore-Tex against the damp marine air. As a bitter wind tugs at their hats and mufflers, they listen to local planning officials tell stories of this place called Siuslaw Estuary. Once upon a time, these waters were home to millions of Coho salmon. That was before intensive fishing, farming and logging severely stressed the fragile ecosystem. Today, only a few thousand of the prized fish return each year to spawn in the streams and creeks draining the watershed.

“An estuary is where saltwater mixes with freshwater,” explains one of the guides, city engineer Dan Graber, as he gestures at the rain-swollen river racing toward the breakers just beyond the bridge. “It’s very important rearing habitat for the ocean-going salmonids.”

Sandra Belson, the city’s director of community development, elaborates. “It’s the nursery for all the sea creatures — not only for salmon, but for crabs and clams and for birdlife, too. Because of the mixing of seawater and freshwater, the estuarine ecosystem is very diverse.”

Partners in Protection

Just as biological diversity ensures productive habitat, so human diversity ensures productive environmental action. Belson and Graber, who led the fleece-bundled visitors that blustery day on the estuary, are members of the Siuslaw Estuary Partnership, a team representing nearly 20 government agencies, nonprofits, tribes and consulting firms wrapped under the mantle of watershed protection and restoration. In 2009, they won a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regenerate the watershed where the endangered Coho are struggling to survive.

“We had some contentious issues locally,” says Belson. “We realized that the driving force behind all of those issues was water: storm water, surface water, groundwater, seawater, freshwater. It’s all connected. Through this project, we’ve been able to get everybody together — to find common ground on a scientific basis.”

The estuary field trip was a highlight of the annual Heceta Head Coastal Conference, which the partnership co-sponsored with Oregon Sea Grant in October. Another of the partnership’s recent initiatives was a comprehensive climate change study. A thick report issued by the City of Florence in April traces the science of estuaries and posits the likely effects of planetary warming on Oregon’s coastal ecosystems and communities. The document draws heavily on the Oregon Climate Assessment Report, citing it more than 50 times.

At an open house in April, locals gathered to hear OCCRI scientists describe how global warming could alter Florence’s beaches, threaten its drinking water, damage its wetlands and tip the delicate balance of sea life in the already-troubled estuary. Getting out ahead of climate impacts is the community’s best hedge against ecological and economic adversity, the OCCRI experts counseled.

Stormy Weather

One mist-shrouded morning, Belson and Mike Miller, director of public works, sit in her City Hall office on Highway 101, where traffic kicks up a steady spray of rainwater. “To me, the biggest threat to our community is the frequency and intensity of storms,” says Belson, who first tackled climate issues as a Peace Corps volunteer in Samoa. “Bigger storms will mean stronger wave action and heavier runoff. Those forces will speed coastal erosion.”

Miller came to Florence from Bend, where the looming climate worry was dwindling snowpack. “The estuary is vulnerable because it’s so dynamic,” he says. “Changes in the ocean — whether it be El Niño or La Niña or higher temperatures or acidification — affect the estuary, along with changes on the land, from erosion to rainfall to contaminants. The estuary gets impacts from both sides. That’s what makes it particularly fragile.”

Rising sea level is another concern on the community’s horizon. As polar ice and glaciers melt, seas are getting higher along with waves and tides. Higher tides carry saltwater farther inland, where it can intrude on freshwater systems. The aquifer that supplies Florence’s drinking water could be at risk for inundation. Oregon’s only federally designated “sole-source aquifer,” this pristine reservoir holds millions of gallons of rainwater that has filtered through Florence’s famous sand dunes.

Despite Florence’s status as a forward-looking town whose environmental leadership is perhaps unmatched on the Oregon coast, the topic of climate change still raises hackles for some, according to Belson. In July when the city council considered the Siuslaw Estuary Partnership’s Climate Change Report, the councilors “decided to not set policy regarding climate change at the current time,” the minutes show.

Meanwhile, the partnership is moving ahead with wetlands restoration and water monitoring. Going straight for solutions while sidestepping the contentious public debate seems to Belson like a pragmatic approach — at least for now. “One of our county commissioners told us we shouldn’t discuss whether climate change is or isn’t happening, but to focus instead on the strategies for dealing with whatever environmental stresses may come about,” she says. “That way we can be resilient and adaptable to anything that may happen, whether it’s a tsunami or an invasive species or human-caused climate change.”

For replanting purposes, Matt Horning, a USDA Forest Service geneticist, identifies tree seedling varieties with a high likelihood of success. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

BEND, Oregon – The seedlings are barely visible among the tufts of lupine, balsamroot and bunchgrass dominating the study plot in the Deschutes National Forest. Matt Horning tramps over the uneven ground, naming each tiny tree as he goes — Douglas fir, Ponderosa pine and a dozen other species whose survival rates, growth patterns and genetic makeup are under scrutiny for a joint study by Canadian and American scientists.

Out beyond the Cyclone fence enclosing the hilltop site, acres of charred forest march across the landscape, thousands of blackened trunks etched eerily against the Three Sisters peaks. “We’re still replanting from the B&B Complex fire of 2003 because the burned area was so huge,” notes Horning, a geneticist for the U.S. Forest Service. “Seedlings not only have to be adapted to the local climate, they also have to compete with existing vegetation and withstand nibbling by deer and other browsers. Replanting on some of the units has not been as successful as it has on others.”

Understanding the optimal growing conditions for trees and other vegetation helps foresters ensure good outcomes when they replant burned-out, pest-infested or logged-over stands of timber. “My role is to help identify the most appropriate plant materials that will be used in reforestation and revegetation,” says Horning, who has studied genetic diversity and adaptation of flora and fauna ranging from the American robin to a threatened prairie lily.

“So if there’s a big fire or some other disturbance, and the Forest Service decides to revegetate the area, land managers will be able to use the best plant materials to create a healthy, sustainable forest.”

Ancient Giants

Scientists with the Forest Service and OSU’s College of Forestry have collected legions of data on Northwest species over the decades. They have mapped which plants thrive in each local mix of geography, elevation and climate. These maps are called “seed-zone” maps — they pinpoint places where each seed type is best suited.

But the climate defining those zones is shifting fast. As forests get wetter or drier, warmer or cooler, vegetation migrates in response. For short-lived plants, the shifts are quick. Grasses can adapt nearly overnight. But for the giants of the Northwest’s boreal and temperate forests, which take decades to mature, a rapidly changing climate can be catastrophic. A seedling that takes root during one climatic period may suffer stress or die in another. Its genetic code, written over eons of evolutionary adaptation, no longer matches the world it lives in.

“Some species can migrate more readily than others,” says Horning, who collaborates not only with OSU forestry researchers but also with crop and soil scientists on rangeland studies. “Species that are generalists, like western red cedar or bluebunch wheatgrass, are more broadly adaptable. Species that are specialists, like whitebark pine, are more susceptible to climate change.”

In fact, more than half of the evergreen species across northwestern Canada and the U.S. already are losing their competitive edge, according to a new study led by Richard Waring, an emeritus professor in the OSU College of Forestry. “Some of these changes are already happening, pretty fast and in some huge areas,” says Waring.

Seeding the Future

That’s why the Forest Service and OSU recently created a Seedlot Selection Tool — a public website built with GIS mapping technology and climate modeling software — to help land managers adapt to change. (A “seedlot” refers to seeds of a certain plant collected at one time and likely to have similar germination rates and other traits.) Horning’s Forest Service colleague Brad St. Clair at the Pacific Northwest Research Station in Corvallis and OSU tree geneticist Glenn Howe led the project with funding from the U.S. Forest Service’s Global Change Research Program.

“Because forest trees are genetically adapted to their local climates, local seed sources are generally recommended for reforestation,” St. Clair, Howe and their colleagues explain. “These recommendations, however, assume that climates are stable over the long term, an assumption that we now know is unlikely.” The Seedlot Selection Tool is one of several projects undertaken in recent years by OSU’s Taskforce on Adapting Forests to Climate Change, whose mission is to provide science-based management options for public and private forest landowners. At a genetics workshop for researchers in 2010, Horning highlighted the user-friendly tool during a presentation on seed-transfer guidelines. “We sat down in Corvallis — the genetics community in the Forest Service along with a lot of researchers from OSU and elsewhere — and said: ‘What sort of management recommendations can we make to folks to help mitigate climate change?’”

Matching seeds with sites is one key strategy. To get the free, online tool into the hands of stakeholders, the OSU taskforce brought potential users together in 2010 for a workshop. Among the attendees were members of OSU’s Tree Improvement Research Cooperative, which includes Starker Forests, Stimpson Lumber Co., Weyerhauser Co. and a dozen other private firms and public agencies.

With a few clicks on the computer, users can try out various seedlots on a selected planting site (or they can map various planting sites onto a selected seedlot) under a range of climate scenarios. In places where precipitation has dropped and temperatures have risen, for instance, they might discover that drought-tolerant Ponderosa pine is a better fit than moisture-craving Douglas fir. “The best way to learn about the tool,” notes Howe, “is to try it.”

Illustration by Teresa Hall

I remember when I felt that the climate change workshop would go well. After a period of planning and preparation, our Oregon Sea Grant team arrived in Port Orford not knowing how the diverse community group would respond to the issue of a changing local climate when we were all actually face to face. So, after introductions and a brief discussion of some overall goals, our team explained why and how to make a “concept map” — each individual’s simple diagram of how he or she perceived a particular idea — in this case, the local effects that they were concerned about and that they thought might be linked to a changing climate.

For about 10 minutes, the group worked on their own concept maps and then put post-its next to each other on sheets of poster paper. As we all looked at the array, the 10 community members — a schoolteacher, fisherman, mayor, city manager, environmental leader and others — saw that they held both concerns in common and some that were individually distinct. Through discussion, we rearranged the post-its into clusters until everyone was satisfied with the way their concerns had been sorted.

“Everyone’s ideas are up there” … “no one’s excluded” … “we’re beginning to see an overall picture,” said members of the group. Bingo. With contentious issues such as climate change, a good place to begin is to have each voice within the group be heard.

This isn’t the end-point, of course, but it does highlight what’s often missing from national discussions of climate change and what can happen in a small group context in a workshop: actual two-way communication, listening respectfully, contributing respectfully.

Know the Audience

We started listening long before the face-to-face meeting. Like other professional communicators and similar climate programs on campus, including those of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, my Extension, education and research colleagues and I use methods such as surveys, focus groups and interviews with target populations before we start engaging them on the substantive issues — what a particular community may want to do around climate change.

From our 2008 surveys of coastal decision makers in Oregon and coastal property owners in Maine, for example, we learned about not only what information related to climate effects they thought they needed, but also what personal attitudes and other behavioral factors they held that were influencing their actions and intentions to act on information. Without understanding those attitudes and beliefs, we wouldn’t really know what information might be directly useful or how best to present it. In both states, one communication tool we used was short videos that specifically addressed concerns the intended viewers expressed. (Follow-up surveys confirmed their value.)

Focusing on the decisions that individuals and communities feel they need to make to address a recognized problem yields a much more constructive conversation than does focusing on global warming itself, we find. No surprise there, really: if coastal residents are concerned about flooding, that’s tangible and relevant to them. Whether people caused it by increasing use of fossil fuels that led to global warming is, for most, an abstraction — and an invitation to argument.

Public Opinion on Global Warming

Americans certainly have differences on the subject, which puzzles some people. How do we explain that despite about two decades of scientific pronouncements about global warming and the environmental, economic, and social hazards that it presents, just 63 percent of Americans now believe that global warming is happening? Only 50 percent believe it’s mostly caused by human activities, and that percentage has declined 7 points since 2008, even while global greenhouse gas emissions have increased, according to an ongoing study by Yale and George Mason universities (nationwide survey of adults conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication in November 2011).

Clearly, if “getting the word out” about the science was the only determinant of whether Americans believe the science about humanity’s contribution to global warming, we’d have higher percentages believing than 50%. But, of course, the calculation that each of us makes with the myriad of topics that are presented to us daily is far more complex than if we were blank sheets walking around waiting to be filled by indisputable facts.

If the understanding and framing are used to promote respectful dialogue, this seems like good manners. If they’re used only to construct persuasive “messages,” however, this seems just like more of the same one-way monologue.

We’re all drowning in information and in competing claims on our time, making attention the scarce resource, as psychologist Herbert Simon observed way back in 1971 (“Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD, The Johns Hopkins Press). Before we turn up the volume on this or that “communication” about science, then, a good first question would be, have we dialed into the right frequency that the other party is tuned to? Guessing isn’t good enough. As a recent federal government report about climate communication pointed out, “there’s no such thing as an expert in communication, in the sense of someone who can tell you ahead of time (i.e., without empirical study) how a message should be framed, or what it should say.”

Hence the research that we do on the populations we hope to work with. Beyond the empirical research and specific communication strategies we employ as a result, our team uses tools from behavioral and decision research to guide our efforts. Still, I agree that gaining others’ attention by focusing on concerns of importance to them and providing information that helps with their decisions are worthwhile, even if they are missing part of the challenge. What is to be done — if anything — about the 25% of Americans in the Yale/George Mason research who are “dismissive” or “doubtful” about global warming — and who may be actively hostile, even in the face of the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists?

Values Before Facts

Probably the first thing to recognize is that for all of us — except maybe the climate scientists themselves — every new science “fact” is not a fact of our direct experience but rather one received from someone else. Thus, either we have to collect evidence about it or accept the words of others. “So, just like any other kind of fact,” as researcher Dan Kahan of Yale mentioned during an interview that’s part of our Communicating Climate Change podcast series, “your beliefs are going to be influenced by your values in exactly the same way as any other kind of belief that you might form.” (see a transcript of Kahan’s remarks)

Those who do believe scientists tend to have one set of “cultural” values, according to Kahan and his colleagues in the Cultural Cognition Network, while those who don’t, typically have another set. So, for example, if today’s fact appears to undercut other deep-seated value beliefs that are far more important to you than the fact du jour, what do any of us do? We tend to discount the “fact.” So don’t expect all Americans to suddenly believe any particular thing.

What one does with this insight to improve science communication is a topic of intense interest and discussion among communication researchers and practitioners. (Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences is holding a conference to discuss the “Science of Science Communication” in May.) Many advocate using an understanding of others’ values to frame scientific information in a way that’s congenial to those others. If the understanding and framing are used to promote respectful dialogue, this seems like good manners. If they’re used only to construct persuasive “messages,” however, this seems just like more of the same one-way monologue.

Being sensitive to the other person, curious about them, attempting to understand them and what they think about the topic of the communication, and responding to them thoughtfully as they engage the conversation — we know this works in our personal lives. It’s not the end, but it may be a way forward. Even with communicating about climate change.