AGRICULTURE

The first, in Ithaca, NY on November 17, was a part of the annual meeting of New York Cooperative Extension Service (CES) agricultural extension agents and educators, held in conjunction with Cornell University.

The first afternoon of the three-day conference was a seminar on the impacts of global warming on agriculture and a look at adaptive and mitigative strategies. More than 80 people, from New York and across the region, attended the meeting, which was the first of its kind for agents and educators working directly with farmers and growers.

The meeting was the culmination of a process begun in 2000, when CA-CP convened a group of scientists and researchers to talk about indicators of climate change in the region. From that meeting have come a number of initiatives, including a symposium in October of 2003, Climate Impacts on Horticulture, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Horticultural Science (ASHS) in Providence (Proceedings).

“It was very clear from the presentations at the symposium that a concerted effort needed to be made to educate farmers and horticulturists about the potential for changes in climate to disrupt significantly farming and growing in general in the region,” says Adam Markham, executive director of CA-CP, who organized the symposium with Professor David Wolfe of the Horticulture Department at Cornell.

“From the beginning, we saw the network of the Cooperative Extension Service as probably the best way to reach farmers,” Markham adds, noting that a survey of CES websites around the region “revealed that there was nothing much being done about impacts of global warming.”

CA-CP was involved in a grant with the Tellus Institute to pilot an educational program for stakeholder groups vulnerable to climate change impacts and “it seemed logical to treat cooperative extension agents as a stakeholder group for that project,” Markham explains. Work was begun collaboratively with Wolfe, Erika Spanger-Siegfried at Tellus, and Vernon Grubinger at the Cooperative Extension Service at the University of Vermont, who was an active participant in the ASHS symposium.

The group’s first effort was to create and pilot a PowerPoint that outlined the science of global warming and the affects on regional climate most important to farmers. The program was designed to be used by Extension Agents and Educators as a tool to introduce the issue of climate impacts to farmers. Additional materials, in a range of impact areas from heat stress, to increased CO2, to changes in precipitation, would be developed to back up the initial presentation.

“Dave was the one to really stick his neck out by going to the director of CES in New York and recommending a full program on climate impacts for agents, something that has never been done,” Markham says. “We were quite excited, when it came through.”

CA-CP and Tellus, with funds from their Hunt Foundation grant, were able to insure that top notch climate and agriculture speakers were at the event, which was clearly considered a success by presenters and participants.

Presenters included two climate scientists who also presented in Providence, Art Degaetaimo from Cornell and Cameron Wake from UNH, as well as Wolfe, Grubinger, and Lewis Ziska, a leading weed ecologist from the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Get complete proceedings. To see the presentations on video or get more info, go to Cornell's site.

COASTAL ZONE

In the summer of 2003, 60,000 homeowners on Cape Cod found out their insurance companies were not renewing their home insurance because the potential of catastrophic storm damage as a result of global warming had become to great a risk.

Although this came as a shock to insurers and the insured in this country, international reinsurance companies like SwissRe and MunichRe – the companies that insure the insurance companies – had been talking about the problem of global warming, and charting the costs, for decades.

“These companies has speakers at the major climate conferences, and if you looked at their annual reports or their websites, you knew that they were very, very worried about the potential for increasing damage claims as a direct result of global warming,” notes CA-CP Executive Director Adam Markham, pointing out that SwissRe’s Chris Walker was a speaker at Climate Solutions for the Northeast, put on by CA-CP in Hartford in May of 2003.

To respond to the double threat of rising sea levels and more powerful ocean storms, CA-CP began to look at an educational program for people in the coastal zone, following the model of the program being developed in agriculture (See companion story).

“The threats to living and working in the coastal zone are different from the problems faced by people living and working in farming communities, of course,” notes Markham. “But the cause – global warming – is the same, as are the things people can do to reduce the threat.

“What different for people in the coastal zone is that adaptation is much more unlikely, at least much more difficult. While it’s true that people who are fishing may be able to catch different fish if the warmer water drives native species away,” Markham says, “people who live in coastal communities subject to flooding or severe storms need much more time and understanding to adapt adequately to the changes they may face.”

So when the Connecticut community of Guilford sought help in addressing a problem they had identified in their town – in part that their Amtrak station, a vital economic link to New Haven and New York City, could be flooded by projected sea-level rise from global warming – CA-CP offered to help. “In addition to the model stakeholder education initiative we were involved in with Tellus, Cornell, and UVM, we had also begun to look at marine impacts in cooperation with the World Wildlife Fund,” Markham explains, noting that WWF had funded a project to bring marine scientists together to discuss impacts in Northeast waters.

“We had asked Tundi Agardy, of SoundSeas, a Washington, DC, a international authority on global warming and oceans, to help us put together the WWF meeting,” Markham said. That meeting took place at the New England Aquarium in June, and Agardi then worked those proceedings into a report, still in progress, on impacts on Northeast waters.

“So we knew that Tundi was someone with great current knowledge of the state of the oceans in our region, who could be very important in addressing this issue. We were very pleased to make it possible for her to be part of a day-long discussion on impacts and solution strategies in Guilford.”

Decision-makers, scientists and planners gather in Guilford, CT, to talk about sea level rise impacts and responses.

That meeting, November 19, also featured presentations by, in addition to Agardi, Connecticut State Representative Pat Widlitz, Climate Specialist Lynne Carter, Michael Ludwig, NOAA Fisheries, David Knowles, FEMA, John , speaking on behalf of Martin Whittaker, of SwissRe, Gary Yohe, Wesleyan University, and Dwight Merriam, of Robinson and Cole (For proceedings, go to Guilford’s website.

Panelists Agardi, (middle) Ludwig (left) and Wildlitz answer questions from meeting-goers.

“This is the kind of community-based, educational effort we are intent on bringing to people in vulnerable areas throughout the Northeast,” said Markham. “We hope to replicate these programs in farming and coastal communities, as well as in areas where forestry and forest products – which are also vulnerable to changes from global warming – are a vital economic interest.”