Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre Internship Program
by Katie Chambers
Ethiopia, August 2017

Katie is a PhD student in Environmental Engineering with a focus on Engineering for Developing Communities. In Ethiopia, Katie will be developing flood inundation maps for communities downstream of hydroelectric dams. These maps will guide the development of Early Warning Early Action frameworks for the Ethiopian Red Cross Society and IFRC. Her environmental engineering research investigates the comparative vulnerabilities and resilience of different types of sanitation systems found in resource-limited communities, as well as the tradeoffs made when prioritizing resilience in system selection.

View photo gallery from the field by Katie Chambers

I cannot believe my time in Ethiopia is coming to a close! In writing this final piece, I wanted to discuss the Climate Centre’s larger work in hydropower to provide context for my specific work. The Climate Centre recently piloted an innovative flood-modelling software for hydroelectric dams called FUNES. It is a self-learning program for flood forecasting and used to manage flood risks in vulnerable communities located downstream of dams. Without getting into too much detail, it can be used to improve predictions of flood events and optimize controlled releases to minimize flood impacts. If FUNES is implemented in Ethiopia, my research would contribute to the development and optimization of the model. Though my part of the project is complete, there is still work to do. Regardless of what solutions are implemented, the successful and continued coordination of multiple stakeholders is required. I’m cautiously hopeful that some solutions can be implemented to improve the livelihoods of the communities downstream of Koka Dam.

On a more sentimental note, this summer has passed so quickly! Though I’m ready to return to friends and family, it feels like I just arrived to Ethiopia a couple weeks ago. Wasn’t it just last week that I learned the proper technique for eating injera (a sourdough-risen flatbread also used as an eating utensil here)? And didn’t I just discover the optimal coffee-to-Katie ratio that allows me to fall asleep at night? I’m incredibly thankful for this summer’s experience and the help of all the project partners that made it happen. This summer has been full of learning, both about my project and myself, and I’m excited to return to Boulder full of new knowledge and experiences. In addition to the work done on the project, token moments of fun were also had (I promise!). From unexpectedly getting snowed on in Kenya, to camping next to waterfalls and hiking up an old volcano in Awash National Park, to exploring Addis Ababa, and to all of the little fieldwork moments that just make you laugh – this experience has been incredible and unforgettable. To anyone reading this that is interested in interning with the Climate Centre through CU, I highly encourage you to apply and I’m always open to answering questions!

Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre Internship Program
by Katie Chambers
Ethiopia, August 2017

Katie is a PhD student in Environmental Engineering with a focus on Engineering for Developing Communities. In Ethiopia, Katie will be developing flood inundation maps for communities downstream of hydroelectric dams. These maps will guide the development of Early Warning Early Action frameworks for the Ethiopian Red Cross Society and IFRC. Her environmental engineering research investigates the comparative vulnerabilities and resilience of different types of sanitation systems found in resource-limited communities, as well as the tradeoffs made when prioritizing resilience in system selection.

View photo gallery from the field by Katie Chambers

My time in the field has come to a close, and I’m thankful for all of the experiences that have come with it. Many thoughts are going through my mind following fieldwork, and I wanted to use a blog post to talk about just one. Lives versus livelihoods was a topic that consistently came up in community interviews, and I’ll go through my thoughts and findings in this post. For the purpose of this post, lives refers to human life and livelihoods refers to the means of supporting one’s life. The current warning system – as perceived by most communities – exists to protect lives. It ensures that no people are in the floodplain and harmed during controlled releases. While saving lives is unquestionably important, communities repeatedly expressed a desire to protect their livelihoods in addition to their lives.

So, how can the existing warning system be improved to incorporate this feedback? To answer a question like this, the first source to consult is the communities themselves. We went up and down Awash River to consult communities about their recommended improvements to the existing warnings and two emerged relating to the topic: earlier and more specific warnings. Communities wanted to receive earlier warnings to better prepare for flood events. The existing warnings only provide about a day’s notice for a controlled release, and most communities can only move irrigation pumps and livestock from the floodplain. Communities want earlier warnings for time to protect their livelihoods, such as place bags of soil to divert flood water or harvest crops early. In addition to earlier warnings, communities would like specific details on anticipated flood impacts. Some communities will have severe flooding impacts occur one year and minimal impacts the next year, but receive the same warning for both events. Communities want to know what the anticipated damage will be, so they can prepare appropriately.

Unfortunately, the existing warning system can be equipped with these recommendations and flooding can still affect livelihoods. Communities acknowledged this, and uniformly expressed a desire for permanent infrastructure to increase flood resilience and save livelihoods. Each of the seven communities visited wanted dikes (to prevent flooding from the river) and canals (to divert water from surrounding areas) to be constructed. It was interesting to contrast my internship’s approach (improving controlled releases and early warnings) with the community’s perspective on the situation, and it is certainly something to keep in mind going forward. In addition to work on hydroelectric dams and early warning systems, the Climate Centre and its partners are engaged in policy dialogues for rethinking infrastructure investments for climate risk management and resilience. Introducing this work into later phases of the project could benefit downstream communities by further increasing resilience, especially from flooding coming from the surrounding watershed.

From improved warnings, to infrastructure investments, to better timing of controlled releases, there are many potential ways to minimize flood impacts. I’m thankful for the challenge and the opportunity to play a role (however big or small it may end up being) in potentially improving the livelihoods of these communities.

Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO)
July 2017 Summary

July 2017 coverage of climate change and global warming consistently dropped in regions around the world. Compared to June 2017, coverage was down about 27% globally. However, June was a month of comparatively high levels of coverage, due mainly to the news surrounding United States (US) President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 United Nations (UN) Paris Climate Agreement on the first day of that month. July’s counts from fifty-two sources across twenty-eight countries in seven regions around the world were on par with the average number of articles on climate change or global warming appearing each month to date in 2017 (there have been approximately 2304 stories/month from January – July 2017). July 2017 articles were up 23% from July coverage in the previous year.

Figure 1 illustrates that coverage around the world has continued to ebb and flow in 2017. Much attention in July 2017 continued to be on events and developments associated with the US Trump Administration. Figure 2 shows frequency of words in articles across the US in July 2017. The word ‘Trump’ was invoked 5035 times through the 376 stories this month in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times. This effectively furthered the ‘Trump Dump’ that has been mentioned in previous summaries. Comparing this with other prominent personalities, in US coverage former US President Obama was mentioned 526 times, French President Macron (with whom US President Trump met on July 13) was mentioned 441 times, and Russian Prime Minister Putin (with whom US President Trump met at the July 7th-8th G20 Summit) was mentioned 444 times.

The most prominent political news in July 2017 was tethered to the July 7th-8th G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, in the context of Trump’s first encounter with world leaders since his announcement of plans for a US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. At the Summit, despite concerns articulated in some news pieces that other nations may follow a US tact, world leaders of the G19 ‘took note’ of the US exit and announced ongoing unity in their commitments for action on climate change. The final communique from the G20 Summit read “The leaders from the other G20 members state that the Paris Agreement is irreversible”, while criticism of the Trump administration stance was widespread in the media both in the US and around the world. For example, in The Wall Street Journal former World Bank Chief Economist and Harvard University President Lawrence Summers expressed dismay regarding Trump’s rejection “of the concept of global community”. Many news stories covered other world leader statements of ongoing support for the Paris Accord, including G20 Summit host and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi expressed President Jinping’s ongoing support for international cooperation in the form of the Paris Agreement to seek “solutions to the common challenges we face… as both a participant and a leader”. Further boomerang climate politics and policy engagement came at the US national and sub-national levels in July. For example, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt introduced a military-strategy-style ‘red team, blue team’ approach to evaluating climate research for policy applications. Administrator Pruitt proposed television debates to ‘advance science’ in the public arena and this proposal was met with resounding criticism in the days that followed in July. Also in the US in July, the ‘We Are Still In’ campaign to address climate change – a coalition of US states, cities and businesses – garnered media interest. For example, Hiroko Tabuchi and Lisa Friedman from The New York Times wrote about how these groups were working with outside experts to quantify their planned reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by the time of the next round of UN climate negotiations. At the sub-national level, Governor Jerry Brown from the US State of California announced that he will host a September 2018 ‘Global Climate Action Summit’. That this event would take place on US soil amidst US Trump administration obstinacy on climate policy action generated a number of media accounts. Read more …

Figure caption: A word cloud showing frequency of words invoked in media coverage of climate change or global warming in the United States in July 2017. Data are from five US sources (The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times).

Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre Internship Program
by Katie Chambers
Ethiopia, July 2017

Katie is a PhD student in Environmental Engineering with a focus on Engineering for Developing Communities. In Ethiopia, Katie will be developing flood inundation maps for communities downstream of hydroelectric dams. These maps will guide the development of Early Warning Early Action frameworks for the Ethiopian Red Cross Society and IFRC. Her environmental engineering research investigates the comparative vulnerabilities and resilience of different types of sanitation systems found in resource-limited communities, as well as the tradeoffs made when prioritizing resilience in system selection.

View photo gallery from the field by Katie Chambers

Research has taken me down and across Awash River here in Ethiopia, going further down the river each day to reach new study areas. It has quickly become a landmark, and with each new community visited, the river is located to help with orientation. Flooding in the Awash River Basin is extensive and sometimes overwhelming, with the local Red Cross branch responding to over 500 flood-affected communities just this year. The current scope of the study focuses on communities bordering Awash River, with seven communities, a resort, and a government-owned sugar factory visited to-date. Each is affected by an annual flood event in the summer, with some affected by flash floods in May this year.

Inundation of agricultural land was reported as the most common negative effect of flooding. In most communities, farmland in flood-prone areas is not cultivated during the summer months. Farmers uniformly expressed a desire to farm year-round, noting that they could perform an additional harvest if flooding were not a problem. Additionally, speaking with representatives from Sodere Resort and Wonji Sugar Factory brought a unique dimension to the work. Sodere Resort is affected by annual flooding, which typically damages riverside rooms. Resort staff are notified about when these events will occur in advance, and move property (e.g., refrigerators, televisions) from vulnerable rooms to avoid property damage. This year, flash floods unexpectedly hit the resort in May which caused over $12M birr ($520,000 USD) in damage. Wonji Sugar Factory also suffers from annual flooding, and each year they relocate some of the 35,000 people living within their borders when flooding is predicted. It was interesting to include the mixture of different stakeholders downstream of Koka, and highlighted the need to tailor warning systems to their individual needs.

The early warning systems currently in place only notify communities of controlled releases from the Koka Dam. As reported by several community members, the releases themselves are not the sole cause of flooding. However, they often coincide with heavy precipitation events, and the combination of the two contributes to the flooding. As one community member put it “when there is high rainfall, Koka gets full and must release water.” Here enters my work, in partnership with the Climate Centre, in answering one of the many questions this project raises:

Can early releases from the Koka Dam, using predicted rain from weather forecasts, be used to minimize flooding in downstream communities?

Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO)
June 2017 Summary

June 2017 coverage of climate change and global warming went up nearly 46% compared to May. This was attributed largely to the news surrounding United States President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 United Nations Paris Climate Agreement, with media coverage on emergent US isolation following through the Group of Seven (G7) summit a few weeks later. These June 2017 numbers were also a 24% increase from the amount of June 2016 climate change coverage around the world. This was predictably most pronounced at the epicenter of the (in)action, where coverage in June in North America doubled from the previous month’s counts (see Figure 2 for US coverage).

Article 28 of the Paris Agreement states that a party to the agreement may withdraw at the earliest after three years from when the agreement entered into force. Since the Paris Agreement entered into force on November 4, 2016, this process can be completed at the earliest on November 4, 2020 (the day after the next scheduled US Presidential election).

While coverage around the world has ebbed and flowed in 2017 (see Figure 1), generally coverage in the first six months of 2017 is still 19% down from the first six months of 2016. While ongoing media treatments from the December 2015 UN Paris Agreement fueled early 2016 attention, time will tell how this June 2017 coverage of the US Trump Administration withdrawal will fuel ongoing media representations through the July G20 summit in Hamburg and beyond.

So, the most prominent political theme in June 2017 proved to be largely focused on the Trump Administration and the Paris Climate Agreement withdrawal. Moreover, this theme contributed to the uptick in coverage around the world. Examples included reactions from Ireland (in The Irish Times) to Zimbabwe (in The Herald). However, political coverage was not limited just to this beginning-of-June development. In other news, G7 leaders – from Italy, Japan, Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Germany and France – met in Bologna, Italy and issued a communique with a strong statement on climate change policy engagement, covered by The Washington Post among a number of outlets. In addition, in mid-June, many media sources, including The Wall Street Journal, covered the story that a number of prominent oil companies – including Exxon Mobil, Total, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum and General Motors – voiced support for a neoliberal US carbon taxation scheme developed by the ‘Climate Leadership Council’.

Coverage of scientific dimensions of climate change in June 2017 included new studies of scientific and economic dimensions of climate change challenges. As examples, sources like The Independent (UK) covered an instantly influential opinion piece in the journal Nature that argued that the global community has three years to take ambitious action in order to bend the greenhouse gas emissions curve steeply enough to meet the Paris Agreement temperature goals. Earlier in the month, media attention was paid to a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters which found that that wildfires on the Great Plains have increased by over 350 percent over the past thirty years. The Guardian and other outlets also covered a study in the journal Science that examined economic impacts in exacerbation of inequality from the effects of climate change. Read more …

Figure caption: Word clouds showing frequency of words invoked in media coverage of climate change or global warming in Australia, India, the United States and in Canada in June 2017. Data are from five Australian sources (The Sydney Morning Herald, The Courier Mail & The Sunday Mail, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph & The Sunday Telegraph, and The Age); from four Indian sources (The Indian Express, The Hindu, the Hindustan Times, and The Times of India); from five US sources (The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times).