Issue 4
May 2016

Ideas, innovations and initiative have continued to grow ‘Inside the Greenhouse’ throughout this Spring. Along with students at CU-Boulder, we have sprout many new projects and nourished ongoing activities.

So far in 2016, among many research, teaching and other endeavors, we launched a successful ‘Stand Up for Climate’ comedy night experiment, culminating in a standing-room only show in March. We also published products from our collaborative projects with Native Voice 1 radio (featuring our interview with Winona LaDuke) and Casey Middle School (Boulder, Colorado) (featuring our interview of William Kamkwamba). We created an exhibit in the new Sustainability, Energy and Environment Complex (SEEC) at CU-Boulder entitled ‘Young Women’s Resilient Voices’. And we worked with forty undergraduate 3rd and 4th years students in the classroom in our ‘creative climate communications’ Spring course.

As we continue to work, support from you is critical. Please visit our donation page to provide a tax-deductible gift. Any amount helps us as we move forward with our work.

Up with hope,
Rebecca Safran, Beth Osnes and Max Boykoff
(Inside the Greenhouse co-directors)

Continue Reading …

The Media and Climate Change Observatory (MECCO) project, which tracks newspaper coverage of climate change or global warming on a monthly basis, was recently awarded $2,000 by The Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences (CARTSS) at the University of Colorado Boulder.  The funding will support the systematic monitoring of media coverage of climate change in fifty sources across twenty-five countries around seven regions of the world.

MeCCO aggregates, monitors, and appraises media representational practices that influence the spectrum of possibility for effective responses to ongoing climate challenges.

Considerations of who speaks for the climate and how through variegated media communications are increasingly viewed to be as important to the long term success (or failure) of efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change as formal science-governance architectures themselves. The project’s research objectives continue to be to provide systematic monitoring of ebbs and flows of media attention to climate change over time and across geographic contexts, and to develop open-source database/archives of media coverage of climate change in order to provide a vitally important platform for a range of research endeavors to follow regarding how and why media attention shapes science-policy inquiries and endeavors.  Media coverage is a critical input into politics, policy and environmental governance around the world.

CSTPR and CU-Boulder partner with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre (RCRCCC) to place graduate students in locations in eastern and southern Africa each summer. This summer, the grad student intern is Sierra Gladfelter, a Masters student in geography. She’ll be in Zambia from June through August and will be writing several posts during her time there.

Here’s what Max Boykoff, CSTPR Director, said in an email about what she’ll be doing this summer:

In Zambia, Sierra will be supporting the monitoring and evaluation
    component of the ‘City Learning Lab processes’ Zambia Red Cross
    Society program. This includes supporting the facilitation and
    documentation of the First Lusaka Learning Lab for the Future
    Resilience for African Cities and Lands (FRACTAL) project, including
    contribution to the development of a learning framework and
    establishing a learning baseline, researching background materials and
    preparing reading materials in collaboration with the FRACTAL team and
    documenting learning during the Learning Lab interactions and
    compiling a learning report. In addition, Sierra will support ongoing
    field work activities of the Zambia Red Cross Society as well as
    contribute to the sharing of concepts for the ‘Forecast Based Finance’
    project, compiling existing materials on forecast based finance,
    developing a participatory training course to illustrate the
    principles of Forecast Based Finance.

To learn more about the program, go to the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre Program website. And keep checking back for more posts from Sierra!

Award Sponsor: NOAA Sectoral Applications Research Program, Coping with Drought Element

The largely rural Western Slope of Colorado encompasses much of the headwaters of the Colorado River, a critical regional water resource used to meet multiple demands across a landscape that is frequently subject to drought. Water managers and users in this region rely on snowpack as a form of seasonal water storage as well as an indicator of drought. Climate change projections indicate that the regional warming trend will continue, causing the snowpack to melt earlier and produce less runoff for the same precipitation input, and potentially reducing its utility as a drought indicator. This project will identify opportunities to improve drought risk management by characterizing decision processes related to drought risk and describing the current use of information among water providers in the Western Slope. Then, we will assess whether snowpack indicators will remain good predictors of seasonal water supplies under a warming climate. The first element of the project will consist of in-depth interviews, participant observation, document analysis and focus groups of five Western Slope water entities. The second element will evaluate the robustness of current snow-based drought indicators, estimate the change in robustness under projected future climate warming using modeled data, and explore the implications of changing robustness for climate adaptation resilience through focus groups with water managers. The project team consists of researchers and practitioners with diverse and complementary backgrounds (hydrology, climatology, social science, policy, civil engineering, and water resources management) and broad experience working on water and climate issues on the Western Slope.

Personnel for this project include: Ben Livneh, Lisa Dilling, Bill Travis, Jeff Lukas, Nolan Doesken, and Eric Kuhn

Two CSTPR students, Juhi Huda and Lucy McAllister, have been awarded CARTSS Research grants (Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences) to fund their research at University of Colorado Boulder.

Juhi Huda’s research project broadly investigates how policy narratives influence the policy process as well as how policy actors within coalitions utilize narratives to gather support for policy outcomes. Drawing from two theoretical frameworks, the Narrative Policy Framework (research on the role of policy narratives) and the Advocacy Coalition Framework (research on coalitions and actors and their beliefs), her project proposes to study policy narratives surrounding commercialization of genetically modified (GM) crops in India focusing on a case study of Bt eggplant (brinjal). In spite of agricultural biotechnology policies being adopted early on, as of 2016, no genetically engineered crop has been released in the public sector in India. Bt cotton was commercialized in 2002 in the private sector. In 2008-2009, the government proposed a strategy to introduce GM crops commercially in the public sector with Bt eggplant. However, an indefinite moratorium was placed in 2010. Intense public debate continues among different actors. Agricultural biotechnology has been a controversial issue and through a study of the varied narratives that have been employed by various actors in the policy issue, this project attempts to understand how policy narratives of relevant actors and their beliefs contained therein may influence the policy process. These narratives will be collected from media documents, public consumption documents distributed by organizations involved in the policy issue as well as through interviews and surveys.

Lucy McAllister’s research seeks to elucidate the many disconnects between electronics commodity chain problems, including child labor, human trafficking, the persistence of unsafe and environmentally hazardous working conditions at electronics factories, and electronic waste issues, and consumer awareness and knowledge of such harms. More specifically, it seeks to investigate whether the legitimization of electronics consumption is the result of tactics employed by lead electronics firms to divert the attention of its consumer base from the harms of the electronics commodity chain. Thus, it is necessary to determine whether or to what extent consumers affirm the images projected by multinational electronics corporations. The CARTSS research grant will support a computerized self-administered questionnaire that will help determine the extent to which U.S. consumers have accepted corporate-framings of the electronics commodity chain. The data collected from the survey will be used third empirical chapter of Lucy’s dissertation.