Bottom line: No, farmers are not elk. However, could they adapt to climate change like elk?
A new study from UC Berkeley examined how annual elk migrations from valleys to the high country and back again are triggered by proximate environmental cues such as emergence of spring vegetation. Since climate change is shifting the timing and geography of those environmental cues, the researchers expect the elk to shift their ranges in order to adapt. These adaptive strategies can help the elk population keep up with climate change, although there will be ripple effects through the broader ecosystem given the importance of elk in the overall set of ecological interactions in places like Yellowstone National Park.
Could farmers and agriculture follow a similar adaptive strategy?
The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) is an historic opportunity to achieve long-term sustainable groundwater management and protect drinking water supplies for hundreds of small and rural low-income communities, especially in the San Joaquin Valley. Past research indicates that few of these communities are represented in the Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) formed to implement the new law. This raises questions about the extent such communities are involved in groundwater reform and potential concerns about how small and rural drinking-water interests are being incorporated into Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSPs).
Our new report summarizes results of interviews with more than thirty small (< 10,000 people), low-income community representatives in the San Joaquin Valley providing an important window into community perspectives on, and experiences with, SGMA implementation. How and why are communities involved with SGMA or not? What challenges and opportunities exist for increasing community involvement with SGMA implementation?
The Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior and the Department of Water Resources organized a conference to connect researchers and practitioners working on the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in California. The conference was held on February 6th, 2018 at the University of California Davis and assembled 55 social science researchers as well as practitioners from in and out of the state.
Our new policy brief reports some initial results from a household survey of SF Bay residents regarding their perceptions of sea-level rise and floodrisks, as it relates to various types of political behavior such as voting for Measure AA.
As part of our NSF project on sea-level rise adaptation, I am very happy to officially release the final version of our report on governance challenges in the SF Bay Area. This report summarizes the results of an extensive study of governance for climate adaptation and sea-level rise in the SF Bay Area, where the concept of sea-level rise adaptation also includes coastal flooding from high tides and extreme storm events. We focus on the “governance gap” that exists between the problem of sea-level rise and the implementation of adaptation solutions that increase resilience.
I have just returned from the 2017 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, where David Konisky kindly provided comments on our paper led by Jack Mewhirter (you can find the paper on the MPSA paper repository, which sadly is gated….), which demonstrated the existence of “negative institutional externalities” in the context of polycentric governance institutions.
There are many reasons to be dismayed about the outlook for environmental policy under the Trump administration. His potential appointees to the Environmental Protection Agency, and Departments of Agriculture, Interior, and Energy not exactly environmental advocates. These political appointees will lead efforts to roll back many of the environmental initiatives of the Obama administration, although they may encounter resistance from career civil servants in management positions.
Last week, I gave an overview of bunch of tidyverse packages (tibble, dplyr, tidyr, ggplot, readr, purrr) to the Davis R-Users’ Group. Here is that talk (and since videos don’t display everywhere this blog is syndicated, here is the YouTube link).
