The first annual National Adaptation Forum was held in Denver this past April. Organizers expected around 150 attendees, but over 500 signed-up. They had to shut down the registration desk and turn people away (I had to beg to get in!). 

The speaker presentations are now online for you to download. Great information (and contacts if you’re job searching) covering a variety of adaptation topics - cities, ecosystems, adaptation law, conservation, animal protection, forests, sea level rise, Native American issues - tons of case studies, examples, and science of adaptation! The presentations are hosted by California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Climate Science Division - get them while they last. You can get PPTs by heavies Vicki Arroyo, Susanne Moser, Roger Pulwarty, Gwen Shaughnessy and many other climate adaptation specialists. Great stuff! 

Images of the Black Forest fire near Colorado Springs show how devastating a wildfire can be. Why are more homes being built in these kinds of areas?

What a great exploration of how our communities are built. Click through and press “listen” if you can. The answers are surprising, especially if you’re new to urban planning, disaster management, and land use development. 

Globe and Mail claims it’s the largest spill in North America. It’s also the third major leak in Alberta, including one burst pipeline that spilled nearly one million gallons of oil in May 2012.

Also of interest, the company didn’t report the spill until a citizen reported it to a local TV station. 

Thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes in a region of eastern Germany where the Elbe river has flooded and burst through a dam, while swollen Danube was approaching Budapest where soldiers and volunteers are building flood walls, officials said Sunday.

Existing flood walls and barriers are holding up, though.  

Residents fear Lake Macquarie City Council’s controversial actions on the risks of sea level rise will wipe more than $1 billion off the value of properties. 

 

But some believe the loss could be worse, with homes worthless because they cannot be sold. Some say their properties already won’t sell and insurance premiums are skyrocketing – problems they blame on the council’s sea level rise measures. 

But the council says  changes in property values are a result of the global financial crisis, housing supply and interest rates, not council predictions of sea or lake level rise.

In a statement the council also said  sea and lake level predictions in 2050 or 2100 played no role in the calculation of insurance premiums.

However, Marks Point resident Barbara Davis, who is leading an action group on the matter, said the council was ‘‘destroying people’s lives’’.

The council had placed notations relating to flood and sea level rise on section149 property certificates of about 10,000 properties, and residents say the move has devalued many properties.

Tim Samaras was an engineer who made probes that captured information at the base of the violent storms. He was inspired to chase tornadoes by the iconic scene in The Wizard of Oz.

With global warming, the glaciers are melting. Once stretching to the edge of town, they now end high in the mountains. Moreover, their greenish glacial water is forming lakes. In summer, when the melting accelerates, floodwaters threaten the area. But the avalanche witnessed by Mr. Bomio shows that the shrinking of the glaciers removes a kind of buttress supporting parts of the mountains, menacing the region with rock slides.

Grindelwald stands as a stark example of what is happening these days to Switzerland’s glaciers, and there are more than a hundred, large and small. As the Lower Grindelwald Glacier shrank, its ice no longer buttressed the east wall of the Eiger, a 13,025-foot mountain that is part of the ring south of Grindelwald. Moreover, the warming reduces the effect of permafrost that once acted as a sort of glue binding together the mass of the mountains. On that day in 2006, a chunk of the Eiger amounting to about 900,000 cubic yards fell from the east face, causing the cloud of rock dust that startled Mr. Bomio and his friends.

Since 1997, Ruth Meier has run the Hotel Gletscherschlucht (the name means glacier gorge), with 6 rooms and 18 beds, at a point where water from the melting lower glacier runs out of a steep and narrow gorge. Well into the 20th century, the glacier extended clear through the gorge, which is about three-fifths of a mile long, and until about World War I, ice blocks were carved out of it for use in cooling in restaurants and kitchens as far afield as Paris. Where her hotel stands a field kitchen once fed the workmen who hacked the ice.

But now a large lake of melted glacial water has formed above the gorge. To avoid potential flooding that would threaten the village below, Ms. Meier said, a $15 million tunnel, more than a mile long, was completed in 2010 to channel excess water when the lake swells in the summer.

Short overview.

Between 2004 to 2010, Indonesia was struck by a series of extreme natural disasters. The first, and most deadly, was the Asian tsunami in December 2004. Triggered by a massive 9.1 magnitude earthquake, the tsunami swept away homes, communities and infrastructure, leaving over 200,000 dead or missing. In March 2005, another earthquake levelled the nearby island of Nias, destroying nearly one third of its buildings and killing close to 1,000 people. Central Java was next: in May 2006, it was struck by an earthquake that killed nearly 6,000. Another quake and a tsunami  killed hundreds more the following July, followed by deadly several volcanic eruptions of Mount Merapi in 2010.

Because it is located in a geologically active geological area, Indonesia is prone to natural disasters. But today the country is better prepared. Why? Because of the lessons it learned in responding to a series of disasters that pummeled it between 2004 and 2010.

Getting Ready for Future Disasters

Disaster Risk Reduction, or DRR, was embedded in Indonesian government policy through a new a new body, the National Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB). Set up in 2008 the BNPB is responsible for disaster preparedness and response at both national and regional levels. Among officials, this means developing national and regional disaster management plans and sharing data. To ordinary people, it means teaching people- especially schoolchildren- how to respond when disasters strike. It also means constructing homes, buildings and infrastructure so they are earthquake-resistant. These steps alone will save thousands of lives in the future.

Read the rest at Urban Times

After a cleanup effort that cost tens of millions of dollars, visitors from the Rockaways to the Hamptons will be able to enjoy miles of seashores that have been groomed and cleaned up by volunteers and work crews. In still others, sunbathers may have to squeeze their towels a little closer on beaches shrunken in some places by half its normal size by the effects of erosion.

“People are going to rewrite the formula for the beach,” says Andrew Field, co-owner of the popular Rockaway Taco restaurant near Queens’ Rockaway Beach, a 7-mile stretch of sand off the Atlantic Ocean that was perhaps the city’s hardest-hit beachfront.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will work all summer to restore 3.6 million cubic yards of sand in a stretch of beach where, at high tide, what last summer was prime real estate for sunbathing is now part of the ocean. […] after spending more than $270 million in repair costs, all 14 miles of New York City’s beaches will be open for the Memorial Day weekend, including Coney Island, Brighton and Manhattan Beaches in Brooklyn; Orchard Beach in the Bronx; Midland, Wolfe’s Pond, Cedar Grove and South Beaches in Staten Island; and, of course, Rockaway Beach in Queens.