A HOT, DRY STATE PURSUES SOLUTIONS AS PLANET WARMS
In news reports, the rising costs of climaterelated disasters have rolled in from across the country and the world: worsening wildfires in the West, melting permafrost in the Arctic, recordbreaking storms and floods in places from the American Midwest to Mozambique, and intense heatwaves taking a sometimes-deadly toll from India to the American Southwest.
Arizona, as one of the hottest, driest and fastestwarming parts of the country, faces major challenges as the world continues to heat up with the burning of fossil fuels.
In an effort to promote a statewide discussion about combating climate change and preparing for its effects, Arizona’s three public universities are teaming up to hold a two-day conference in Flagstaff beginning Friday. Organizers say the conference at Northern Arizona University will be the first statewide, solutions-focused climate gathering of its kind.
The lineup of speakers includes climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, hip-hop artist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and former interior secretary and Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt.
Saturday’s sessions will feature a town hallstyle youth climate forum where speakers will include Jamie Butler, one of the young activists who is suing the U.S. government over its inaction on climate change, arguing it’s violating the activists’ constitutional rights to life, liberty and property.
The conference is called “Climate 2020: Seven Generations for Arizona,” a theme that draws on the Iroquois principle of making decisions on resources that will be sustainable seven generations down the line.
“I want my great-great grandchildren seven times removed to have the same if not better environment,” said Nikki Cooley, one of the organizers and a co-manager of the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals’ climate change program.
“We are responsible for teaching the younger generation, and if we don’t lead by example, then we’re just going to be left behind and scrambling,” Cooley said. “The time is now to take action, and we’re doing just that.”
When Cooley speaks at the event, she plans to share her personal perspective from having grown up on the Navajo Reservation without running water and without electricity. She said many elders on reservations are particularly vulnerable to the rising temperatures because they still don’t have electricity to run an air conditioner.
Cooley said she hopes the conference will help deepen collaboration across the state to implement strategies for addressing climate change.
Arizona is hot and growing hotter
Nancy Selover, Arizona’s state climatologist, will give a presentation detailing rises in average temperatures in Flagstaff, Tucson and Phoenix. Nighttime temperatures have climbed especially rapidly, pushed higher by a combination of global warming and the urban heat island effect.
The climate data show Phoenix’s average nighttime low temperature from 1991-2018 was 7.1 degrees higher than the nights from 1941-1970, Selover said.
The summers in Phoenix have also grown hotter on average, with dramatically more days of record-setting heat during the past decade. And heat-related deaths are on the rise, reaching a record of 182 deaths reported in Maricopa County last year.
Local officials in Phoenix have been working on strategies for extreme heat, such as opening cooling centers for people who need them, and planting trees to bring neighborhoods more shade.
But based on current emissions trends, scientists have predicted Arizona will continue to get much hotter.
The latest National Climate Assessment, which was released last year, detailed scientists’ findings for the southwestern United States. Under a scenario in which emissions of greenhouse gases aren’t curtailed, the report says climate models project an 8.6-degree increase in the Southwest’s annual average temperature by 2100.
Scientists wrote in the report that higher temperatures have intensified drought in the Colorado River Basin since 2000, and that continued increases in temperature are expected to “contribute to aridification” over the long term. They said climate change has driven an increase in wildfires in the West, and that agriculture is vulnerable to more intense droughts and water shortages.
Researchers have projected that under a business-as-usual scenario, counties across the Southwest and other southern regions of the U.S. will be hit hardest, facing more economic damage from climate change than other parts of the country.
In a report released last month, researchers with The Hamilton Project and Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research said low-income Americans will be especially vulnerable due to their limited ability to move in response to climate change.
The researchers also said Latino, African American and Native American communities are “likely to bear a disproportionate share” of the burden because “geographic disadvantage is overlaid with racial disadvantage.”
Panel discussions during the conference will focus on topics such as the effects of climate change on human health and wildfires, and the future of water in Arizona, which faces cuts in deliveries of Colorado River water next year under a three-state drought-contingency plan.
Asking how people can prepare
Kate Petersen, a leading organizer of the conference and coordinator for NAU’s Center for Ecosystem Science and Society, said the idea for the event grew out of hallway conversations after scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their landmark report warning that swift action is needed to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
Petersen said she and other organizers hope the summit will help catalyze dialogue about solutions.
“We’d like to hear from Arizonans what they’re concerned about and what resources their communities can bring to bear on this question of adaptation, mitigation, resilience. How do we prepare for what is already a changing climate?” Petersen said. “We hope that this elevates the conversation at the state level.”
Organizers have been spreading word about the conference beyond the universities, inviting community leaders, policymakers and students of all ages.
“We really want this to change the way folks are talking about climate in Arizona,” Petersen said. “I think we have a lot of resources here, and that bringing them together will help us become more proactive as a state.”
Some states, such as California, have issued reports and state plans on climate change, summarizing the latest research on how rising temperatures are likely to affect water supplies, agriculture, wildfires and health, and laying out strategies for preparing. California’s latest climate assessment, for instance, warned that heat waves in cities could cause two to three times more heat-related deaths by 2050.
State has no current climate plan
In Arizona, the state government hasn’t recently done a similar statewide climate change assessment.
Arizona does not have a climate-specific requirement or regulation for energy, but the Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities, requires 15% of the energy from regulated electric utilities to come from renewable sources such as solar and wind by 2025. The requirement steps up annually until that date, with 9% required from such sources this year.
Some commissioners have proposed increasing that requirement to as much as 80% and modifying it to credit carbon-free nuclear power toward that goal. But those efforts were resisted by nuclear opponents and those who prefer an increase in energy sources such as solar.
Other western states, such as California and Colorado, have much more ambitious goals for reducing carbon emissions.
“Arizona in the past has had conservative governments that haven’t been too supportive of action on climate, but the demographics are changing,” said Michael E. Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University. “I think the political winds are shifting in a direction that’s advantageous to at least a serious conversation about climate change. And of course, Arizona is on the front lines of the impacts of climate change.”
Mann said he personally saw the effects of climate change when he visited Phoenix in June 2017. With a high forecast of 120 degrees, it was too hot for certain planes, prompting the cancellation of some flights at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
Mann was staying at an airport hotel with his 11-year-old daughter. In the middle of the night, his daughter suddenly woke up and was struggling to breathe.
“We immediately contacted the local hospital and brought her to the emergency room where they gave her an inhaler and diagnosed her as having asthma triggered by extreme air pollution,” Mann said. “Our daughter isn’t asthmatic normally, but under those conditions she was.”
Hotter temperatures increase the levels of ground-level ozone, or smog, which can aggravate asthma and other respiratory illnesses. Even healthy people can have trouble breathing.
Mann said these sorts of health effects underline the urgent need to curb the burning of fossil fuels.
“Arizona, as much as any state in the union, really needs to think about how it is going to cope with this fundamental challenge that it faces,” said Mann, who won’t be attending the conference in Flagstaff. Every state needs to prepare, he said, “because climate change increasingly will be the number one challenge.”
‘Desperate for U.S. leadership’
Earlier this month, a global team of more than 11,000 scientists officially declared that the world is in a “climate emergency.”
While President Donald Trump has promised to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, many state and city governments have gone the opposite direction in their climate policies.
Newly elected Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, for example, has called for starting work immediately on “climate resiliency” and putting the city on a path toward becoming carbon-neutral.
“The world really is desperate for U.S. leadership on this,” said retired Lt. General Dirk Jameson, who visited Arizona State University last week to speak about climate change’s implications for national security and the military.
Reports from the Pentagon have described climate change as a “threat multiplier” that contributes to extreme weather and disasters, displaces people, and increases tensions in places around the world.
Jameson said rising temperatures also affect troops stationed in Arizona because they encounter days when it’s too hot to train. He said that’s called a “black flag day.”
“If the situation continues to get hotter, then those kinds of things are going to be even more applicable,” Jameson said. “It’s a very significant impact.”
Jameson said he thinks the upcoming Climate 2020 conference in Flagstaff will offer a vital opportunity to foster discussion within Arizona on taking action.
“I think it’s critically important that those forums are gaining more and more urgency,” he said. “We’re in an urgent situation to do all the things we can.”