Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Diana Liverman: Thank you very much for inviting me to talk to you. The idea of bringing together people from higher education in the Southwest, to talk about how we can collaborate to resolve issues of climate change and sustainability is wonderful. For all those jokes – you’re looking for the clicker? For all those jokes about the University of Arizona, Arizona State, sort of competition, coming from another part of the world back to Arizona, you know, the rest of the world doesn’t know the difference between U of A and ASU. I think many of us know this. I’ve often felt, you know, everybody thinks I’m ASU and vice versa, so I’ve often thought we should probably just merge, at least on environment and sustainability because then we’d blow the rest of the world out of the water.

With that, I’m actually going to talk – take a step back and talk a bit about why the challenge we’re facing in responding to climate change and in designing our institutions to be more sustainable, is more challenging than you thought. Even though this group and other institutions have been working hard now to respond to climate change, I think when I show you the global picture, you’ll see that we’ve really got a long way to go, and we’ve got a lot of leadership we need to bring to it. I’m going to give a brief overview of the latest on greenhouse gas emissions, what’s happening to temperatures, and what’s happening with policy.

I’m going to talk a bit about how the Southwest is really a hot spot for what’s going on with climate change. I’m going to try to convince you that even though we’re focused on climate, we need to think about many other multiple stresses that are affecting sustainability. And then I am gonna make a pitch for thinking about adaptation because higher education institutions, we’ve mostly been focused on our carbon footprint and reducing emissions, but I want to try to encourage you to think about adaptation. It’s important. Then another issue I’ll briefly touch on is the American public, and the American college student, and what they’re thinking about climate change, and just try to remind us that we actually haven’t lost our audience. It is still there.

Then finally, I’ll just talk a little bit about some of the things we’re doing at University of Arizona, very briefly, to try to make a difference. Could I have the next slide? Let’s start by taking a look at the latest data on global greenhouse gas emissions and temperatures, next. This is a group that I work with through the International Council for Science, called the Global Carbon Project. Every year, they produce a fantastic summary of what’s happened to global greenhouse gas emissions in the last year, and put it in the larger context. The point I want you to see here is that rather than global greenhouse gas emissions starting to slow in their growth because of all the efforts that people are making and all of the international policy negotiations, in fact, the rate of greenhouse gases is increasing.

Now some of us, in a sort of a perverted way, were hoping that the recession would solve the growth in emissions. But one of the things that we found from the Global Carbon Project is if you track what’s going on here in the 1990s, we’ve got emissions growing at one percent a year, then from 2000 to 2010, up to three percent a year growth. Then we get the recession, and a window of hope that emissions have stopped growing. They drop by 1.3 percent, but look at what happened in 2010. We’re now back up to a six percent growth in emissions. Now admittedly, much of that is in new areas of the world, where emissions are growing very fast, such as Asia, but the US, too, has returned to higher emissions. This doesn’t look too good.

There’s a lot that the whole world needs to do to deal with this growth in greenhouse gas emissions. Next. This is the latest on global temperatures, and I think that the thing I want to say here is you’ve probably seen these graphs before in the media. We really need to pay attention to thinking you know, the world isn’t the same as when I last looked at this graph in 1995 or 2005, we need to look at what happens each year because each year tells us if we’re getting anywhere towards sustainability. What you can see here is the increase in temperatures of about one degree since 1880. These are four different data sets, so that people can be less critical about only using one data set. What we see here is that the last ten years have had eight of the hottest years on record.

We really are getting globally to points of very high temperatures. Next. This is the one that worries me most. I’ve been very involved with the climate negotiations. I was in Copenhagen and Cancun representing the science community and answering questions. And this graph, it’s a little bit complicated, but what it shows on the left are the historical observations of surface – global surface temperature increases. And then when you get to around 2010, you’re looking at different scenarios for what might happen with greenhouse gas emissions. Oh, thank you, let’s see if this is gonna work. Oh, no, it’s just the – yeah, okay. What we have here is this is where we start to get the different scenarios. What I want to show you is that in Copenhagen, a lot of countries make commitments to reduce their emissions.

Very few of them have carried forward on them, but even with the best case scenario, if you took all of the national commitments that were made in Copenhagen, the estimates on this graph show that we have a very high probability of a world that would be more than two degrees warmer. Over the last year or two, scientists have become more and more convinced that on our current trajectory, we’re not looking at a world that’s two degrees centigrade warmer, we’re looking at a world that could be four degrees centigrade warmer before 2050, if we don’t do something about it. The other thing American scientists have learned is to stop talking in centigrade because everybody thinks in Fahrenheit. What we’re actually talking about is eight, nine degrees Fahrenheit warmer world. I’ll show you in a minute what we think might happen in the Southwest. Next. Let’s have a quick look at the late–some of the recent data on the Southwest. This data is absolutely fascinating.

This came out just a few weeks ago from EPA. EPA has a new reporting role, where large facilities that are point sources must report their emissions. A few weeks ago, they issued that first report, and several of us sort of got right on it to see what it meant for the Southwest. We do a lot of University of Arizona in terms of climate outreach for the Southwest. One of the calculations that we’ve done actually for the National Climate Assessment that Jim mentioned, was we looked at the Southwest. Now this does include California, which of course, is a very big economy, but it’s New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah. It reported that the large facilities – no, this is the overall emissions from the Southwest, is 726 million metric tons. That’s 13.4 percent of the US total, 2.4 percent of the world. This region is responsible for 2.4 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and we’re not 2.4 percent of the world’s population or land area.

This is a serious responsibility. If you look at the EPA database, they reported from 850 facilities in the Southwest. Do you know what the biggest emitter in the Southwest is? Anybody? Four Corners Power Plant. The second one is the Navajo Power plant, so Arizona and – now what’s this one? This is going to be the real deal? Oh, okay, yay, let’s see if this works. All right. Thank you so much. That’s collaboration between U of A and ASU, it’s great. What we have here is 850 facilities in the Southwest reporting. Most of the highest emitters are power plants and refineries [inaudible 00:09:06] and paper. What really shocked me was how high the universities rank. I mean universities, as institutions, are major emitters in the Southwest. The highest emitter in the Southwest is UCLA – that’s ranked just 205 – USCD, University of Utah, and then University of Arizona.

Now ASU has – is further down the table, but I understand that’s because we have our own generating station, and theirs is outsourced. I don’t know if that’s true. We can have a debate about it. The point here is that EPA is now reporting emissions from universities, and that’s going to point attention at us. We’re now part of a reporting system, where people can see that their local university is emitting as much, in some cases, as their local utility, or local industry. We are on the radar, and it increases our responsibility. In terms of what we’re looking at with – if we don’t do anything about global emissions, and what we’re looking at in the Southwest is this is a graph that we put together that’s in Fahrenheit, so more accessible to the public.

This is just – if you take the higher emissions scenario, which is the one that we’re on, we are moving towards, by 2050, six degree warmer temperatures in the Southwest. By 2090, for our grandchildren, we could be looking at a Southwest that would be ten degrees warmer. This is a very challenging projection, and this is what we’re looking at in terms of rainfall. This all comes from a Southwest climate change site that University of Arizona operates for the region. Here again, if you look at the higher emissions scenarios, we’re looking at four costs of reduced rainfall of 40 percent across much of the region. I don’t mean to depress you. What this is supposed to do is make you want to solve climate change in your institutions, and across our region. Now we’re trying to ask you to change the slide, and I’ve got the equipment here.

Let me talk about adaptation because I think that however hard we work to reduce emissions in this region, in our institutions, and globally, we’re not going to turn things around fast enough. We are going to have to live in a world of warmer temperatures. We’re going to have to live in a Southwest of warmer temperatures, more extreme storm conditions, and probably less water. I want to encourage people, even though we’ve focused a lot on reducing emissions from our higher education institutions, for everybody involved in a higher education institution, to also think about what we need to do, to think about how to adapt to living in a warmer climate. Jim Buizer actually was part of a group that wrote a report for the National Academy of Sciences recently that was the first really major study on what America might choose to do in terms of adaptation.

I think we’ve got multiple reasons for wanting to adapt to climate change. Part of it is we’re not that well adapted to current climate variability. We have campuses that flood regularly. We have campuses that have water problems and where their trees are dying, even in – without climate change. We can think about adaptation to fill what I would call the adaptation gap, so that we are better prepared just for current climate variability. We know climate change is already happening, so that’s a good reason to adapt. The other thing is many of you are making decisions about infrastructure that has a very long lifetime. When making a decision about infrastructure, think about infrastructure that might have to cope with eight degree Fahrenheit temperature increase because those buildings, those power plants, those landscaping is going to be around for a long time.

Then the last one I wanted to mention is that extinction is forever. The reason – one of the reasons we have to think about adaptation is we have ecosystems, a biodiversity in our region and on our campuses that is severely threatened by climate change. I’ll come back in a minute to talk about how we might have to think adapting biodiversity to a warmer climate. Some people said, “Oh, we can’t talk about adaptation because then people won’t do anything about mitigation.” That’s rubbish. We need to do both. Adaptation is an insurance in case our mitigation isn’t successful. And there are also lots of solutions that are win-win, where you can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce energy use, whilst also providing a more adaptable building for example. Just a few examples, many of which you are familiar with.

This is just one diagram of how you might adapt buildings to a warmer climate, designing for shade and cooling, and you can see that just walking around the ASU campus, the shading of the buildings, the effort to put vegetation in. I was talking to Dave about air conditioning because he’s from Trane, and I was saying, “Can we air condition for a warmer world without contributing more to the problem, i.e., using lots of energy for air conditioning, but would then produce more emissions. I think he thinks we can, but we really need to think about that. In Arizona, we already live with air conditioning, but in other parts of the West, people aren’t using it as much and they start to do so. Then we need buildings that are robust to climate extremes because we’re expecting more severe weather as the climate warms.

In terms of water, this is a big area that University of Arizona works on, and one of our big focus areas is water reuse because as we have less water and warmer temperatures, we really need to think about reusing and recycling our water. We’ve got to – I come from land grant institution, where we are also very much focused on the food and agricultural system, and renewable resources, and we need to think about how we’re going to change our research, how we’re going to change our extension to help people cope with a warmer world. Then the final example, does anybody know who this little guy is? No? It’s a pika. It’s a little mountain critter that lives on the top of mountains in the West. people are really worried about this guy because he lives on very high mountains, and he has to have rocks around. As it gets warmer, it’s gonna be too warm for the pika. Now in some cases, they can go further up, but that’s not where the rocks are.

The moment he starts moving up to be able to survive in a warmer world, he becomes exposed to the predators. I heard someone giving a talk on this. I think it was actually Terry Root, and she said that a child had suggested that we mobilize the population to move the rocks up the mountain for the pika, so he can survive. We really do need to think about how dramatically we might need to deal with ecosystems. I mean we’re very aware Saguaro National Park might not be – have any Saguaros anymore in a warmer climate. We need to think about whether ecosystems can move upwards, pole-ward, or into shadier and cooler places. That question of planned or assisted migration of ecosystems is very controversial in the conservation community.

If you’re interested in adaptation, this is just a quick plug. Come back to Arizona at the end of May because we’re hosting the Second International Conference on Climate Adaptation, bringing the world’s experts together to talk about how to adapt to a warmer world. If you would like information, get in touch, send people from your campuses, send students. It’s a very – it’s both a very challenging issue, and a very exciting issue for people to talk about. The next little thing I wanted to talk about was the need to think beyond climate. I’m a climate change researcher and I sometimes forget all the other stresses that humans are putting on the planet. I’m part of an international group that has been working on something called planetary boundaries.

We’ve written a whole series of papers together, where what we’re trying to do is do a global assessment for policy and decision makers. What we’ve looked at are we’ve got nine boundaries that really are places humans are massively stressing the planet, the acidification of the ocean, the putting of aerosols into the atmosphere. Sometime we have a lot of dust storms here. Changes in land use, loss of biodiversity, and our assessment shows us that in at least three areas, we’ve gone beyond the safe boundaries for managing the planet, for biodiversity, for nitrogen pollution, which is causing dead zones in the ocean, and destroying our waterways, and for the loss of biodiversity. Now, not just thinking about climate, we’re trying to get our head around how you manage a planet within all of those boundaries.

I would suggest that we need to start managing our campuses within those boundaries because campuses are places of biodiversity. They’re places where if we use too much fertilizer, we’re contributing to nitrogen pollution. They’re places where we’re changing the land use as we expand our campuses. One of the things that we’ve been thinking about is could we come up with ways – it’s sort of a more specific way of thinking about sustainability by identifying these planetary boundaries. Then Jim already mentioned our attempt now to build on that by bringing the scientific community together, and this is an international effort. The most important thing we’re trying to do here is bring social scientists together with natural scientists, but we’re also trying to bring practitioners together.

Within Future Earth, which is going to be an international science collaboration, to create a sustainable future for the earth, we are trying to engage all of the stakeholders, so the private sector, the higher education sector, and this is going to be launched in Rio in June, at Rio +20. If you want more information, just Google Future Earth so that you can tell people about that. Okay. Now some of you may think, “You know, I might feel that climate change is an important risk, but the parents of my students, my students, my legislators don’t care about climate change. In fact, it’s almost a sort of a so politicized topic, that really I shouldn’t do something about it. My board members think it’s something fraudulent or whatever.” I want to try to show you that this idea that’s particularly common in the media, that the American public has completely turned against climate change doesn’t really hold up when you do careful, social science surveys.

I want to talk just briefly about the work of my friend, Tony Leiserowitz, and Tony and collaborated on this National Academy Report, which is about information, education, and public awareness about climate change. That’s freely available, and the information I’ll show you is in that report. What we were trying to do in this report was to figure out what source of information the American public, American business, higher education institutions – in fact, I think some of this group’s organizations are mentioned in the report. One of the things we do in the report, and I’ve updated it beyond the report, is look at the changing attitudes in America. This is from Tony’s work at Yale. What it shows is the change in whether the American public think that global warming is happening.

We had in 2008, 70 percent, and then a massive drop to 2010. In this period, several things happened. There was a bunch of media attention on errors in the IPCC reports, the recession hit, there was a cold winter. There were a number of reasons that it fell, but the thing – everybody focused on how the public was turning against the idea that global warming was happening. They focused on the drop. What they didn’t focus on is that throughout this period, more than half of the American public think that climate change is happening, think that global warming is happening. Tony’s new report that’s coming out next week, shows that even though there is some politicization, with Democrats much more convinced than others, he finds that 30 percent of Tea Party members think that global warming is happening. His work helps sort of nuance the stereotypes we would have about people’s views.

A lot of people are still worried about global warming. Some other things from Tony’s work is that right now, his latest study, 63 percent think that global warming’s happening, 51 percent think it’s caused by humans, and 65 percent think that global warming’s affecting their local weather. Two-thirds of the American public think that we should sign an international treaty, and many large percentages are taking action to reduce their impacts. There are differences by political affiliation, but they’re much less than the media and politics suggest. Now you may think that more than half is not enough to move ahead on climate change, but there are very few issues in America where you have more than a majority that are supporting your actions. That’s to just say that don’t be – don’t buy into the idea that people don’t care about climate change. They do.

One of the things we know is that framing the climate change issues matters. Sometimes, it’s better not to have climate change in your organization or sort of heading, or the name of your organization. Sometimes it’s better not to talk about climate change. I didn’t talk about climate change when I talked to some of the alumni from U of A recently. We can frame the issue of climate change in many other different ways, and research shows that this is becoming increasingly effective. If we talk about the opportunities in terms of the green economy, particularly if you’re talking to faith groups, framing the issue of climate change in terms of inter-generational responsibility and stewardship of creation, is a very effective and appropriate way to talk to people. I talk a lot about energy security, food security, water security.

Those are things that people are deeply worried about, and allow them to think about these multiple stresses, including climate change. Making it local, not global, talking about solutions, and one of the things that our report in Tony’s research shows, is the importance of segmenting your audience. There are different things – people are – this isn’t marketing. People are interested in different things, so you should respond to that. This I won’t go through in detail, but I thought if you haven’t looked at the UCLA study results on the environment recently, I did look at the latest data. This is the freshman survey. Now I’ve really lost it. Can someone help me get that back up because I ‘m not sure if I can. Thank you.

I’ll move to the next one. Sixty-three percent of your incoming freshman thought that – shall I come down and fix – you are completely useless, Jim. Why did we hire you? Oh, okay, I’ll go through very, very quickly. All right. We’ll get back to where I was. I think you should walk away from it actually. This is your student attitudes, 63 percent think that global warming should be a federal priority. The senior survey in 2009 found that three-quarters of students wanted global warming to be addressed. Many of them think that the federal government’s not doing enough. We have two-thirds thinking it’s essential, very important, or important to become involved in a program about the environment. Ninety percent think that it’s essential, very important, or somewhat important to protect green–to practice green practices to protect the environment. Only one percent of them are doing environmental degrees.

This is just to say American college students care about this stuff. I think this supports the idea that we should be greening our institutions to attract students, and to reflect their values. Just to finish up, to talk a little bit about the role of universities and colleges, you all know this, that’s why you’re here. Our role is to generate the research and the evidence, to inform decision making, to educate students, to practice sustainability. I would argue not just climate mitigation, but adaptation and managing within other planetary boundaries. So now for the paid advertisement. Just a little bit on what we’re doing at the University of Arizona. I would say one of the things that characterizes us is the land grant mission, where particularly our College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has a mission to serve our state and to serve the region. That really spreads across the whole university.

The institute that I am privileged to co-direct, we’ve got 270 affiliated faculty, and that’s growing daily. We have schools, not just one school of the environment. We couldn’t agree to have just one, so we’ve got one in every college. We’ve got a green course guide now that’s showing about 320 courses. If you want to find out more, you’ve got all the URLs on the bottom of every slide. Just to give you a quick example of what we’re trying to do to inform decision making in the Southwest, and this is something I invite all of you who are with colleges and universities in the Southwest to become part of this network that we try to maintain. We work with a number of universities and colleges, but not everybody. What we’re trying to do is to provide climate information and analysis, not just about climate change, but about climate variability.

We’re trying to interpret the El Nino forecast for ranchers, for mining companies, for the water utilities in the Southwest, to try to give them accurate climate information. We found by having a long 15-year relationship around issues of drought and climate forecasts, we’ve built a level of trust that’s made it easier to talk to people about climate change. We produce a number of newsletters. We’re coordinating for the Southwest, the input into the National Climate Assessment, and we’d be happy to share that with all of you once that report’s completed. We host a Department of Interior Climate Science Center and a number of other activities. One of the things that you may associate with southern Arizona is Biosphere 2, and for some people, it’s been a bit of a joke.

Mike Crow actually was involved with Biosphere 2, had his own experience with it, and we were given Biosphere 2 this last summer by Ed Bass. What we’ve tried to do is to take on the challenge of rethinking Biosphere 2, both as an outreach and educational facility. We get about 100,000 visitors a year. We’ve also converted – we’ve created the largest instrumental watershed in the country here within the agricultural thing, and notice that we’re also using it for education and outreach, and research on solar energy. We’re trying to rethink Biosphere 2, as not a closed system, but a system that’s open to the public, that’s open to scientists, where you can do controlled research, but not something that’s in a closed environment. In terms of greening the campus, wonderful people that we’ve got, like Bob – some of the Second Nature people were with us yesterday. I know you’ve just been walking around ASU, and there’s some similarities in our buildings. We’ve gone for LEED Certification. We’re doing things like shading of our buildings.

This is a fantastic addition to our College of Architecture and Landscape Gardening, which is a garden that is designed to move water through the system slowly, and to demonstrate sort of sustainable landscaping. We have a campus plan that is very much focused on sustainability and reducing our carbon emissions. This is one – our largest chilled water loop system in the world, or one of them, is the ice chiller plant that we have on campus. We’ve just finished our Climate Action Plan, a little late, but better late than never, and that’s giving us a lot of information that we need to reduce emissions on our campus and contribute to solving the world’s climate problem. Our students are amazing. One of the most sort of soul-warming things that happened for me in the last few years was when our students voted to increase their own tuition; $24.00 a year goes towards a campus green fund to fund sustainability. It’s funding energy efficiency, gardens, composting, water harvesting. It’s just incredible.

We also have some scholarship programs for students who are focused on environment communication. I’m gonna end with what really matters to all of us, which is the students, and some of the initiatives that are funded by the green fund, and Students for Sustainability. We’ve got the compost cats that compost on campus. We’ve got gardens going in, and we’ve got them doing education. The reason that we’ve got to do something about climate change is both for the planet and for these students because we don’t want them to have to live in a warmer world. We want them to be in a more sustainable environment. Thank you very much. You don’t want questions do you? Oh, I can answer questions if you want, or I’ll make someone else from my team answer them, if there are any.

Audience: What’s that pink thing you have on your wrist?

Diana Liverman: Oh, now he wants me to – okay, so I didn’t talk about this, but the thing that changed me more than anything else in the last year was I was invited in November to go to Dharamsala, India because the Dalai Lama is worried about climate change. He invited ten of us to go and brief him for a week about the risks of climate change. We talked to him about planetary boundaries. We talked to him about what was happening to emissions. It was an incredible experience. He was very moved, and he loves science. He now is – he’s going to be in San Diego in a couple of weeks.

I don’t know if any of you are from San Diego, but he’s going to be speaking about climate change because he’s decided that both as a world leader, and as a the leader of one of the world’s major religions, that he wants to change behavior around climate change. He wants to change people from the inside, to have them really care about other people. That was really wonderful, and so now I think about – a lot about what I’m doing is not running an institute or helping a university, but it’s actually thinking about alleviating suffering of other people, both here and in the future. It was a very moving experience, so look for the Dalai Lama on climate change. Perhaps he can have an impact where the rest of us can’t. Okay. Thank you.

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The above transcript provided by Landmark Associates.