[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The IGC Grad Student Organization sponsored an outreach table at the Virginia Tech Science Festival Expo in the Moss Arts Center from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm held on Saturday, October 27th. Their station featured specimens and information from the Fellows’ various research areas, to include:
An interactive stream sampling activity to search for live benthic macroinvertebrates and observe under microscope – a big hit with the kids!
Stained fish samples and fossils – especially visually appealing to young visitors.
Information on invasive species, such as the emerald ash borer and tree of heaven – of particular interest to adults who had heard of these organisms.
The IGC exhibit was also part of the Biological Sciences Activity Passport, along with several other outreach exhibits by the Biological Sciences Department, VT Microbiology Club, VT Stream Team, and Joel McGlothlin Lab. Other Global Change Center-affiliated labs participating in outreach at the Science Festival included the Paleobiology & Geobiology Research Groups. Hats off to our IGC Fellows and GCC Faculty providing education outreach and communicating their science![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_gallery interval=”3″ images=”26281,26278,26279,26280,26277″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row]
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Thanks to the faculty, students and friends who made it out for the 2018 Fall Picnic!
It was a picturesque, autumn day for sharing Hokie Pride, along with some friendly competition! Interfaces of Global Change Fellows, GCC Faculty and friends gathered for an evening of fun and mingling over the dinner hour. Voted by peers as the most spirited at heart – the coveted IGC Golden Boot Award has a new home for the next year in the office of Dr. Ignacio Moore! Coming in most fashionably, runner-up was Dr. Meryl Mims! Cheers to many seasons of camaraderie, collaboration and community building amongst the Interfaces of Global Change Fellows, Global Change Center and beyond![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_gallery interval=”3″ images=”26181,26183,26172,26180,26182,26184,26177,26175,26176,26173,26189″ img_size=”large”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Drs. Brian Badgley, David Haak (SPES), Lisa Belden, and Frank Aylward (BIOL) are offering a new, broad-based soils course for those that have had little exposure to the belowground world. If you are interested in…
Do you need to characterize the impact of the microbial communities in your study system? Do you already have sequence data describing microbial communities that you need to process? Are you curious about the current state of the science for studying microbiomes?
Faculty from the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences and Department of Biological Sciences, with support from the Global Change Center, are offering a new graduate class to address this need. Interested students from all backgrounds are encouraged to participate, regardless of previous formal training in microbiology. Students can participate in the course using either sequence data from their own research or will be assisted in finding publicly available data to analyze.
GRAD 6984: Introduction to Microbial Community Analysis | MW 2:30 – 3:20 | CRN: TBD
A sense of gloom and frustration clung to the air along with the late lingering Virginia humidity as the first year IGC fellows met for their weekly seminar on September 24 to discuss denialism and the Merchants of Doubt, the film based on the Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway book of the same name.
We discussed the strategies of doubt merchants to deliberately obfuscate scientific evidence by sowing doubt, even where none exists, about science and scientific findings. Such strategies have been used since the Cold War, successfully, to slow or prevent the enactment and acceptance of regulations surrounding tobacco, acid rain, flame retardant chemicals, and climate change.
An early focus of discussion was the extent of deception that Merchants think justified in pursuit of their agenda to support industry and economic growth, and what we as scientists can or should do when presented with such attacks. Several students thought that duty to objectivity and their perceived moral high ground prevented the scientific community from engaging the Merchants at their own game.
From there, the seminar discussion turned to how the doubt merchants are able to manipulate ideological divides to keep misinformation and uncertainty alive. Even with the evidence for anthropogenic climate change aligned, for example, the politicization of climate change has created a field that climate change deniers can coast through by appealing to tribalism and fear of regulation.
The first year fellows and IGC faculty generally agreed that denialism is getting worse in the current political climate. Faculty shared their experiences with confrontation and explaining uncertainty, and everyone was invited to consider how we are all susceptible to false information and responsible for verifying information. Fellows found discouraging that the results of good science can be easily obscured by the power of some politicians and companies, but as one student suggested, the pressure from doubt merchants can help to make us better scientists, knowing we may have to defend our conclusions to people who are predisposed to doubt us.
We learned we have to work hard as scientists to contribute to society without being targeted by doubt merchants. However, we hope the session also gave the fellows a new perspective on dealing with denialism, and the importance of questioning and sourcing as second nature to being a good scientist.
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Kristen Bretz is a first year PhD student in Dr. Erin Hotchkiss’ lab working on how changes in carbon inputs influence biogeochemical processes in headwater streams and how these changes affect the ecosystem.
Camilo Alfonso joined Dr. Ignacio Moore’s lab in the fall of 2018 an he is working on the influence of Testosterone on the male-female and male-male interactions of a tropical lekking bird.
November 2, Northern District, John Barton Payne Building, 2 Courthouse Square, Warrenton, VA 20186
November 7, Central District, Miller Center, 301 Grove Street, Lynchburg, Virginia, 24501
November 15, Southeast District, James City County Rec Center, 5301 Longhill Rd, Williamsburg, VA 23188
Who should attend? Agents, Coordinators, and volunteers who are in leadership roles, or are interested / considering leadership roles, and those who would find these topics beneficial to them. If you have questions about attending or topics, please let us know.
JOCOTÁN, CHIQUIMULA, GUATEMALA – Eduardo Méndez López lifts his gaze to the sky, hoping to see clouds laden with rain.
After months of subsisting almost exclusively on plain corn tortillas and salt, his eyes and cheeks appear sunken in, his skin stretched thin over bone. The majority of his neighbors look the same.
It’s the height of rainy season in Guatemala, but in the village of Conacaste, Chiquimula, the rains came months too late, then stopped altogether. Méndez López’s crops shriveled and died before producing a single ear of corn. Now, with a dwindling supply of food, and no source of income, he’s wondering how he’ll be able to feed his six young children.
“This is the worst drought we’ve ever had,” says Méndez López, toeing the parched earth with the tip of his boot. “We’ve lost absolutely everything. If things don’t improve, we’ll be forced to migrate somewhere else. We can’t go on like this.”
Guatemala is consistently listed among the world’s 10 most vulnerable nations to the effects of climate change. Increasingly erratic climate patterns have produced year after year of failed harvests and dwindling work opportunities across the country, forcing more and more people like Méndez López to consider migration in a last-ditch effort to escape skyrocketing levels of food insecurity and poverty.
During the past decade, an average of 24 million people each year were displaced by weather events around the world, and although it’s unclear how many of those displacements can be attributed to human-caused climate change, experts expect this number to continue to rise.
Increasingly, those displaced seek to relocate in other countries as “climate change refugees,” but there’s a problem: the 1951 Refugee Convention, which defines the rights of displaced people, provides a list of things people must be fleeing from in order to be granted asylum or refuge. Climate change isn’t on the list.
Data from Customs and Border Patrol show a massive increase in the number of Guatemalan migrants, particularly families and unaccompanied minors, intercepted at the U.S. border starting in 2014. It’s not a coincidence that the leap coincides with the onset of severe El Niño-related drought conditions in Central America’s Dry Corridor, which stretches through Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
Seeking to understand the upward trend in emigration from this region, a major inter-agency study led by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) interviewed families from key districts in the Dry Corridor about the pressures that are forcing them to leave. The main “push factor” identified was not violence, but drought and its consequences: no food, no money, and no work.
Their findings suggest a clear relation between climate variability, food insecurity, and migration, and provide a frightening window into what’s to come as we begin to see the real-world effects of climate change around the world.
A country in crisis?
To Diego Recalde, director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Guatemala, the current trend of mass migration in response to food insecurity and drought is a clear indication that the country has been barreling towards a climate change-induced crisis for some time.
Adverse climate conditions in Guatemala affect food security by reducing agricultural production in both commercial as well as subsistence farming, limiting the agricultural work opportunities that make up a significant portion of the national economy as well. Rising poverty rates and plunging social indicators paint a bleak outlook for the country, which has the fourth-highest level of chronic malnutrition in the world, and the highest in Latin America. According to the World Food Programme, nearly 50 percent of children under five years old are considered chronically malnourished in Guatemala, a measure that peaks to 90 percent or higher in many rural areas.
For subsistence farmers like Méndez López who rely on rainfall to produce the food they eat, it only takes a few months of erratic climate patterns to limit or completely impair their ability to put food on their families’ tables. With increases in the frequency and severity of droughts, Recalde worries that for the most vulnerable sectors of the population, the worst is yet to come.
“This is a national disaster,” he says. “There should be red flags going off all over the place.”
Scientists attribute the unusually severe droughts starting in 2014 that have sped up the exodus of families heading north to effects from El Niño, part of a natural climate cycle known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which causes swings between cooler and wetter, and hotter and drier periods around the globe.
This type of natural climate variability has affected Guatemala and other Central American countries for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, even playing a role in the mega-droughts that accompanied the collapse of the ancient Mayan civilization.
While it may seem as if climate change is driving these wide swings in weather, it’s important to make a distinction between periods of climate variability, and the long-term shifts of climate change. The latter quickly becomes a matter of politics, international negotiations, and claims for loss and damages under the Paris Agreement.
While scientists know that El Niño contributes to increases in global temperatures, it is still unclear whether human-induced climate change is causing El Niño events to intensify and occur more frequently.
“By definition, climate change should usually be modeled in 50-year terms. But what the models are showing should be happening in 2050 is already happening now,” says Castellanos, referring to alterations in rainfall patterns and aridity levels across Guatemala. “So the question is, is this variability higher than usual?”
A lack of historical meteorological data makes demonstrating a clear connection between human-induced climate change and increased climate variability difficult. Nevertheless, Castellanos, who is among Guatemala’s leading experts on climate change, finds it hard to ignore the transformations he’s experienced first-hand throughout his life.
“We still have some ways to go before we can conclude scientifically that what we’re seeing now is outside the normal. But if you go out to the field and ask anybody if this is normal, everybody says no.”
Whether attributed to El Niño events or to global warming, what’s happening in Guatemala paints a vivid picture of the vulnerabilities that are exposed when societies don’t have the capacities to cope with and adapt to a changing climate.
Vulnerable economy, vulnerable villages
In previous years, families affected by a bad year’s harvest would seek work as day laborers on commercial farms, making enough to purchase staples like corn and beans. But this year, there’s no work to be found. Even well-established commercial agriculture ventures have been affected by this year’s drought, foreshadowing the bigger problems that will arise as the climate-sensitive crops that make up the bulk of Guatemala’s key agricultural exports (and domestic job market) suffer the effects of rising temperatures and increasingly frequent climate-related disasters.
Today, towards the end of yet another “rainy season” that brought no rain, many rural communities seem trapped in a dizzying vortex of catastrophe. Years of erratic weather, failed harvests, and a chronic lack of employment opportunities have slowly chipped away at the strategies Guatemalan families have used successfully to cope with one or two years of successive droughts and crop failures. But now, entire villages seem to be collapsing from the inside out as more and more communities become stranded, hours away from the nearest town, with no food, no work, and no way to seek help.
“There’s no transportation. People have run out of money to pay the fare, so cars don’t even come here anymore,” says José René Súchite Ramos of El Potrerito, Chiquimula. “We want to leave but we can’t.”
Many describe the current situation as the most desperate they’ve ever faced. In the settlement of Plan de Jocote, Chiquimula, Gloria Díaz’s crops didn’t produce a single grain of corn.
“Here, 95 percent of us have been affected by droughts that started in 2014, but this year, we lost absolutely everything, even the seeds,” Díaz says. “Now we’re stuck with no way out. We can’t plant the second harvest, and we’ve run out of the resources we had to be able to eat.”
Like many others in her community, Díaz has taken to foraging the countryside for wild malanga roots in attempts to stave off starvation, but they’ve become scarce too. Without a reliable source of potable water, outbreaks of diarrhea and skin rashes have become increasingly common, especially among children.
In the neighboring department of El Progreso, Sister Edna Morales spends many days riding a donkey through the parched mountains surrounding the small town of San Agustín Acasaguastlán, looking for malnourished children whose families are too poor and weak to seek help. These days, the nutritional feeding center she runs remains at full capacity.
“These children have so many health problems that are compounded by severe, chronic malnutrition. Their hair is falling out, they’re unable to walk,” she says. “Living here, you hear about many cases of children dying from malnutrition. They don’t even get reported to the news.”
It’s not just children who are suffering the consequences of severe food shortages and crushing poverty. In Chiquimula, Díaz displays a recent group photo of the community organization over which she presides, the Association of Progressive Women of Plan de Jocote. One by one, she points at women who have died, or are slowly dying, from preventable causes made untreatable by extreme poverty and malnutrition.
When subsistence farmers lose their harvests, they’re forced to purchase the staples they typically grow—often at highly inflated prices—to feed their families. Without a source of income, this additional expense leaves many without the economic resources for other basic necessities such as medications or transportation to doctors.
As hunger pushes desperate parents to resort to extreme measures in order to feed their families, robberies and violent assaults have skyrocketed.
“People from our own community are starting to go out and rob people, because it’s their only option,” says Marco Antonio Vásquez, a community leader of the village of El Ingeniero in Chiquimula.
Mass migrations
Many consider migration to be their last option, one that comes with tremendous risks to their personal security and unthinkable consequences if they’re unable to complete the journey.
“A lot of people are leaving, many more than ever before,” says Vásquez. “Towards the U.S. in search of a new future, taking their small children with them because they feel so pressured to risk it all.”
Those with homes or small plots of land use them as collateral to pay human smugglers known as “coyotes” between $10,000 and $15,000 USD in exchange for three chances to cross the border into the U.S. But families from the poorest regions of the country are often forced to choose the option with the least guarantees and the highest risks—going alone, often with small children in tow.
In Guatemala City, two to three planes touch down at the Guatemalan Air Force Base every day, each one carrying around 150 Guatemalan citizens who have been deported or intercepted as they attempted to cross into the United States. Many were fleeing hunger and extreme poverty in their home country.
Ernesto, who asked his name to be changed, looked weary as he waited in line to claim the small bag containing belongings that had been taken from him when he was intercepted at the U.S. Border—his shoelaces, a battered cell phone, and a small bible. His family in Guatemala had put their home and livelihood on the line, hoping he could make it across to find work in the U.S., which would allow him to support his family back home. This was the second time he had been deported.
“I have one chance left. If I don’t make it, we will really be in trouble.”
Save the Date: EcoSavvy Symposium – February 16, 2019 – Registration will open in early December Balancing Form and Function in the Garden: How to Meld Beautiful and Sustainable Natives with Favorites from Around the World
Whether you attended the 2018 Master Gardener College or not, you should still check out the Brag Boards that were submitted! Click HERE to view the video of all of them! Make sure to send in a brag board next year to brag about your unit!
After Hurricane Florence hit the southeast coast last month, Claytor Lake, hundreds of miles away in southwestern Virginia, took a hit. More than fifteen tons of debris ended up in the lake – everything from the usual ‘flotsam and jetsam’ to at least one toilet, a mannequin, and an empty boat.
This part of Virginia is not home to very many lakes, and that means people here work hard to keep them clean and healthy.
“Not many people know that the New River is one of the only rivers that flows north,” says Jeff Caldwell, Executive Director of Friends of Claytor Lake. “So, most of the stuff that comes into the lake, it comes from Boone and Asheville area, so that sort of throws people off when they start looking at the weather and seeing rains and if we get a monsoon here, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to affect the lake. If Asheville gets a monsoon, then we’re in trouble for a little while.”
Kelly Coburn
And sure enough, it wasn’t long before all that driftwood and detritus has been dragged out of the lake, with help from the friends, work crews and several nonprofit organizations. And that network of people who care about lakes is vital to its health and longevity said Kelly Cobourn, assistant professor of water resource policy in Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment. “We’re trying to understand: How do people make decisions about using the land and what does that mean for water quality of the lake over the long run?”
Cobourn is the lead investigator on a project in its third year exploring how humans and lakes affect one another. They’re finding, that when people feel a connection to a lake, “It can galvanize people to come together and start to work around a common cause,” she says.
That’s what started it all back in 1992, when a disaster lead to the formation of “Friends of Claytor Lake.” A chemical spill in Pulaski county turned the water blood red. It took a crisis to call attention to the importance of lake health and safety, but these days, it can be subtler, less dramatic things that threaten the health of the lakes.
“We might have a mowed lawn that comes to right up to the shoreline, like it does here. How do we think about how we prevent that fertilizer from running off into the water?” Cobourn says those fertilizers full of nitrates and sometimes phosphorous are considered the largest threats to many lakes.
“So, you could think about when you put the fertilizer on, because if you put it on before a rain, that could be problematic. Or you could think about creating buffers, like for example there’s a little bit of a buffer here that’s rocky, but it may be preferable to put in a buffer that is some form of plant life that would pick up the nutrients before they run into the lake.”
Claytor Lake is just under 5,000 acres, a relatively small water body. It was created by the Appalachian Power Company, which built a hydro-electric dam on the New River in 1939. Project manager of the lake health study, Reilly Henson, says, fortunately, it borders Claytor Lake a State Park, so it’s mostly surrounded by huge forests “Forest tends to be really good for the watershed because they provide a large area where natural processes can continue and where people aren’t actively putting it into the watershed.”
But there are other threats to Claytor lake that no one is putting into the watershed, on purpose anyway.
Jeff Caldwell says the invasive water plant called, Hydrilla is like Kudzu of the lake. “Hydrilla will completely engulf other vegetation and choke it off.”
He’s been leading the struggle to beat back the invasive plant that hitched a ride here from China. Unfortunately, it’s an excellent traveler. “If you put your boat in the water and just graze across a plant and then you stick your boat in the water in Smith Mountain lake, you just moved Hydrilla from Claytor to Smith Mountain Lake.”
Caldwell says you can’t ever get rid of it entirely. A few years ago, they introduced a species of Carp into the water to eat the invasive plants and they do a pretty good job of keeping them in check, but no matter what they do, the plants will come back. And that’s one reason that Claytor Lake will need to continue making new friends, who can help keep it a clean and healthy source of recreation and drinking water in the New River Valley.
In Bangladesh, low-lying and vulnerable to yearly flooding, farmers are shifting from raising chickens to raising ducks. Ducks can swim.
In the Philippines, where half the mangrove forests have been lost to development, biologists are replanting the trees to recreate nature’s protective coastal shield against deadly typhoons. The gnarled tangle of mangrove roots slows the movement of tidal waters, reducing the impact of storm surges and waves.
These efforts have been undertaken to ease the pain of climate change. Now world leaders say it’s time to do much more.
Until recently, the consequences of climate change were thought to be so far into the future that many average people, including those who live in coastal zones, declared they needn’t bother; they’d be long dead by the time catastrophe struck.
No more. Climate change is here, costing billions of dollars every year to recover from destructive events. Without adapting to that new reality, the world will confront rising costs of disasters that put economic growth, health, and in some places, even survival at risk. The World Bank estimates that extreme weather events could push 100 million people back into extreme poverty by 2030 if the world fails to adapt.
“Without urgent adaptation and action, we risk undermining food, energy, and water security for decades to come,” Ki-moon said in a briefing. “Adaptation action is not only the right action to do, it is the smart thing. The costs of adapting are less than the cost of doing business as usual.”
Seeking solutions
The new group, on a two-year mission, intends to bolster funding and search for sensible solutions as practical as Bangladesh’s trading chickens for ducks. The commission has recruited 28 commissioners and political leaders from 17 nations, including Germany, Canada, Mexico, China, India, and Britain. (The United States is not part of the group.) Additionally, 25 leaders from around the world, including China’s environment minister, Germany’s economic development minister, and the mayors of Paris and Miami, also signed on to the group.
This year, on track to become the fourth hottest on record, would seem to make the case for adaptation, as a string of climate-related disasters has played out all over the world. Wildfires spread through drought-stricken California, Sweden, Portugal, and Greece. Heatwaves killed hundreds of people from Japan to Britain. Back-to-back hurricanes in the southeastern United States killed more than 35 people, while one of the most powerful Pacific storms of the year, Typhoon Mangkhut, hit Guam, the Philippines, Hong Kong and southern China.
“We are at a moment of high risk and great promise,” Gates said in a statement. “We need policies to help vulnerable populations adapt and we need to ensure that governments … are … supporting innovation and helping deliver those breakthroughs to … places that need them the most.”
The commission will spend a year sorting out the best adaptation approaches and present a plan to the 2019 United Nations climate summit.
Like “walking and breathing”
The trio’s call for adaptation, coming on the heels of last week’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that warned the world has little time to respond to a warming planet, might signal a note of despair.
But Georgieva said that’s not the case. “For quite a while there has been that sense that if we adapt, that means we are accepting defeat against climate change,” she said at the briefing. “It is not defeat, it is reality.”
Even if efforts to reduce carbon emissions succeed and the goal of keeping global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius is achieved, changes already locked into planetary systems carry significant consequences that argue for the need for adaptation, Georgieva said. She added the world is capable of doing both tasks at the same time, like “walking and breathing.”
“We are the last generation that can change the course of climate change, that can mitigate climate change effectively and the first generation that has to live with the consequences,” she said. “It has to be mitigate and adapt at the same time.”
Role-play exercise for multi-stakeholder collaboration
By Chloe Moore and Hye-jeong Seo | October 17,
Navigating the challenges of global change will require scientists to engage with countless, diverse stakeholders in collaborative decision-making. It is often difficult to collaborate with stakeholders who have different backgrounds, knowledge, assumptions, and values. This is especially a significant challenge to the Interfaces of Global Change fellows whose encounters are mostly limited within the academic bubble. Down the road, however, we will be engaged in conversation and negotiation with diverse stakeholders who are not always scientists or scholars. If we want our science to have an influence, then we need to understand who the other stakeholders in our systems are, how they interpret the given situation and information, and what their priorities and interests are. The best way to learn is always “by doing,” so in a recent IGC seminar, fellows engaged in a role-playing exercise for multi-stakeholder participation.
The exercise required the fellows to role-play different stakeholders in a fictional watershed management scenario in which a watershed has been deemed impaired. They all had to work together to best remedy this issue under a strict budget. The stakeholder roles were assigned to represent diverse socio-economic and environmental dimensions that could be found in the management of a watershed.
Many interesting points came up during the exercise. Throughout the discussion, stakeholders kept asking questions about scientific facts including what is the primary cause of watershed pollution in the area, the impact of cattle on water quality, the effectiveness of each strategy improving water quality, and so on. These facts are critical to figuring out who is responsible for each strategy and for building an effective strategic plan. It illustrates that science cannot be separated from planning and policy decision-making.
The exercise also shows that multi-stakeholder participation can improve the quality of management decisions. In the beginning of the exercise, the person role-playing the Virginia Department of Natural Resources allocated the agency’s total budget equally to septic system improvement, fencing out cows from streams, tree planting for riparian vegetation, and water quality monitoring, but this initial plan was changed as stakeholders discussed priorities and timeline for more effective water protection. At the end of the exercise, the agency decided to put most of its budget for the first year into the septic system and water-monitoring program to examine the impact of septic system improvement on water quality. The information from water monitoring will be reflected in future years’ strategy development and budget allocation.This is an ideal example of adaptive management, which attempts to reduce uncertainty over time by actively integrating continuous feedback into the management strategy. The diverse stakeholder collaboration created this outcome, which may not have formed without all members present.
The exercise ended with a short debrief. Fellows pointed out the importance of visual tools like maps, which help collective understanding of situations, and understanding the powers and responsibilities coinciding with different stakeholder roles. Among those valuable insights,the most important takeaway of the day would be this: participation does matter with science. This reasserts why we need to learn how to communicate science in an inclusive and participatory manner that is directly connected to one of IGC’s goals.
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Chloe Moore is a first year PhD student in the Mims Lab interested in studying the landscape genomics of amphibians and multispecies inference.
Hye-jeong Seo is a working towards her PhD in the Planning, Governance and Globalization program under the advisement of Dr. Todd Schenk. She has strong interests in environmental risk communication for public dispute resolution and decision-making.
