 So how do I get there? OK, we're ready. Hi, everybody. I'm Bruce Campbell. I lead the Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security Program, or the CGR. And so I welcome you to this session this afternoon. So to me, it's a lot about time dimensions and how in the climate change world we're doing predictions to 2100, and if you're lucky, to 2050. And in the policy world, we're talking about decisions that need to be done in the next two weeks, or perhaps if you're lucky in two years' time, but at very short dimensions. So I think the overall question for this panel and group of speakers is how do we better deal with climate change impacts that make sense to policymakers as opposed to the very long projections? So we're going to have four short presentations from scientists on different aspects, biodiversity, climate information services, forest fires, climate adaptation by farmers. And then we'll have a presentation from a policymaker looking at a different kind of set of questions. How does science information get to policymakers? What works and what doesn't work in linking policy and science? What do scientists and policymakers have to do differently to make the linkage better? And then we've got plenty of time for discussions. So we've got five presentations, short presentations. We've said 12 minutes, but we may put a little bit of leeway on each. And then the second hour, we'll have four discussions. So the first speaker is Walter Patkin. He's the head of regional and sectoral research program at IRI, International Research Institute for Climate and Society of Society and Climate at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. And over to you, Walter. Thank you. So as Bruce was saying, one of the main objectives of our work is trying to inform policy makers, decision makers, planning, et cetera. And when we're talking about adaptation, decision makers need to know, adapt to what? What can we expect regarding climate? When we're talking about mitigation, same thing. What mitigation options are likely to succeed? Now, in both cases, what we need is information on future climate. And for that, the best tools available to establish climate change scenarios for future climate are the climate models, the GCMs. And GCMs, as shown in that little cartoon, they take the world, they divide the world into grids. And then for each grid, they take several layers up into atmosphere and several layers down into the ocean and following laws of thermodynamics, physics, et cetera, simulate exchange between these grid cells and simulate global circulation of the atmosphere. In fact, these models are very similar to the ones that I use for weather forecasts, except that the climate scientists modify them to take into consideration changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, simulating greenhouse gas emissions. Now, climate models are becoming better and better. One of the ways in which they become better is they have higher resolution. The earlier models from the first IPCC report, they couldn't see the Alps, they couldn't see the Andes. Now, the most recent models have much higher resolution, they resolve processes much better. But like in any area of science, still a lot to learn. And I'm going to show you an example of the need to continue learning. This graph here shows how the most recent models, including IPCC, the ones that are going to be published next year, how those models are seeing rainfall occurred in a window in southeast South America during the 20th century. So this is model simulating what happened. And that band, that pink band includes all the runs of all the models. And basically what they're saying is that in the 20th century, in that window southeast South America, rainfall increased more or less five millimeters per month. That's how models see reality. This is what happened. So completely different. The observed was much higher than what any of the models were able to do. And that's all right. This is part of advances in science. So one limitation when trying to create future climate scenarios with the models is, first, we still need to learn a lot more about climate. Another challenge, probably even more important, is that we have to imagine the world for the next 100 years. We have to imagine what will be the level of emissions of greenhouse gases, population, global population rates, deforestation rates, technologies, very, very difficult to imagine. And so what the climate or what the scientific community did was to establish a range of possible socioeconomic scenarios. Some are more optimistic and say there's going to be a lot of renewable energy sources, a lot of technology transfer between countries. Some are a lot more pessimistic. And then depending on how optimistic or pessimistic, they established different trends in emissions of greenhouse gases. So now we have emissions in optimistic scenarios, emissions in very pessimistic scenarios. Then they connect these emissions of greenhouse gases with those climate models and establish a prediction for the rest of the century. And you get the classical figure. This is a figure that will be published next year in IPCC report. And it's showing what the different models are predicting for two contrasting scenarios. Again, one that is optimistic and one that is pessimistic. In short, what these models say is that by the end of the century, the global temperature, this is the temperature of the whole planet, not the temperature for region, but the whole planet, the global temperature will range anywhere between about one degree warmer than today and about 60 degrees warmer than today, which is equivalent to say that the price, for example, of a barrel of oil by the end of the century will be somewhere between $100 per barrel and $2,000 per barrel. Huge range. Now, this is for temperature. For precipitation, the situation is much more challenging. And certainties are bigger. For example, even in an area like East Africa, where 90% of the models agree that the region will become wetter, look what happened with individual runs. So yes, 90% of the models show increasing rainfall, but the range, actually the range of all the runs are from minus 10 to plus 25. And the interesting thing is that each one of these scenarios has the same chance of occurring. And this is for big windows. This is for the whole East Africa. Very few decision makers, policy makers act at that huge region level. They act at local level. If you try to do predictions at local level, uncertainties are huge, are much larger than this. This is the state of the art. This is the best tools we have to produce climate change scenarios. So in conclusion, climate change scenarios with the best tools we have are uncertain. And in fact, the original objective of IPCC working in climate models and in climate scenarios was not to be connected to impact studies. The main objective was to raise awareness. To say in the 90s, start saying in the 90s, we better change the way we do business or we'll be in trouble. But in spite of that, still you see published results like this, results in which they show maps, for example, saying that by the end of the 21st century, Brazil will be producing 10% less corn. And if you go to the Pixel, it probably say 12.5% less corn. Now remember where this is coming from. This is coming from linking some kind of crop models with these climate scenarios, huge ranges. Where is the uncertainty in this map of projected crop yields? No uncertainties. So the problem is, this is not only inappropriate. It's dangerous. Because this is a lot easier to understand by a policymaker, decision maker, than a complicated graph showing uncertainties and ranges of possible situations. And because it's easily understandable, they can lead to maladaptation. And I don't know if this term exists. I will start using it today. Mal mitigation too. So this is the situation. The situation today is that, on the one hand, as Bruce was saying, decision makers, including those in charge of policy, have to act in the immediate term, weeks up to maybe a few years. On the other hand, the scientific community have been providing scenarios that are very long, very far in the future, end of the 21st century. And therefore, climate change is perceived as a problem of the future. And then when those decision makers start understanding better what these climate scenarios come from, they realize they're extremely uncertain. So this is the best recipe for paralysis. You provide information that is very far in the future, and you provide information that is very uncertain. And the consequence is that with very few exceptions, you will not see climate change effectively incorporating into development plans, programs, policy, et cetera. That's the situation today. Clearly, we need new approaches. We need new tools. And just to start with an example, the first thing is we have to understand that climate varies at very different temporal scales. And I'll show you the example of the Sahel in Africa. So this graph is showing the total annual rainfall, observed since 1900s, observing the Sahel year after year, total millimeters of rainfall. One question that we may want to ask is has there been any climate change in the Sahel? Is there any trend, observed trends in rainfall? And there is a trend, a trend that suggests that in the Sahel, now it's raining less than it was raining at the beginning of the 20th century. That trend has a magnitude of about 180 millimeters, total in the whole century. Now, if you also look at the graph, you will see that some years rainfall is higher than normal. And some group of years rainfall is below normal. So there are decades that are wetter and decades that are drier. That's the decadal climate variability. And if you look at the magnitude of that decadal variability, it's already pretty much stronger, much higher than the trend. So it's about 290 millimeters in a couple of decades. And on top of that, you have the year-to-year variability, the huge changes from one year being dry to one year having floods. That's what's called the inter-annual variability. And that's where the magnitude is the largest. And if you try to explain what part of the whole story is explained by each one of these different temporal variabilities, you will see that 55% of the story is in the year-to-year variability. In this case, in the Sahel that has a strong decadal variability, there is 27% of the story explained by that. And what we usually call climate change, the trend, that's only 18% of the story. Now, this is for the Sahel. In general, in the world, you have about 65% or more explained by the year-to-year variability, about 20% in the decadal variability, and only about 15% explained by the trend. And think about it. Most of the studies that we see are dealing with this trend. So they're missing 85% of the story. So a few initial thoughts. The scenarios that are based exclusively on climate models are uncertain. They're worse for precipitation, and they're much worse for the scale, for the spatial scale that decision-makers need. The scenarios are focused only in trends, in what we usually call climate change. They miss very critical information. Imagine, in adaptation, it's evident. But also imagine in mitigation. We plan a mitigation intervention and activity, thinking of, for example, carbon sequestration for the next 50 years. It may be a forest, it may be grasslands. And then in the middle of that period, you have a huge fire, or you have two or three years consecutive droughts. The entire effort in mitigation is destroyed. So focusing only in trends, not only are missing the big part of the story, but it also may be hampering all the efforts they are trying to make for the longer term. And then the majority of the variability is found in this year-to-year inter-annual variability. So we need a different approach, a complementary approach. First of all, we need to place climate change as a problem, as a challenge of the present, not as a challenge of the future, something that is already happening. And this is important to bring to the policy agenda. Two, some of the most important challenges or problems dealing with climate change are expected in the increased year-to-year variability. That means increased frequency or intensity of extreme events or damaging events like droughts, floods, storms. And therefore, one good way to start improving adaptation to future possible climate is to improve adaptation to current climate. There's a lot to be done still, especially in the developing world, to improve adaptation to current climate variability. With respect to mitigation, also, activities should be planned considering all these temporal scales are not only the strength of climate change. Because of what we just said, some of these efforts can be seriously challenged by short-term climate variability. And then, of course, there are some activities that require planning in the future, require some information on future scenarios. But first of all, we don't need to go to the 2100s. No decision-makers interested in 2100. Second of all, let's use an approach that is trying to adapt with flexibility. The truth is that we don't know what the climate will look like in the future. That's the truth. We have an idea. We have models that can help us to imagine some possibilities. But it makes sense to adapt with flexibility. Propose a range of plausible, well-informed climate scenarios for the future. And then identify interventions that will be most likely to succeed. So final comments. Climate risk management and adaptation to climate change. First of all, start improving adaptation to future climate by improving adaptation to current climate variability. There's a lot that can be done learning to adapt to current climate. And then adapt with flexibility. Propose a wide range of plausible climate change scenarios and identify interventions with the highest chance of success. Same thing for mitigation. Mitigation also requires climate information. Also requires consideration of climate risks. And therefore also mitigate with flexibility. Same thing. Propose a wide range of possible climate change scenarios and identify interventions in mitigation with high chance of success. And finally, decision makers use a holistic approach. They don't look at one aspect of the issue they're trying to solve. So incorporate climate information, products, and tools into decision systems that integrate this climate information with all the other sectoral information. Thank you. Thanks, Walter. So we won't have questions now. We'll keep them until the end. Next speaker is Christine Paddock, Director of the Live Views Program at C4, based in Indonesia. Thanks very much, Bruce. I would like to point out that I'm actually presenting on behalf of Miguel Pinedo Vasquez, who unfortunately at the last minute couldn't be here. But I'm also presenting on behalf of that large group of people that you see, whose names you see here. And I'm somewhere pretty far down the list. And this was a group of largely distinguished scientists who worked together, all of them either connected with Columbia University and or C4, and many of them connected with both project that was done on fires in the Western Amazon. So I'm going to be speaking largely and presenting some data largely from that project. And quite frankly, I wouldn't choose an anthropologist to present some of this stuff on vegetation and predicting the probability of fires. But that's what you've got. But on the other hand, many of those other people are sitting here as well. So the chances of you're getting a real answer to your questions, if you do ask a question, is probably pretty good. OK. So I'm going to speak, and again, very briefly, about these important, I think, and interrelated issues that the project dealt with. But not just, you know, I'd like to make comments not just about this specific project in the Western Amazon and the Peruvian Amazon. But I think many of these, it raises issues that are really applicable to many other areas. So just touch very briefly on the fact that many tropical areas are experiencing profound and rapid landscape change, that some of these changes are resulting in an increased risk of agricultural fires escaping, whether we're talking about things that may become forest fires, but that usually have their origin in agricultural fields, that the drivers of increased fire incidents are complex and interrelated. And then I'll make a few comments about the kinds of tools that have been developed to some extent based on this project, but also using the expertise of these various scientists and their institutions to develop tools that actually can help policymakers and also help communities both adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change, especially, as has to do with fire. So there are landscape transitions. This is not new to most of you. And we talk very, very often, forest being cut in this case, in the Latin American case, often for pastures, for various kinds of agricultural uses, also for industrial plantations, in this case. Oil palm, these are the kinds of things that are going on the Western Amazon. They're going on in many other places, or there are counterparts of these kinds of changes in other places. But also, and I think one of the things that the project was interested in and that we found were important, was not just deforestation as such, but the fact that there were different patterns that were arising. So if you look on the large thing on the left, that's not just a forest. It's a complex mosaic, a complex smallholder mosaic that includes both agricultural, small-scale agricultural uses, lots of managed forest, some pastures, and so forth. And very often what's happening is that patterns, these sort of mosaics, are becoming much coarser. So the areas are getting bigger. The areas of production are getting bigger. The areas of forest are often getting bigger. There's protected areas are replacing these very finely patterned mosaics. In any case, and often also what you find is that tenure changes, and they're larger landowners, and they're different kinds of uses, and different types of settlement, and different numbers of people on the ground, and all that are happening. And so this project actually looked at quite a number of these issues, but looks most specifically at fire. And fire is interesting, because it tends to integrate a lot of changes. Changes in the incidence of fire, the incidence of fires escaping, for instance, often reflect different kinds of changes. Just very briefly, it's in these humid areas. It's not necessarily a natural phenomenon, but people have been using fire for a very long time. It's a very convenient. It's a cheap tool for smallholders to use. And they have been using it for a long time, as I said. But there are many things that are happening now, whether climate change. Miguel mentions climate change, but there are many other changes that are going on that have changed how fire can be used, how effectively fire can be used, and whether it becomes destructive or not. One, well, we'll talk about some of these things, but for instance, there are demographic changes that are occurring as well. And the particular sizes and all of these things don't really matter, but there are multiple dimensions of change that are going on in these landscapes and in many landscapes. And they're really changing the risk of fire. The risk of fire is escaping, for example. Looking on the right, I mean, the land cover dimensions are things that you might immediately think about. Not only are there different land uses or different land covers, but they often are of different sizes. So pastures are larger. They're larger plantations. The new kinds of vegetation coming in in many places. And also, the climatic dimensions, this is where the climate change issue comes in, droughts, longer dry periods, more larger changes with seasonality, different types of variability. But it's also important, I think, to look on the left on a lot of demographic changes that are going on, demographic and economic changes. So many more people going into cities, for example. Fewer people often actually living in rural areas. A lot of the landowning becoming sort of absentee landlords, not just very large ones, but also many households becoming multi-local. So much of the time, they're actually in the city and there are fewer people out in the countryside and all. So there are a large number of changes going on that, so it's not just climate change itself. And fire somehow integrates. This fire often shows you the multiple, sort of puts all these changes together. And actually what we find are not only some very interesting changes that are going on in the fire risk and the incident of escaped fires, but often these are somewhat unexpected and often the relationships are not linear. So I'm just going to show you a few of these, what I think are really interesting things that have come out of these papers. And as I said, I'm not quite ready to describe it in great detail, but certainly one of the things that was a bit of a surprise to us was that where populations were declining, we actually saw more fire. People may have thought that with people using fire, if you had more people, you had more fire, but actually it was sort of the fewer people you had, there was more fire. And this map of the Peruvian Amazon, the cooler colors actually show declining populations. And these are populations, I think the population figures use the national censuses over the last 30 years. So it's actually in those areas where populations are declining that you're actually seeing more fire. The red shows sort of more fire. So this we found a somewhat interesting issue, and of course one that could sort of feed upon itself. And a lot of it, we believe in some cases, this is somewhat speculative in some cases, not that a lot of it has to do with issues, for instance, of absentee landlords of much larger areas that are being farmed and being farmed with just being used with and leaving only a few guards on in the areas where people no longer have the social relations, for example, that makes having your fire escape from your own area a real problem. So whereas people probably didn't want their agricultural fires to escape and burn the next guy's field over, but the fact that you were just a guard for a landlord and you were about to risk your life trying to put fires out, whereas an actual owner would have been much more apt to do so. And then with more and more fires, people actually leave because it becomes more difficult to stay on the land and to maintain agricultural production. Another very interesting thing, and I'm going to try my very best to actually discuss this in a coherent manner, we actually developed statistical models that tried to assess the effect of different land covers and the age of different land covers on the probability that particular areas would burn. And here what you see that if you look at some of the vegetation, so the first dot on the left, you see are degraded pastures. The second one is sort of regular pastures, not really degraded. And then there's sort of increasing age of different kinds of vegetation. So younger fallows and then secondary forest. So you see really degraded pastures and secondary forests actually decrease the probability of fires occurring, whereas pastures and young fallows actually increase the probability that fires will occur. On the other hand, so it's sort of a U-shaped curve, right? So with age of vegetation, it first rises and then falls. On the other hand, if you look at oil palm, you get actually a decrease in probability with age. So young oil palm tends to areas tend to burn much more, much more probable that they'll burn young ones being sort of zero to five years old and adolescent ones of about five to 10. And then adult oil palm actually seems to sort of stop fires to some extent now. However, this is in normal years. If you get a real drought and in the last decade we've had maybe three years of really extreme drought, things really change. So if there's a drought, things are really apt to burn. I mean, this really influences the situation of whether it's gonna burn or not. And if you combine that drought with degraded, with degraded pastures, all of a sudden it's no longer less apt to burn. It's actually more apt to burn. And with greater age, you actually see the probability rising rather than that U-shaped curve, right? So a secondary forest, an older secondary forest, makes it even more, is even more apt to burn than the other one. There's sort of more fuel or whatever in there. However, if you look at adult, so there's that curve. However, if you look at adult oil palm, the probability falls again. There's a real tipping point there and the probability falls. We don't know exactly why that's the case. How much it has to do with that particular kind of vegetation, how much it has to do with people really getting out there and stopping fires if you've got an adult oil palm plantation that you really want to save. But these are some of the interesting, maybe by us not really predictable results that we got and also sort of interesting sort of non-linearities that we found. If I make just one other issue I'd like to talk about, and this again sort of relates some of the research we did to the policy issues. Essentially what we found is that, and it was truly not my research, but this is Katya Fetnandes and Walter's research, showed that it's actually possible for us to predict. It's IRI's work. It's actually possible for us to predict bad fire seasons about three months in advance by monitoring sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic. So this actually gives, when we talk about useful timescales, this gives a three month warning that particular areas are going to suffer particular climatic or weather effects that will make fires much more predictable. So exactly how policy makers can use that. We haven't explored all of that issue, but it is possible to predict, and it's possible to predict it with quite good accuracy. This shows from 2010 our ability. Each one of these dots, as far as I understand, actually shows successful prediction. Most of the white places were not areas that we were particularly interested in, but it was, we actually managed to successfully predict three months in advance, whether there would be increased fire season, and there really were increased fires in these areas. So just to sum up this particular team, this collaboration between the Earth Institute at Columbia University and C4 has been developing both science and tools that can serve both for mitigation stopping fires and also for adaptation by, for instance, things like designing early warning systems for adaptation to climate variability by providing institutional support to local government and all for fire prevention by mapping the vulnerability that communities would suffer based not only on the climate, but also on various social and demographic and economic changes and landscape changes, vegetational changes that have happened, and then, and all this can serve to design land cover management strategies to combine both the mitigation and adaptation issues, and especially has to do with a fire risk in these transitional landscapes. And with that, I thank you on behalf of Miguel Pinedo and the whole group. Thanks very much. The third speaker is Shahid Nahim. He's the Director of Science for the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation at the Earth Institute as well. So where would it be? Was that close that? Close this one down. Well, thanks everyone for coming. It's really great fun to be here. I think I'm learning a lot that I don't get to learn when I'm focusing so much on the science. I'm a scientist, I feel I should apologize for that. I'm actually representing quite a number of people at different institutions, and they're all listed down below. And CERC actually involves the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Botanical Garden, Wildlife Conservation Society, and more, and then our department. So collectively, we represent people from NGOs, people who are practitioners, people who are students and professors, instructors, and it's quite a wide range of people who work on this topic. Now I was asked to speak about biodiversity, and I was told to talk about ecosystem services and biodiversity, functional biodiversity and climate change, and bioecological adaptation. And I was told I had 12 minutes to do this. So I'll try to stick to the time, but you'll see that I'm gonna take some shortcuts. Okay, so why does biodiversity matter? I'm just gonna borrow from Millennium Assessment. After all, there was 1,300 people who worked for five years and they didn't agree on a lot, but the one thing they did agree on was that biodiversity was the foundation for ecosystem functioning, which is what we as biogeochemists or ecosystem ecologists would study. But then that's linked to ecosystem services and that takes us into the realm of social sciences, which I'm less familiar with as opposed to Christine who was just up here. And then that is linked to human wellbeing. So if we've all settled on that, that biodiversity matters, it's somewhat surprising to me that it actually doesn't appear very often when we're talking about climate change. And there's been 20 years of research. I have the privilege of being able to write a review paper on it to celebrate 20 years of this research on the importance of biological diversity. There was a study done a little while ago that actually looked at the impact of all of the research that we've done for 20 years on policy, on the media, and on other sorts of places outside of our science and the impact was almost zero. So imagine doing something for 20 years and you're all excited about it and then you say, what's the impact? And somebody says, it's zero. You're thinking, well, maybe we as scientists need to do something differently. So I really enjoyed being able to interact with people who are much more on the ground and advancing the science. Because this is how we view it and the scientists actually have this very complex view in which we're looking at how three and a half billion years of evolution has generated 8.7 million species that are found in biomes all around the world. But we know that these biomes and these ecosystems are changing and that affects biogeochemistry. It's hard to actually hold that model in one's mind when thinking about the world and even more difficult if you're trying to figure out what to do as someone who's designing policy or who's a manager. But that's what's in the head of a scientist. And we do actually link it to anthropogenic drivers, but sometimes it doesn't come out as very clear. So I'm gonna give you five scientific studies just because I wanted to show you that I'm a scientist and I'm doing that first with a rotating three-dimensional graph, which is absolutely inscrutable. But the message is actually pretty clear. If you look at the North American Great Plains, which once had natural vegetation and bison, it's now 99% agriculture. And what we did is we looked at the capacity for native vegetation to deal with environmental change using functional diversity, as opposed to taxonomic diversity and agricultural diversity. And if you look at that little blue shape at the bottom, that represents the kind of functional diversity that's left in the agricultural systems that are there. And that large green sphere is what the prairie could do. Now, of course, the prairie wasn't very edible, but it actually had the capacity to deal with a tremendous amount of environmental change. This paper was just accepted last week, but here this is two of five, so bear with me. I know people don't like science so much, but I enjoy it so much. I wanna share it with you. And what we wanted to show here is that 85% of the species or more you've never seen, I've never seen, they've not been described. Many of them are microbes or insects or tiny things, and they're rare plants. And what we showed, at least for plants, was that rare species actually have a lot in common with common species. So if you lose the common species, those rare species represent a great source of biological insurance. But we actually were able to try to show that in a mechanistic way. This paper we published in 2005 that showed forest store carbon, but by a diverse forest store more carbon and store it more reliably. And we were concerned about a lot of policy or lots of ideas about carbon credit, which wasn't looking at the diversity of the forest and giving the sort of credit that was there. Simple message, complex story. This one here is just to show that right now in my discipline everybody is moving to multiple dimensions of biodiversity. But the field of biodiversity seems to be dominated by looking at how many species there are and adding them up, which is very primitive biodiversity science. But taxonomic diversity on number of species doesn't tell you much about what's happening in the real world. Biodiversity is multiple dimensional. The study here, which was published in Ecology, we're showing that ecosystem functions are actually better predicted by phylogenetic diversity and functional diversity. Taxonomy doesn't tell you very much. And yet most of biodiversity policy and most of biodiversity conservation is focused on taxonomy. This last one is a paper by Erika Zavalletta. And there are many more like this that's been published in 2009. It makes a simple point that a lot of times we're talking about carbon storage or pollination or water production. But when you do that one study at a time you get a false sense that it doesn't take much biodiversity for you. What these graphs are showing is that if you have multiple functions you're trying to preserve or trying to manage, it takes a lot more diversity. And if you want to get a lot of those functions, if you want only 30% of each of the functions it doesn't take as much diversity although it gets quite high when you want lots of functions. But if you want lots of functions and you want at least half of those functions and that could be soil production or nutrient retention or water production you need an exponential amount of diversity to get that. So this business of looking at one function or one service at a time doesn't work. So there is five studies which I would have loved to have spent about an hour on each but I just did that quickly. So here's the problem. I realized that for 20 years our science hasn't had much impact and it's because we don't have simple messages. And yet the message is fairly simple. If you keep losing spices eventually curry is salt. I thought since I was coming from Poland I should get a Polish sausage and if you say keep losing spices eventually just have fat. But it's a fairly simple message, right? And those complicated studies, the five that I just showed you, actually this is the bottom line. And I think that almost anybody whether you're a policymaker or a private citizen or a manager can get that. If you keep losing parts eventually all you have is junk. Okay, now this is sort of like the brain and I have to say that with the jet lag I'm worrying I've lost a lot of parts. But I think everybody knows that when you start to lose the parts all you get is junk, right? And that's the same that's true for ecosystems. Now it gets so much harder to get that message across when we look at a complex landscape. This is a beautiful landscape. It's quite a mosaic of natural habitats and managed habitats and it's quite a range. But what we wanna say is if you keep losing species eventually ecosystems collapse. And that's what 20 years of research has been arguing for. So here we can expand it. Ecosystems become less efficient. They exhibit lower levels of function. They deliver fewer services. They become less reliable. They're less resilient. And eventually the pillars of human well-being decline with the poor and vulnerable being the first to experience the adverse consequences of biotic impoverishment. Those seem to me very important things to consider and not actually that difficult to deal with from a policy or management level. Now we are looking at a landscape because we're trying to integrate across the agricultural and the non-agricultural systems. So now with the sustainable development goals replacing the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations has set up the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. I'm excited about that because one people could complain about the Millennium Development Goals is that they really didn't have a lot of solutions that they had to the problems of implementing them. So this time the United Nations has actually set up a network and I encourage you all to look it up and see if you're willing to participate. But when people are trying to meet the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030 that they actually will have a group that they can turn to to find solutions. And one of the first things we did which is this complicated diagram is to say that ecosystems are ecosystems. Doesn't matter if it's agriculture, doesn't matter if it's a rainforest, doesn't matter if it's a prairie or it's a monoculture of corn. They all provide services, they all have functions but the proportions of those services are very hard to keep in balance. As I said for the Great Plains, much of the Great Plains is edible. And if it isn't edible we feed it to cows and then we eat them. But when you go to the natural prairie grassland there's not a lot that's edible there but they actually do a lot for retaining water, for picking up organic pollutants and degrading them and providing many other ecosystem services. So I'm just gonna give you the few points I think Lou asked me for six slides and I gave 18. So I'm gonna make the, I think you just wanted these last three slides. The message, okay, diverse systems are more efficient and resilient. There's 20 years of research to back that up and there is a scientific consensus. There's a lot of stuff that's being debated but there is a scientific consensus. It's not a hypothesis anymore. You know in America, there's still people think it's a hypothesis that climate is changing. Well, this is not so when it comes to biodiversity. It really does matter if your system becomes more and more simple. Okay, biodiversity is not about species richness. This is a tough one because I think we are so inculcated in the idea of using species as our metric for biodiversity. It's really sort of tough. And it's not about conservation biology. This is a problem I run into all the time. You notice I didn't show a single picture of a beautiful rhinoceros or a resplendent ket cell or something like that. I love those things. I spend a lot of time chasing them down but that's not what biodiversity is about. It's about 8.7 million species, most of which you don't see. Okay, so we need to clarify what biodiversity is and focus on functional genetic and landscape diversity. The latter is very tough to measure but very important. And I think this is my last slide. I think the Convention on Biological Diversity in the UNFCCC create confusion because the Convention on Biological Diversity addresses climate change but only indirectly. And the framework on climate change does not. It has a couple of technical reports about biodiversity but if you saw that map, I mean you saw that model that Walter presented at the beginning. I actually met some climate modelers and they said, what do you want? I said, I want you to take that model that now finally has the alps in it and put 8.7 million species in it. And they said, go away, right? Because they don't even want to put in 10 species. But that's the kind of complexity we're dealing with even though the message is fairly simple. I think that one thing we could do is generate a set of coherent guidelines. I think our group out at Columbia and C4 are working towards that and try to provide some sort of cross cutting clear guidelines that help understand bio-climatic adaptation mitigation as opposed to just one or the other. I think that's it. Thank you. I think we almost should give Shahid an extra clap because he's had the biggest agenda and he finished it exactly on time. And the last scientific presentation is Ruth DeFris. She's Professor of Sustainable Development at the Institute Columbia. Okay, thank you. I don't usually do work research on climate adaptation but that's what I'm going to talk about today. Climate adaptation, the more we look into it, the more we see that there's so much research to be done on that topic. And we think about landscape approach. Who's in the landscape? It's people who are getting their livelihood, growing food, who are adapting to changes in their landscape. So I want to talk about what we're learning from a data set that CCAF's collected and Bruce provided us the opportunity to analyze and see where we can go with climate adaptation. So when we talk about climate adaptation, it's very local. It's who's really the decision maker on the landscape? It's the people who are managing the landscape every day, the local decision maker, the land manager. And those are the people who are faced with decisions about how to adapt to climate change. So we often have a somewhat mismatch in scale when we think about climate adaptation and climate mitigation as well. We talk way up here at the international policy level or even at the national policy level. And the people who are making decisions about how to adapt to change are very much at the local level. So how do we connect these scales, these mismatch in scales which we often find? Part of that is trying to improve our understanding about those decisions which really are going on on the ground and how local decision makers, those are the land managers and the farmers, are making decisions about climate adaptation and why they're making those decisions and what factors go into the decisions that they're making. So there is a data set that some of you are probably familiar with, collected by CCAF's, which is a really unique data set. Much of the climate adaptation literature is at a very local scale case studies, single points in time. CCAF spent quite a bit of effort to collect a baseline household survey across 4,000 households in 12 countries, 83 villages, I think that's the number, to ask the same questions of the farmers and see what we can learn about how they are thinking about adapting to climate change and that information then can feed up the chain to the larger scales thinking about policies to promote successful adaptation to climate change. So we analyze this database, large database, again in 83 different villages across 12 countries, to see what we can learn about the decisions at the local scale about adaptation, how general are the conclusions that we can reach across different regions, how locally specific are those decisions that are being made and we spent some time trying to glean out what we can from this very impressive and large effort to collect data across these thousands of households in different parts of the world. So what did we find there? One of the questions that this survey was after was to look at how useful is weather and climate information really. Walter told us about how long climate adaptation and climate information on long timescales really is not very useful. The local land manager and farmer is thinking about the weather and the crop season and what to do and is really not thinking about climate. We found that in these different regions clearly weather information is significantly associated with change, providing information about weather, does lead to changes. These changes that this survey asked was whether the households made some change in their agricultural practices over the last 10 years. It looked at what type of change, whether the change was in timing of planting, whether the change was in the crop variety, irrigation, different types of land management and then asked some more information about why those changes were made. This data set also very importantly does not provide information about whether that change was actually successful or not, whether the outcome was positive beneficial adaptation or mal-adaptation, and that's a real issue with the adaptation literature. But what we found when we looked across these different four regions, West Africa, India, East Africa and Bangladesh, that reported change over the last 10 years, the 10 years in the survey period, was positively associated with weather information. So weather information is providing some useful service. That's good to know because IRI and many institutions spend a lot of effort on providing information about weather. The mode of delivering that weather information or the effective mode of delivering that information ranged very widely across these four regions, whether radio, social networks, TV, NGOs, different sources of information were very different in these four different regions. So this large survey did provide information that the weather information does seem to be useful information. Good. But we also see here, which is not a surprise, that climate and weather is one of many reasons that smallholder farmers are making changes or reporting changes in their practices. We often think about climate adaptation and climate information in the abstract of what is leading to going into decisions that smallholder farmers are making. But we see here that climate really is less than half of the farmers reported that they were making changes due to, linked with climate, other factors, markets, land, labor resources, prices. These factors were more important than climate. So when we think about climate adaptation, it's really important to think about the holistic context in which local land managers are making their decisions. So here's a lot of numbers, and I don't want to go into all the numbers, but just to tell you that this is a very rich data set that has a lot of information embedded in it and that these reasons for change vary across regions. In India, for example, the percent of farmers who are making changes or reporting that they made changes due to climate was pretty low, 17% or so, and the main reason was market. In West Africa, climate was a more important factor, although still other factors such as lands and market and so on were very important in what went into the changes. Also in different regions, the smallholder farmers are making changes based on different aspects of climate, which again gets to Walter's questions about what information is really useful for making decisions, less rainfall, more rainfall, higher temperatures, starts of rains, and so on, are different types of information that smallholder land farmers are responding to. So the reasons vary across regions, and the types of change vary across regions, improved varieties, timing, land management, fertilizer, and so on. So in that data set, there is, as I said, a real wealth of information, but what that tells us most importantly is that when we think about providing information and we think about policies to promote climate adaptation, the context for making those decisions is important, and understanding that particular context is really needed. So thinking about policies way up here at the global scale or even the national scale really needs to be disassembled to think about what would be beneficial at the local scale in different situations. We've also taken a look at research on climate adaptation and looking through all of the literature that we can find about where that research is being done and who is conducting that research, and though we all know that the impacts of climate change are likely to be the greatest in the tropics or currently we know are significant in the tropics, more important in the tropics than in temperate locations, most of the research as far as we can see on the issue of climate adaptation is being done in temperate locations by scientists working in, scientists from countries in the temperate part of the world, and this is really a mismatch to the climate adaptation research that is being done and the need for understanding about climate adaptation. So this is just a small set of all the literature, but the more and more we delve into the literature, the stronger this conclusion seems to be. So to sum up, we're using the CCAF's data set to understand that climate and weather information is one of many reasons why farmers make changes, and we often forget that. When we think about climate adaptation approaches and that the local context is really essential to formulate policies for both adaptation and mitigation, we can't think about one size fits all kinds of policies. The regions vary very much and within the regions as well. We need to understand the local context if we're going to be successful, and we need a research framework that looks at long-term outcomes. The research, as it currently is, looks at whether farmers make changes or not, but what's the long-term outcome of that? Is that adapting to climate or is that maladapting to climate? We really don't have the long-term information that we need to assess the outcomes of adaptation and the impacts of national and international policy. So again, climate adaptation is not my usual area of research, but this data set provides a window into the climate adaptation and it's quite a fertile area for research and needs quite a bit more research and attention than it's currently getting. So do I have a thank you slide? No, I don't. Thank you. Here's a little bit. So we go from four science presentations and now the last presentation is really going to look how do scientists and policy makers work better together. And it's Dr Romano Kiyomi, who's the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Environment, Agriculture in Kenya. Thank you. Thank you very much, Kampur and Lufo, for inviting me in this forum. First, I am not a current Permanent Secretary. I'm former Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture. I moved on three months, four months ago as the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture. Secondly, it's interesting for me to talk in a forum like this. I am actually a natural resource scientist myself. I monitor for that matter. I'm actually monitoring food production sustainability and I've been a policy maker as a Permanent Secretary for about eight years, but it's interesting now to come and talk as a policy maker. So secondly, as a policy maker to talk after four scientists, it's a big difference. I mean, it's a quarter of the time. So you will get that quarter of the feeling. Then you will see scientists talk with the presentations from their laptops. I'll talk with my presentation from my iPad. Again, you'll find out who is doing better, but that is how we go. Anyway, for a beginning, I would like to, probably most of my presentation will be something you've already before, but defining it a little bit further. You know, when we talk of policy makers, who are we talking about? I'm going to talk here as a policy maker because I was a Permanent Secretary, equivalent to a minister or something like that, but actually a policy maker is a wide range of people, and that's one of the things the scientists have never grasped. You think when you talk to a cabinet secretary, when you talk to a permanent secretary, you have actually informed the policy makers. So I want to inform you that the range of policy makers leads from the Secretary, that is the President and his cabinet, and the permanent secretaries. The Registrations, that is the lawmakers, and actually they are very important, that's parliamentarians, people who have been elected by the people presenting the people, and even the lawyers, who have a lot to do with making the policies, and even the media, that's got a lot to do with communicating and actually influencing the policy making. So one of the mistakes we'll be doing is not being able to understand who are the policymakers, and targeting becomes a problem. Vandere, I wanted to make a point that when you talk of a policy, what are we talking about? And many times, scientists and people from the civil society and from the, especially the NGO communities, every time somebody from government talks, you think they are talking policy. But they are actually talking politics. Politics is completely different from policy. So you need to look carefully to see what is policy and what is politics. So that, because policy has a long lasting effect than the politics. And that's why we are also assuming that for policymakers you need to give them decisions that they will make in the short term. Policies are not actually short term, they are long term. And because they are supposed to last over time and space. So we need to make that differentiation and especially for somebody who was a natural resource scientist coming from where I came from and then staying among the people who combine the policy and the politics for a long time, you find this very interesting. Now, how do the policymakers then use the climate change information? The wide range of policymakers. Now, since we have been targeting their circuitry and informing them on climate change information on climate change parameters, we find that a wide range of policymakers actually have no idea of climate change. For example, in the world of Africa, at no time, as any of the politicians used any climate change lists or problems or issues as a campaign promise. That shows how they actually don't know much about it. So until we get such kind of situation where you know some of us come from countries which are very important policymakers, I mean politicians who have reached that level, people like the Nobel laureates, but tell you frankly, he never used this knowledge of environment and climate change for a campaign. He had to use other means and the agency was such a renowned scientist in terms of environment and matters that you may consider important in climate change. Now, yeah, the policymakers use climate information to make policies, to make laws, even to design programs and projects, even to start small institutions. You will notice that because of a lot of quite important information coming from the international systems, most of the policymakers, most of the institutions in the developing world have done something small with the effect of climate change, something like starting a unit or having laws on environment, but basically you may view that as not enough. Yes, they do that, but how much have they done? And one of the reasons is because most of the people or most of the times it is only the executives who are informed about climate change matters. And policymakers such as the parliamentarians who are actually very important in making the laws and in many countries now in developing world, there are even policymakers at lower levels, at counter level. I know many countries have got states now, other countries have got counties like we have in Kenya, they have governors, they have counter-assemblies. All those are very important in policymaking and probably because they don't know much about climate change, then you find that climate change does not fight any position in their programs and activities and in their strategic plans. We have been talking a lot in scientific presentations. Some of the presentations you have heard today, many times they are presented in seminars and workshops and meetings and in fact most of the policy makers at that level, they attend most of these seminars and meetings. They can be as a break to take a break from their much more intense discussions and they don't take much of that away with them. So we need to find ways and means of doing things probably in a more serious manner than seminars, workshops and meetings and probably coming to that a little bit later in suggesting some of the mechanisms that we can use as pathways to getting some of this information into the policies and programs. For example, I think we are aware that most of the people are actually not only policy makers. In the developing world, the view of climate change has been taught as a problem of the future. In any case, this is a problem that's been created by the developing world. There are ones who are emitting carbon, there are ones who are polluting the environment and actually if you go to most of the debates that say you do something about it, leave us alone. You cost the mess, so clean the mess. They say that most of the time and sometimes even when they don't say it's because they just want to behave nice. So when you make in of this international laws, they sign the rebels of carbon emission that you would want, you suggest to not be emitted and all this, but do nothing about it. Because again, there is no monitoring measures, there is no means of sanctions only once if you do something about it or not. So it becomes just another public relations activity. We need to get more serious than that. So what do we do? Because to tell you in Leo's sense and having been involved in a lot of these discussions in the environment and climate change in the developing world, one of the reasons that they don't state in signing any of these international protocols is because they actually do nothing about it and whether they sign or not nobody does anything about it anyway. So it becomes like, well, one of my ministers in the environment was very focused. It's like a child play. We play, we go home and life goes on. There are some times, some cases where they see real problems and they try to do something about it and this is where they see real problems and they take real action. I keep giving examples of India. I remember Mr. Liliya in 1984, 1985 and by that time there was so much pollution, there was so much as pollution of an environment when you are getting from the airport you'd feel the new smoke of the hair itself. 84, 85, 86, 87. Because they experience the problem themselves firsthand, they actually do something themselves firsthand. You go to Delhi now and Bobby and you find green trees planted all around the airport. All cars by law are not allowed to emit anything. They all use LPG dust, by law. They made it by law. And I remember one time I visited India in 2007 and we had the opportunity of interacting with the president, not the prime minister, the president, who was actually a physicist. A nuclear physicist, for that matter. And you know, presidents are like Figa and Siniti, but a very intelligent person and you could understand why they did the kind of things they did because the information went all the way from the politicians. Scientists were involved in the decision making when you have a scientist who is the president a nuclear physicist who is the president you expect a big difference in the decision making that. And therefore I was able to understand why they have taken such strong action in India and yet in other parts of the world in Africa and other places they haven't. So what I'm suggesting is that we need to be much more proactive than we do with each. So some of the pathways for scientists to interact with the policy makers is to try to see whether it is possible to have formal mechanisms of briefing and scheduling meetings with a cross section of the policy makers. Raging all the way from the executive to the legislature to the lower levels of government. Formal, not seminars and workshops and meetings. The other mechanism is possibilities of having professional bodies who take climate change as a matter of a regular subject. We have professional bodies in various professions but I'm not aware of any strong professional bodies that deal with climate change. That have climate change as a formal subject or a formal agenda in a professional body. It's very important to look at how or where it would be possible to have scientists get involved themselves in policy. There's a lot of difference when the person involved in making those decisions at various levels are scientists compared to when they are not. At international level it would be important to see whether it is possible to establish mechanisms for the ones and functions with respect to application of climate change interventions. For example, there is the world food price, there are various prices which are found in the world, in the various regions. One would want to look at the possibilities of prices at various levels for actions which have been taken at international level and creating environments or creating situations that give people incentive to participate in climate change actions. Right now we have a few actions like payment for environmental services but I don't think they have been taken very seriously in payment for environmental services or for climate change interventions and adaptation issues. Now if you look at most of the information that is provided by scientists, it's relatively scientific and many of the policy makers want simple success information so that they can use it at policy making levels so it may be important to find ways and means of kind of producing simple messages that can be taken easily by the policy makers at the various levels. To conclude I would want to make the following statements. In Africa typically only the secretive are informed about climate change matters. The registrists the public and many other stakeholders are not informed and therefore very little is done in terms of adaptation and mitigation. In any case while they may take a few adaptation actions they view mitigation as something that should be left to the public to understand what is going on and what is going on and what is going on and therefore there is very little mitigation activities we can say would be taken on climate change matters. As I've mentioned before most of the mechanisms to inform the policy makers are informal and unless we have formal mechanisms of implementation I would want to again retaliate the needs for scientists working along the whole value chain of the policy makers so that they can prioritize activities and interventions of climate change for the policy makers because as it is now the threats to climate change and the livelihoods of people is seen more strongly by the scientists than the policy makers and that needs to be addressed. So the proposed approach it is proposed as scientists in this forum discuss mechanisms and interventions that would enter into international and the national policies through more of strong policy issues such as registration because I wanted to mention or to inform you that most of the policies when they are informed of policy statements or they are informed of programs and projects do not really end up being of much impact until a specific policy is converted into law then it really does not become very effective I believe or I know that the most effective policy statement of policy is the one that's been converted into law and therefore it's important to take every policy statement every information that we provide for these purpose of climate change to see whether it gets into the laws of the various national systems I'll stop there and thank you very much for your attention So I'd like to invite the speakers up to the stage and so we can throw them into the audience for comments or questions I'll just tell you one story is that CCAPS is really committed to having outcomes and linking better with the policy makers the decision makers, the people having action on the ground and so we decided to put one of our senior scientists this year for four months into IFAD which is the International Fund for Agricultural Development which has got a billion dollar per annum investment to understand how science products can better inform the policies of IFAD so this is not national governance this is a multilateral agency and it was really interesting experience because this and you need a special sort of scientist to be able to put there in the first place of course and we unfortunately have got a special one and she's my right hand person so I lost her for four months which was a great tragedy for my own workload but she did a fantastic job in working with IFAD and some of the quotes that came out were that the decisions are made at the speed of light and that scientists are just not ready to rise to the challenge of making decisions like this that uncertain and and not a hundred percent great scientific information is better than waiting for four months for the better information if you want to impact the rolling out of programs another one was that they need the scientists more than they need the science in other words they need the advisors who were doing the science but they're actually not so interested in the science but they're just a person to provide them the data tools they weren't so happy about tools they wanted people who playing around with those things and to give them the advice they didn't want to be handed tools which they had to deal with so these were lots of interesting things to for us to think about how we do science better impact the process questions from the audience and perhaps you could say your name and then your institution and then fire off your question or your comment I'm going to ask for a few questions so panelists please try and remember them and I notice you haven't got a pen but you've got a good memory a lack in alternatives and the second question would be also with regard to this if you also ask the people with regard to the use of any traditional forecast methods for example behavior of insects or something like this thank you okay and we'll have a third one over there but you're not allowed to ask Ruth I'll just throw a challenge out to you all Edmund de Barrow I work with RUCN there's a lot about science and research on climate change RUC4 Earth Institute started to learn anything from some of those people who live with risk as a daily part of their lives for example in some of the drier areas where I've experienced with an Africa I've certainly learnt more about risk management and resilience some of the key components of climate change adaptation from pastoralists that I've learnt from any learned textbook of climate change etc etc which goes to build on a bit of the previous question that's all for now I've got another question later on one last question before we all one more over there Hello, thanks everyone for your talks Ross Hampton, I'm the Chief Executive of the Australian Forest Products Association I used to work in the Australian Government now I work on the Australian Government and I love those presentations and I'm not a scientist I just wanted to ask a question I think that goes to the title of the talk about these temporal ranges and difference between science and policy making and I think woven through all the presentations and some of the slides that I've heard as of and I just loved is grappling with this difficulty of the way that the policy makers deal with the questions in front of them as opposed to the scientists in Australia we've had some developments lately that suggest and have been comments made by our Prime Minister amongst others that we're not going to do climate change dressed up as something else climate change, mitigation, adaption dressed up as something else so is there a goal to try to simplify if you like the science to the message to the real elephant in the room the climate change elephant Good, so perhaps we can start with Ruth On the how the questions were asked this is a question maybe Bruce can answer because it was CCAPs that really coordinated this survey and the collection of this data was a large effort but I believe that the reasons were categorically provided rather than open-ended which I think such a large data set it would be very difficult to deal with open-ended questions so I think they were categorical I believe Bruce might have more to say on that about the reliability of information that's really a key aspect that we pulled out of this CCAPs asked us to provide feedback on what could be useful in future surveys is we know whether the farmers reported change we don't know whether they had better yields or they had worse yields whether information was useless or whether it was useful so that's a really key aspect which is another sort of data collection aspect which is to layer on top of all of that traditional knowledge about making forecasts that was most certainly part of the survey I don't remember exactly the numbers they weren't enormous in terms of farmers reporting making changes on the basis of that information but I can go back in and look at those numbers but it was definitely in there Is this working? A comment on your comment on whether now we are repackaging adaptation and doing work on actual development I think this is part of sort of like a pendular history right because I was thinking now how many years did we miss by asking for additionality how many opportunities did we miss because we had to show that what we were proposing was in addition to what we were supposed to do I feel terrible about that terrible and so I the way I see it now is that I cannot envision development plans and do not consider adaptation to climate change I find it very hard to separate but if I have to choose between the two extremes of the pendulum I'll choose doing what we're supposed to do in the name of adaptation The other question that I found interesting is on whether we should simplify the messages and I think we should simplify the messages as much as possible although I think that the most effective way to transfer knowledge is not necessarily having a scientist talking to a policy maker I mean these are interesting exercises but I think that at least in our in our experience the real successful stories occur when we have a chain of information a network of information you have scientists talking to maybe more applied scientists who are talking to advisors like our colleague was saying who are informing decision makers and the truth is that there are very few scientists that can talk directly to a farmer or to a minister and it's fine I don't think there's anything wrong with that I just think that we really want science informing decisions at the farmer at the ministerial level we need to strengthen those networks of knowledge transfer and not necessarily skip links and have scientists trying to talk to a farmer to a minister and I think very often we overlook that very often we we have scientists trying to talk to the press trying to talk to a minister and typically it's a disaster the truth is that we need these intermediary links so I think just sometimes it makes a lot of sense to have very simple messages and some scientists are able to do it directly I think a more sure strategies to strengthen these chains or networks of knowledge anybody else from the panel want to rise to the challenge of Ed's one he lives more from the people in the field than the scientists Kristi sure I'm an anthropologist sort of what I do for a living or I pretend to do for a living no I think there is an enormous area of finding out how people do adapt you know and it takes us in directions that sometimes I think we overlook migration and all is not a sign of maladaptation often there are traditional forms of change of residence mobility there are many many just the simple flexibility the diversity that tends to make up sort of local livelihood portfolios and all there's so many of these things that I think we can see as sources of adaptation and I think often are not described that way so I do fear very much you know once everybody really takes adaptation to heart and then it's going to teach all those guys how to adapt you know I fear that there's going to be a lot of we're going to be working in ways that are not going to be useful to people so I think the necessity of finding out how people adapt but this isn't easy you know it's not always just a matter of going with a questionnaire and saying pick three out of four are these the most important ways of adaptation a lot of it has to do with kinship networks with all kinds of social networks I think we underestimate the importance of a lot of that already so yes it's it's time to look at that very very seriously and also not to separate that traditional stuff you know we want the traditional on one side and then we want this new improved stuff on the other people have been changing those traditional forms for a long time I want to bring out a point of making messages that are useful to the policy makers and some mechanisms of doing that while we know that maybe scientists are not the best placed in terms of expressing themselves to politicians to policy makers and to those levels I want to give you a few examples of scientists who have been very successful we are all aware that Norman Borough said that many times that he has to walk the corridors of power and he did Norman Borough have been to the many places he would take a phone call call Downing Street and he would have the minister for agriculture for UK pick the call he would take a phone, a small phone he would call the capital hill and he would make an appointment for the green revolution to move to where it moved Norman Borough told me and I had many occasions with him that he had to move from the countries and to the corridors of power there is nobody who can express himself best for these messages other than scientists you may use different mechanisms but eventually you have to add there in India scientists are the best scientists they have got institutions they have got processes of communicating to the policy makers at all levels and if you want to have an appointment with the president of India another you will give you an appointment with the president of India at instant until you have a country until you have a world that respects knowledge that respects intellectuals that respects that level of knowledge then you will not make a difference and therefore it is important to create that that understanding it is only a country a situation that respects and that has got very high regard for knowledge based decision making process that will actually make this difference so it is upon ourselves to make sure that we create situations or we do everything possible to make all the political processes the whole value chain acknowledge and respect the decision making process that is based on valuable information thank you let's have another set of questions Lou I don't think Ed quite got the answer to his question did you Ed but Huria you did a really interesting study in northern Mali where you learned directly from people how they are managing risk would you want to just tell that very quickly is it a really interesting study yeah in northern Mali we try to understand how people actually react to climate variability specifically to drought and we found for example really complex patterns of migration and this mobility I mean I think one point I totally agree with you is that mobility is not reflected in many adaptation plans or adaptation policies and that is something I think we should work more on it as migration is also not for example in the red agenda where you are planning something so you have to know whether people are moving or not so we learned a lot and we learned for example that migration of man causes also vulnerability of women so women has to adapt not only to climate variability but also to the migration of man so that is really important yet to learn also from the local people how they do it can I ask a question now now that we have answered another one I just wanted to come back to Walter and Romano perhaps in the graph you showed us the hell it was really interesting because you had a the long term trend was decreasing but most of the trends over that time period were contrary to the long term trend and yet a long period of increasing a really significant decrease and then another long term period of increasing and during those periods of increasing both the wetter years and the drier years were all getting wetter and during that time of the really rapid decrease both the wetter and the drier were getting drier these things seem to be correlated in time and in ways that are predictable ways that are perhaps usable can we take these medium term trends because you talked a lot about the interannual variability but these decadal time trends seem to be robust enough that policies and measures can be put in place to take that into account and Romano if as a policy maker as a PS at the Ministry of Agriculture in Kenya you got information that the rainfall has been increasing in this region of western Kenya for the past 15 years we don't see any inflection points is that something you could use is that something you could make policy on and how could that information get to you in a way that would be useful and then what would you do with it in the executive if that came to you and what knowledge you were saying good questions one more over here thank you my name is Samwin from Myanmar from the Ministry of Environmental Conservation in Forestry thank you so much for your very knowledgeable presentations actually this is not the question it will be mixed with the clarification and for Christine you mentioned about the fire so in terms of context you said that secondary forest and adult wild plantations can have reduced fire occurrence regarding my experience the forest fire will depend on the types of forest because you said about the secondary forest or wild plantations can reduce the fire occurrence I think it may lead to the encouraging the deforestation and degradation of the forest this is just my inquiry thank you so much and one over here thanks very much, Paul Chatterton is my name from WF I want to use the slide as a starting point for my question the slide on research and where it's being done I think that was extremely instructive the problem and the impacts are in the tropics and yet the work and the resources are not so how do we switch that around this is a generational issue and we can't solve it by actually doing the work that will do the work in the tropics my question back to all of you and let's focus it on research there's a whole range of other questions that we have to solve as well but how do we transfer those resources and build those institutions in the places where the problems can be solved and where they need to be managed most urgently and we'll have Ed has got a rebuttal I think okay can you pass this back no it's a completely different question a different sort of challenge because certainly in IUCN one of the things we are involved with from our perspective is policy influence and I'd just like to add a little bit to what Dr Kiomi was talking about as well policy yes it's not politicians politicians are part of the policy process we have to politically influence politicians eventually to be able to pass the policy so in one respect how do we articulate our research findings in a way that a politician will understand and bear in mind most politicians have is it four years or five years to make a difference that's their time frame so they want to be able to make another area of engagement what we've used quite successfully is in trying to engage with the parliamentary committees the relevant or appropriate parliamentary committees as one of those formal vehicles if you will to actually influence and the last point I think is yes with Professor Bohr I wish there were many more like him who can walk those corridors of power but more than like us here ordinary folk and I think we do need those fairly simple messages like I often tell to people you meet the PS in the lift what's your five second thing that will get you invited into his or her office so there's some of the simplicity of message stuff and to bring it together policy influence is not a linear process it's very much trying to hit on multiple levels and I think we've already talked about looking at the media looking at both the science the technical aspects as well as working with the politicians so we it's not a one size fits all you've got to hit at many places thank you good we're going back to your to your earlier question I wanted to say at least from my perspective about whether or not we are involved on the ground all my students who work internationally you know they're out there in the field and they get some experience it is limited though three to four years maybe five years many of my students have had experience working in other countries before they came decided to get a PhD I think it's slightly different question I go to visit them to see what's going on but if I have a student who's working in Virginia now as I do on the molecular biology of microbial diversity he spends a lot of his time in the lab spends a lot of his time learning molecular methods that doesn't necessarily go straight back to farmers trying to decide whether they want to add fertilizer to their field or not so the story I want to tell you is that I was once at a conference on conservation biology getting ready for the meetings in Johannesburg and we were talking about willingness to pay methods to value biodiversity and there was an anthropologist there and she said to us that if you really want to you know get this right you have to go and talk to the people but that means that you have to spend about maybe about 10 years before you learn how to talk to the people maybe another 10 years before you learn how to interpret the answers they gave you and I think most of us realize we didn't have 20 years to do this so they went back to doing their willingness to pay method which is just to go in and ask a bunch of questions and so I guess we always will deal with this problem that we always working with a set of filters I guess where the message goes back and forth between people who are working on very short terms and people who work on long so when the anthropologist can get together with the economists that we can cooperate rather than distrust each other's methods I think that's a good way to do it I do puzzle over this I visit my student for two weeks to find out what they're doing I'm not going to learn the language or the culture and I hope that they've learned some more perhaps we can have the climate questions for Walter okay so on the decadal timescale first of all now right now there's a lot of investment in research to try to understand quantify and hopefully predict this variability at the decadal timescale so far it's very hard in the case of the Sahel it is pretty clear that it's linked to sea surface temperatures but in other places like for example in southeast South America something that looks like the decadal may be a slowing in the just trends due to ozone so it's a it's a line of very active research right now and in fact in many places it may just be noise this one looks like a decadal variability even in places like the Sahel though where the decadal variability is I think it's better understood and there is a pretty good chance of being able to predict it it's still a minor source of variation compared to the inter-annual so even in those places you can explain about 25 or so of the total variability now what is really interesting and I think that's where you're going is that if you can characterize even better predict those decades for example decades of lower than normal precipitation you can be pretty sure that those will be decades with more frequent routes and that is what really matters so in short I think this is as I said a very active field of research science is advancing but still not to learn and where it ends being predictable I think it can be a big help in that sense in not because of the variability decadal variability in itself but because of the frequency the chances of higher frequency of damaging effects like droughts from Louis I think the model presented quite practical output in terms of the results it's very correct that the times of decrease and the times of increase have been felt practically felt in the East African region and the variability has practically been felt in the East African region but then the response has been probably fragmented if you take the response country by country basis probably except Kenya there is no other country that responded and I think practically in Kenya it's not Kenya the whole of it responded I responded, I was there I was taking the decisions you know very well I started the research management initiative before I left the Kenyanka Catholic Research Institute and I actually do the paper itself that started the DMI in 1987 and we had a large program that was happening in the North and therefore resilient programs and activities started immediately after that I started the SLM program the Sustainable Management Program which was supported strongly by GEF and a few others was involved in drafting the National Environmental Management Program I was deeply involved in doing the carbon fund which we have in the country so these efforts I've got to have champions so you see there's quite a lot of activities in Kenya compared to other countries around the east and Central African region yet the effect was actually not in one country it was in the region, you go to Uganda you find nothing, you go to Tansa you find nothing, you go to Ethiopia you come to Kenya, you find a lot of activities going on a lot of these activities I'm something to do I don't have to do it myself but I was behind the scenes in getting most of these things done you know how wrong it took for me to do the SLM to get the 10 million dollars in GEF it's now a worldwide program it's you know the kind of things we do there on people running management and environmental change and wrote papers that actually influenced Wangali Madai to change from a position of Shamba system to a different system I wrote that paper, we wrote the paper with that so a lot of this work that's why I'm saying it takes to move from scientists to different places that's why I moved from where I was and I want now to be more a scientist I have an appointment now with the president with the minister in Uganda I'll get an appointment because you know we'll be doing certain things together and I may want to influence them that way rather than influencing them I say I want to put them in my own country because I've found that the differences are huge so that information has been useful but then it's been useful on the spot in various ways we now have a very large program on drought resilience program of about 50 million dollars that I just talked about before I left we have a climate change unit almost in every department of agriculture, of research of environment and world although I hear they are not getting as much support as they were getting when I was there so some of these things you need a few people to get them done and some of that information you provided has actually been useful because I knew about it even long before then when I did the DMI and all those that information we knew about it how can we get more than done in the developed world, developing world that is my greatest fear some of the modules that I was working with before I left the science itself have not moved an inch since I left some of the work we are doing with you have not moved an inch since I left them myself I don't know I could be wrong but I want to find out how do we get more of this work being done in the developed world by the national scientists as long as work is being done in America as long as it's being done in Britain there are practical apprehensions that are there if you come with something you bring something foreign in African countries you find a lot of these things not being adopted I am saying this very strongly because my minister for environment told me Kiyome you spent 12 years overseas I don't know how much you are influenced by those people so when you come and mention these things most of the time I believe you but I want to be careful with you it's true I spent a long time overseas studying and working and things like that some of these people working themselves there they know them from grass roots and they want to present information they are able to make these decisions much quicker and less apprehensive when the work is done outside and that's why I started programs such as bioscience for East and Central Africa it was one of the concepts I started myself because I believed that if we have to move in the advanced science we have to bring that advancement being done in Africa itself and for some of you have worked with us to go around the world to list that a million dollars list another 60 million dollars with the Buran Merida Gates to have African scientists link up with the rest of the world scientists to do the work there and produce the sports and output there I'm saying this very as you see passionately because it's one of the subjects I'm very passionate about producing simple messages the policy makers as we have said it's really very important but it's important to understand when you come and learn something like what you learnt from the pastoralist the other day the questioner who put that question it's it's not easy that you learnt something it is because you went to an environment that you don't know anything about if you go in an environment that you don't know anything about everything you meet you learn so you have to combine about knowing what is there bring in new information and I mean infusing the decision making process so there's a lot we can say about this but until I mean for example it took a very long time for last I happened to have been sitting in the in the fund cans of the CGIR and I strongly I've sat there for more than six years including the Exco and the fund cans it took a long time to convince them to have a climate change charge program I don't know there is now a climate change charge program we had to fast track it because some of us did a push for it so some of these things need champions and it's up to four new people to establish champions one champion can make a lot of difference can actually sit for one hundred scientists thank you Paul I don't think we answered your question but I think we totally agree that we have to change the picture in Ruth's in the next decade Christine you want to do the fire question? No actually I think Ruth should do the fire question so this was a work that was supervised by her but then I reserve the right to say something about anthropologists in those 20 years they need okay okay before the the fire question can I say something about the Borlaug question so before we have too much Borlaug envy it's true that scientists are terrible communicators you complicate the message and all of that but Borlaug and Swaminathan had something really positive to say you know increasing yields that's a really good a good result of science to take to the corridors of power we have at least okay I have gotten stuck in the world of being no you know the message is don't do this don't do that we're ruining the world reduce emissions framing our message in terms of what shouldn't be done rather than what could be done so I think we have to think about how we can turn our science around from from the message being we're doing something wrong to what can we do to to improve that is more politically palatable and likely to be to be accepted fire so the interesting result of this work about fire was that the precipitation anomaly overriding variable that determines whether there's fire and how big the fire is but that the type of forest the type of land cover can mediate or exacerbate that impact so secondary forest we find in in non drought years can reduce the impact of fire in drought years increase enhance the impact of fire which likely has to do with fuel load moisture and aspects like that but the really interesting finding out of this was that adult oil palm so once oil palm becomes mature has a mitigating effect on fire reduces the likelihood that fire will spread which speaks to the conclusion that we know that the precipitation anomaly is overriding that's a factor a result of global climate we can't really do much about that but we can think about how we manage the landscape and configure the landscape to reduce the likelihood that forest will spread and while you know we might not think about oil palm in a positive light for city and other aspects in terms of mitigating fire in this setting seems to have a positive impact once it becomes mature I don't know if that answers your question. I think we should wrap up and so Kristine do you want to do a rebuttal on the 20 years? I did also want to add the mature forests we're not in that diagram you know so we weren't looking at mature forests which we assume would be different from the sort of secondary forest that we were looking at but quite frankly I think the message that I want to give is a little complex which we're supposed to be giving simple messages but no 20 years is an exaggeration but the idea that we do want to include local adaptation in what we want to suggest are ways that are important messages and trying to increase the ability of people to adapt and the truth is that yes it often takes some times and it takes some knowledge of what is going on and I know that these days somehow saying that you know it takes the time to learn a language if people really can't don't know the language at all it seems to be sort of unpopular rapid appraisals of everything seem to be the thing but we're talking about policies that change people's lives and while we're worried about whether we can do it in two weeks or a year taking that year learning that language or finding somebody who can speak that language may actually be worth maybe worth the time that you spend on it so I'm not I don't mean to sound angry or whatever at it but the truth is that these are incredibly important issues these are policies that really can affect people's lives and occasionally whether it's what's necessary as time or humility or a lack of hubris assuming that we know how people's lives should be changed in order to improve their livelihood options sometimes it actually you know it may be worth taking taking a little bit extra putting a little bit more effort into it using either method research methods or finding the proper people to do that research and that may actually be important so I think it's not something to be completely dismissed in the name of efficiency or simple messages good and so Lou's going to give us he's going to do a brilliant summary of the session I'll do a summary but we'll see it but actually I cheated a little bit and did ask folks to pry me with major conclusions from their talks beforehand and I have taken some notes about the discussion but I think one of the things we heard from Walters is that the traditional approach to improving adaptation of climate change and climate change based scenarios the traditional way has some serious limitations for decision making and then some of these complementary approaches using climate change variability and starting with adaptation to current climate variability as the way to move forward for variability to future climate change helps bring the problem back to the here and now helps bring the problem back to the time frames that policymakers are making decisions that land managers are making decisions and the challenges of effectively incorporating adaptation to climate variability and making it possible with these approaches to help overcome some of these challenges. We heard about from Miguel about landscape transitions and one of the conclusions that Christine brought out was that the way land transitions are moving we're seeing a coarsening of the scale that these landscape mosaics are moving from fine scale mosaics to much more coarse mosaics with larger fields, larger fields and that these changes have human reasons sometimes to do with migration sometimes to do with land tenure and it's a very dynamic process with many things going on in the landscape associated with the human system as well as the natural system. Increase incidence of fires is one manifestation of transitions in tropical landscapes and one that affects the ability of communities to adapt to climate change. So the work in the proven Amazon shows that the changes are complex and the effects of particular changes on the probability of destructive fires occurring is nonlinear. So there are some things that we can do about how we manage vegetation to reduce the probability of fire in a region where it traditionally doesn't have fire. And what we heard from the policy makers that perhaps tools are not welcome but scientists love to make tools. But there are opportunities for early warning systems about fire because some of the dimensions of climate are predictable and there are correlations in sea surface temperature that give us advanced warnings and setting up advanced warning systems. Romano was talking a bit about the different types of fires in the Amazon and the center in East Africa. Similar types of things for fires in the Amazon are also possible. Shahid talked a little bit about or a lot about the diversity and the functional side of diversity that the literature is enormous and complex and difficult to understand but the outcome of 20 years of research draws some very clear and concrete conclusions that there is a need to resilience. Diversity does lead to more ecosystem functions that maximizing ecosystem services requires diversity and we need to be able to communicate that clearly. The IPCC acknowledges the importance of biodiversity as an integral to the climate systems at all scales but often neglects to include biodiversity in some of its major findings and UNFCCC does this to climate change but there is still a bit of a silo effect in how these are dealt with in international policy. Biodiversity is not about species riches. It is not about conservation biology so that a campaign to clarify what biodiversity is and its role in producing more efficient, robust and durable management strategies would benefit both decision makers and researchers. So we need to be cognizant of the fact that this disjoint nature of conventions on biodiversity creates confusion leading to countries being parts of international agreements that lack integration and miss opportunities for synergy. Ruth talked about an interesting study on 4,000 households of smallholder farmers across multiple countries and shows that this indicates that climate change can exceed varieties other management practices. However, climate is only one of the many reasons why farmers change practices depending upon region and local context. As a body of research on climate adaptation is a bit biased towards developed countries and I think that was striking it came back in the conversation afterwards. It rarely tracks changes over time scales long enough to assess the context. Romano talked to us a lot about the complexities of policy making in the African context, the context that he has strong firsthand knowledge of. I think one of the take home messages is it's a bit messy as a context. The legislatures are often not very informed and but these legislatures are the representatives of the people that are appropriate for the people that very often a lot of the information rests within the executive and so there's a need for scientists to be communicating at several levels but also a need to be building networks to get information to move between levels. Very often there's a bias in the attitudes that mitigation is not a problem of developing countries. The problem is created by a lack of understanding why countries need to follow low emissions development pathways. I think as scientists and as international policy regimes wanting to have an impact in Africa perhaps the entry point isn't mitigation, the entry point is adaptation and if mitigation can be accomplished as a secondary byproduct there are perhaps opportunities there. But clearly that's the entry point. In Kenya as in many African countries there are no formal mechanisms for policy makers to interact with scientists and it's done on an ad hoc basis and we heard that the meetings and conferences are perhaps not the most effective way to get information into the hands of policy makers in ways that result in decisions and scientists need to support and better articulate the consequences of climate change. Policy makers are confronted with numerous problems so one day they're dealing with a health crisis and making decisions about vaccination the next day they're dealing with agricultural productivity the next day they have water and sanitation. How do we communicate the importance of climate in what they're dealing with and perhaps maybe not isolating climate as a policy imperative the other policy imperatives would be one way forward. He made the point that policy is not politics and that policy is long-term politics is perhaps short-term so there are opportunities there to effect change. I think the discussion went there was several different trains within the discussion. One was about the learning from and building on adaptation strategies that are already there in the landscape and that there is no adaptation strategies. We need as scientists we need to document it and understand that but help policy makers also link with what people are currently doing for adaptation. There was a bit of a discussion on just how much effort and what is the type of effort and who should be doing this research. Romano spoke very eloquently I think for the need for more linkage between African science and international community and the imperative for African scientists to be in the vanguard of moving this forward and perhaps as much as you need champions within the corridors of power to bring about these changes you also need champions within the scientific communities. Those are some of the big topics that we covered today and maybe I'll just leave it there but I would like to thank the panel that has been a lot of discussion and crafting the messages and crafting this so I hope everybody else found it useful, found the discussion fruitful and what folks will be here at least for the next day so please interact with the panelists and interact among yourselves as you've heard interesting topics of conversation come up here so thank you all very much and Bruce?