2011 - Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences ...

William Travis
Extreme Events: Agents of Adaptation?
FUNDING: NOAA
Theory holds that
extreme events override
political and economic
barriers to create windows
of opportunity for
hazard mitigation. The
idea has intuitive appeal
and may even be partially
right. But the desire
to quickly return to
pre-disaster conditions,
as well as a commitment
to traditional responses
(such as building higher
levees) rather than new
approaches, thwarts the
potential for post-disaster
mitigation. Much of the
research conducted by
faculty and students at
the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research
(CSTPR) focuses on extremes and their roles in shaping
policy. Motivated by debate over links between weather
extremes and global warming—but also by abiding
questions about how societies respond to environmental
extremes—I am exploring several hypotheses about
adaptation.
Graduate student Gene Longenecker and I are studying
the possibility that some hazard responses actually increase
losses in the long run. Longenecker worked for the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) since
obtaining his master’s in Geography at CU, and he is back
for a Ph.D., armed with the latest hazard loss simulation
model (HazUS) to test ways we might detect this effect
were it to hold in the real world.
Graduate student Mary Huisenga and I are using
another simulation model to test hypotheses about a more
subtle role of extremes: Might they act as pacemakers of
adaption to underlying trends, like climate change? One
hypothesis reflects the window-of-opportunity theory:
Occasional extremes evoke adaptation that fills in the “adaptation
deficit” built up over a period of gradual change.
But extremes provide inherently noisy information, and
may point in the wrong direction or trip premature and
inefficient adaption. Both of these effects show up in a
simple model initialized with real data for a Great Plains
wheat farm put through a couple of decades in which
the mean of the distribution of yields is slowly ratcheted
down. The farmer can switch from continuous cropping to
alternating fallow, a technique that gets better yields from
less moisture. We model an adaptive and nonadaptive
farm under gradual change to find the point where fallow
Figure 1. Compare Net income non-adaptive and adaptive farmer ONE ($).
Net income GC for all cropping ONE GC Net income non-adaptive farmer ONE
Figure 1. Compare Net income non-adaptive and adaptive farmer THREE ($).
Net income GC for all cropping THREE GC Net income non-adaptive farmer TWO
is adopted and raises net income (Figure 1). We then add
variously timed droughts to test their pace-making role. It
works out that a luckily timed drought can, indeed, evoke
adaption such that the adaptive farmer’s net income (here
plotted as the midpoint of the distribution) spends fewer
years below zero (Figure 2). There’s much more to explore
here, including other climate-sensitive systems, such as
flood control, and other adaptations, like insurance.
CIRES Annual Report 2011 53