CGA-Seminar-20-May-2022

CGA Seminar on the Uneven Geography of Climate Change 20 May 2022

URL:https://gis.harvard.edu/event/cga-virtual-forum-2022-uneven-geography-climate-change

Susan Cutter, Univ of S. Carolina
- Spatial Inequalities in Climate-Sensitive Hazard Impacts
- disaster risk has changed
  - new understanding includes non-linear change, interdependencies, systems, etc.
  - hazard, exposure, vunl, scale, systems
- new methods, tools, geospatial data, social media data, satellite imaging, etc.
- changes in disaster governance
  - state, policies, social, private sector actors
  - prepare, mitigate, respond, recover
- inequalities in disaster risk persist
  - rich v poor
  - gender
  - technology
  - age
- variability in event type and loss patterns
  - most hazard events versus highest losses versus most fatalities
    - counties and states all over the map on these axes
- post 1980 climate sensitive county $$ loss patterns
  - especially acute in coastal counties
- county per capita lost
  - greatest loss of life in central states and west
    - flooding and fires
  - per capita losses increasing overall since 1980
- assessing spaital impacts via relative losses
  - ratio of property loss/county GDP
- assess differential impacts using social vulnerability
  - social vuln index (SoVI) measures social disparities in disaster impacts, preparedness, response, recovery among places
- what gets measured, gets managed
  - assess impact inequality using social vulnerability with maps
- Approah to reducing inequality in disaster
  - SoVI coupled with FEMA erified loss counts tells the story of where resources are needed to support disaster relief
  - this was tried in 2016 flooding in LA — good evidence-based support for this approach
- SC has a migitation program ($157M) with risk profiles using SoVI as one of the metrics
- National Risk Index
  - SoVI
  - BRIC (community reslience)
  - Expected Annual Loss (SHELDUS database)
- climate disasters increases inquality and expand
Marshall Shepherd, Univ of Georga
- The Extreme Weather Climate Gap: risk and vulnerabilities
- 2021 saw multiple billion dollar weather and climate disasters
- working on a committee analysing effects of multiple compounding disasters of gulf area on marginalized, disadvantaged communitie
- these climate disaster impacts are here now, not future tense
- so what?
  - air pollution, increasing allergens
  - extreme heat
  - severe weather
  - env degradation
  - degraded living conditions and social inqualities
  - changes in vector ecology
  - water and food supply impacts
  - water quality impacts
- parts of world exceeding limits of habitability
- extremes are becoming more extreme and people feel them far more than “averages”
- the DNA of climate change is already in current weather patterns
- climate risk is expected to increase
- climate risk in the 2040’s
  - skewed towards coasts, southwest, florida,
- extremely confident in decreasing cold and increasing heat
- weather-climate gap
  - disproprit sensitity to extreme weather cliamte events and a delay in ability to bounce back
  - heat islands in major metro areas
    - black communities in particular tend to fall in these heat islands
  - flooding on large paved areas also tend to focus on black communities
  - communities of color, children, older adults, lower income communities are bulls-eye of impact
David Keith, Harvard
- What is known about the geography of solar geoengineering’s risks and benefits
- economy → emissions → concentrations → climate change → impacts
- 4 types of interventions
  - decarbonization
  - carbon removal
  - solar engineering
  - adaptation
- note: decarbonization only stops things getting worse, but doesn’t stop it
  - carbon removal and solar engineering required to reverse impact
- options for geo-engineering
  - space-based methods (big sun blocks in orbit)
  - increase stratospheric aresosol
  - decreasing amount of high altitute cirrus clouds
  - increase reflectivity of marine clouds
  - surface albedo enhancement
- past concerns about talking about geo-engineering because it gets polluters and policy-makers off the hook from change is decreasing quickly
  - global forums, univ and federal research effort
- the physical geography of consequences of geo-engineering
  - what does the science say?
  - would depend on the choices we make
- geoengineering cannot replace emissions cuts but can supplement it
- 2019 model of decreasing half of global temp increase to pre-industrial levels
  - across variables: surface air temp, max annual temp, precip - evap, max 5 day precip
  - no significant increases in climate risk across any of 4 variables with geo-engineering outcome of temp decrease
- still lots of concerns about solar geoengineering
  - physical risks
    - unintended outcomes of intervention
  - injustice
    - does increase inquality
  - conflict
    - used as a weopon
  - humantity and nature
- still lots of skepticism, but that’s changing
- poorer, more vulnerable countries more willing to consider geo-engineering interventions
Siqi Zheng, MIT
- Climate Change and Global Sentiment
- features of our research
  - geotagged social media data
  - natural language processing
  - GIS econometric modeling
- sentiment score
  - dictionary based approach
  - machine learning approach to classify posts
  - get clusters of negative and positive labels of posts
- COVID and global sentiment
  - global evidence of expressed sentiment alterations during covid
    - mood much worse
      - 4 times more miserable than a monday
  - other data results:
    - countries with tighter culture have smaller sentiment shock
    - countries with higher governance efficiency have faster sentiment recovery
- Climate Change and Global Sentiment
  - mapping of average day time temperature to overall average sentiment score
  - sentiment change as a percentage has a strong correlation with max temperature
Devika Kakkar, Harvard
- Unlocking Geospatial Big Data for Climate Change Research using High-Performance Computing
- projects
  - climate change impact on psych well being
  - climate change impact on physical well being
- Well-Being project
  - enriching cliamte data with sentiment scores from Siqi’s climate/sentiment research
  - Social Media Data Enrichment System (SMES)
    - geotagged tweets
    - sentiment (NLP)
    - geography GPU database
    - GIS-based econometric modeling
  - 10 billtion tweets
  - HPC
  - real-time enrichment running on NERC
  - open-source software based on SMES
  - open access data infrastructure
- Physical Well Being
  - raster big data image
    - 900m resolution PRISM data
    - 7 climate variables
    - 48 states
    - 100k rasters
    - 8tb storage, 85mg each
    - 20 years data
  - RINX (Raster Info Extraction System)
    - input climate rasters + address
  - 10.3 million patients days of cacl
  - extramatcion of 7 climate varaibles 20 years of data
  - HPC
  - easily replicable, scalable,
  - in partnership with SPH and HMS
Pam Hatchfield, Held in Trust and MFA
- Climate Mapping for Cultural Heritage
Kelsey Mulcahy, Meta
- International Public Opinion on Climate Change
- Data for Good’s mission
  - empower partners with privacy preserving data that strengthens communities and advances social issues
- fielded a global cimate change opinion survey in partnership with Yale
  - goal: biuld a deeper understandiong of international public opinion
  - 31 countries, survey on fB (feb to mar 2021)
  - modules
    - cliamte change lknowldge and bleieves
    - worry abnd perceived risks
    - policy preferencews
    - energy and the ecoomy
    - climate activism
- findings
  - awareness of climate change
    - majority in developed counties, lower in developing countries
    - countires in Europe and Latin America more likely ot understand cliamte changes is caused by human activities
  - worry and perceived risks
    - on average, women typically said they were less knowledgeable but more worried
    - in US, 3/4 said that theywere somewhat or very worried, versus half of men
      - similar in Australia, Canada
  - people less likely to perceive personal harm, but more likely to be aware of future harm Eleanor (Kellie) Stokes, Earth from Space Institutehttps://blackmarble.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Tracking human responses to climate impacts with NASA’s Black Marble
Black Marble data (night time data visualization of the earth)
daily look of earth at night
focus on human settlements
helps understand how disasters impact power availability
Puerto Rico power outages after hurricane
what areas lost power
how long specific areas stayed without power
tracking conflict in Syrian civil war
Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan
Panel Discussion Harvard CGA