The Political Economy of Climate Adaptation and Environmental Health: The Case of Ethiopia

The environment affects our health, livelihoods, and the social and political institutions within which we interact. Indeed, nearly a quarter of the global disease burden is attributed to environmental factors, and many of these factors are exacerbated by global climate change. Thus, the central research question of this dissertation is: How do people cope with and adapt to uncertainty, complexity, and change of environmental and health conditions? Specifically, I ask how institutional factors, risk aversion, and behaviors affect environmental health outcomes. I further assess the role of social capital in climate adaptation, and specifically compare individual and collective adaptation. I then analyze how policy develops accounting for both adaptation to the effects of climate and mitigation of climate-changing emissions. In order to empirically test the relationships between these variables at multiple levels, I combine multiple methods, including semi-structured interviews, surveys, and field experiments, along with health and water quality data. This dissertation uses the case of Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous nation, which has a large rural population and is considered very vulnerable to climate change. My fieldwork included interviews and institutional data collection at the national level, and a three-year study (2012-2014) of approximately 400 households in 20 villages in the Ethiopian Rift Valley. I evaluate the theoretical relationships between households, communities, and government in the process of adaptation to environmental stresses. Through my analyses, I demonstrate that water source choice varies by individual risk aversion and institutional context, which ultimately has implications for environmental health outcomes. I show that qualitative measures of trust predict cooperation in adaptation, consistent with social capital theory, but that measures of trust are negatively related with private adaptation by the individual. Finally, I describe how Ethiopia had some unique characteristics, significantly reinforced by international actors, that led to the development of an extensive climate policy, and yet with some challenges remaining for implementation. These results suggest a potential for adaptation through the interactions among individuals, communities, and government in the search for transformative processes when confronting environmental threats and climate change.

Climate change, water resources, and the politics of adaptation in the Middle East and North Africa

Through an examination of global climate change models combined with hydrological data on deteriorating water quality in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), we elucidate the ways in which the MENA countries are vulnerable to climate-induced impacts on water resources. Adaptive governance strategies, however, remain a low priority for political leaderships in the MENA region. To date, most MENA governments have concentrated the bulk of their resources on large-scale supply side projects such as desalination, dam construction, inter-basin water transfers, tapping fossil groundwater aquifers, and importing virtual water. Because managing water demand, improving the efficiency of water use, and promoting conservation will be key ingredients in responding to climate-induced impacts on the water sector, we analyze the political, economic, and institutional drivers that have shaped governance responses. While the scholarly literature emphasizes the importance of social capital to adaptive governance, we find that many political leaders and water experts in the MENA rarely engage societal actors in considering water risks. We conclude that the key capacities for adaptive governance to water scarcity in MENA are underdeveloped. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

The environmental justice dimensions of climate change

Nations around the world are considering strategies to mitigate the severe impacts of climate change predicted to occur in the twenty-first century. Many countries, however, lack the wealth, technology, and government institutions to effectively cope with climate change. This study investigates the varying degrees to which developing and developed nations will be exposed to changes in three key variables: temperature, precipitation, and runoff. We use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis to compare current and future climate model predictions on a country level. We then compare our calculations of climate change exposure for each nation to several metrics of political and economic well-being. Our results indicate that the impacts of changes in precipitation and runoff are distributed relatively equally between developed and developing nations. In contrast, we confirm research suggesting that developing nations will be affected far more severely by changes in temperature than developed nations. Our results also suggest that this unequal impact will persist throughout the twenty-first century. Our analysis further indicates that the most significant temperature changes will occur in politically unstable countries, creating an additional motivation for developed countries to actively engage with developing nations on climate mitigation strategies. © 2011, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.

Climate change and forest sinks: Factors affecting the costs of carbon sequestration

The possibility of encouraging the growth of forests as a means of sequestering carbon dioxide has received considerable attention, partly because of evidence that this can be a relatively inexpensive means of combating climate change. But how sensitive are such estimates to specific conditions? We examine the sensitivity of carbon sequestration costs to changes in critical factors, including the nature of management and deforestation regimes, silvicultural species, relative prices, and discount rates. (C) 2000 Academic Press.

The toxicology of climate change: environmental contaminants in a warming world.

Climate change induced by anthropogenic warming of the earth's atmosphere is a daunting problem. This review examines one of the consequences of climate change that has only recently attracted attention: namely, the effects of climate change on the environmental distribution and toxicity of chemical pollutants. A review was undertaken of the scientific literature (original research articles, reviews, government and intergovernmental reports) focusing on the interactions of toxicants with the environmental parameters, temperature, precipitation, and salinity, as altered by climate change. Three broad classes of chemical toxicants of global significance were the focus: air pollutants, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), including some organochlorine pesticides, and other classes of pesticides. Generally, increases in temperature will enhance the toxicity of contaminants and increase concentrations of tropospheric ozone regionally, but will also likely increase rates of chemical degradation. While further research is needed, climate change coupled with air pollutant exposures may have potentially serious adverse consequences for human health in urban and polluted regions. Climate change producing alterations in: food webs, lipid dynamics, ice and snow melt, and organic carbon cycling could result in increased POP levels in water, soil, and biota. There is also compelling evidence that increasing temperatures could be deleterious to pollutant-exposed wildlife. For example, elevated water temperatures may alter the biotransformation of contaminants to more bioactive metabolites and impair homeostasis. The complex interactions between climate change and pollutants may be particularly problematic for species living at the edge of their physiological tolerance range where acclimation capacity may be limited. In addition to temperature increases, regional precipitation patterns are projected to be altered with climate change. Regions subject to decreases in precipitation may experience enhanced volatilization of POPs and pesticides to the atmosphere. Reduced precipitation will also increase air pollution in urbanized regions resulting in negative health effects, which may be exacerbated by temperature increases. Regions subject to increased precipitation will have lower levels of air pollution, but will likely experience enhanced surface deposition of airborne POPs and increased run-off of pesticides. Moreover, increases in the intensity and frequency of storm events linked to climate change could lead to more severe episodes of chemical contamination of water bodies and surrounding watersheds. Changes in salinity may affect aquatic organisms as an independent stressor as well as by altering the bioavailability and in some instances increasing the toxicity of chemicals. A paramount issue will be to identify species and populations especially vulnerable to climate-pollutant interactions, in the context of the many other physical, chemical, and biological stressors that will be altered with climate change. Moreover, it will be important to predict tipping points that might trigger or accelerate synergistic interactions between climate change and contaminant exposures.

Discounting the Benefits of Climate Change Policies Using Uncertain Rates

Evaluating environmental policies, such as the mitigation of greenhouse gases, frequently requires balancing near-term mitigation costs against long-term environmental benefits. Conventional approaches to valuing such investments hold interest rates constant, but the authors contend that there is a real degree of uncertainty in future interest rates. This leads to a higher valuation of future benefits relative to conventional methods that ignore interest rate uncertainty.

Full of Hot Air? Three Examinations of Climate Change in the American Political Information Environment

Climate change is thought to be one of the most pressing environmental problems facing humanity. However, due in part to failures in political communication and how the issue has been historically defined in American politics, discussions of climate change remain gridlocked and polarized. In this dissertation, I explore how climate change has been historically constructed as a political issue, how conflicts between climate advocates and skeptics have been communicated, and what effects polarization has had on political communication, particularly on the communication of climate change to skeptical audiences. I use a variety of methodological tools to consider these questions, including evolutionary frame analysis, which uses textual data to show how issues are framed and constructed over time; Kullback-Leibler divergence content analysis, which allows for comparison of advocate and skeptical framing over time; and experimental framing methods to test how audiences react to and process different presentations of climate change. I identify six major portrayals of climate change from 1988 to 2012, but find that no single construction of the issue has dominated the public discourse defining the problem. In addition, the construction of climate change may be associated with changes in public political sentiment, such as greater pessimism about climate action when the electorate becomes more conservative. As the issue of climate change has become more polarized in American politics, one proposed causal pathway for the observed polarization is that advocate and skeptic framing of climate change focuses on different facets of the issue and ignores rival arguments, a practice known as “talking past.” However, I find no evidence of increased talking past in 25 years of popular newsmedia reporting on the issue, suggesting both that talking past has not driven public polarization or that polarization is occurring in venues outside of the mainstream public discourse, such as blogs. To examine how polarization affects political communication on climate change, I test the cognitive processing of a variety of messages and sources that promote action against climate change among Republican individuals. Rather than identifying frames that are powerful enough to overcome polarization, I find that Republicans exhibit telltale signs of motivated skepticism on the issue, that is, they reject framing that runs counter to their party line and political identity. This result suggests that polarization constrains political communication on polarized issues, overshadowing traditional message and source effects of framing and increasing the difficulty communicators experience in reaching skeptical audiences.

Shifting ranges and conservation challenges for lemurs in the face of climate change.

Geospatial modeling is one of the most powerful tools available to conservation biologists for estimating current species ranges of Earth's biodiversity. Now, with the advantage of predictive climate models, these methods can be deployed for understanding future impacts on threatened biota. Here, we employ predictive modeling under a conservative estimate of future climate change to examine impacts on the future abundance and geographic distributions of Malagasy lemurs. Using distribution data from the primary literature, we employed ensemble species distribution models and geospatial analyses to predict future changes in species distributions. Current species distribution models (SDMs) were created within the BIOMOD2 framework that capitalizes on ten widely used modeling techniques. Future and current SDMs were then subtracted from each other, and areas of contraction, expansion, and stability were calculated. Model overprediction is a common issue associated Malagasy taxa. Accordingly, we introduce novel methods for incorporating biological data on dispersal potential to better inform the selection of pseudo-absence points. This study predicts that 60% of the 57 species examined will experience a considerable range of reductions in the next seventy years entirely due to future climate change. Of these species, range sizes are predicted to decrease by an average of 59.6%. Nine lemur species (16%) are predicted to expand their ranges, and 13 species (22.8%) distribution sizes were predicted to be stable through time. Species ranges will experience severe shifts, typically contractions, and for the majority of lemur species, geographic distributions will be considerably altered. We identify three areas in dire need of protection, concluding that strategically managed forest corridors must be a key component of lemur and other biodiversity conservation strategies. This recommendation is all the more urgent given that the results presented here do not take into account patterns of ongoing habitat destruction relating to human activities.