Tribes Use Western and Indigenous Science to Prepare for Climate Change

The National Weather Service has been helping firefighting crews better prepare for and fight wildfires. They’ve developed a model called the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh-Smoke (HRRR-Smoke) to show where there’s higher smoke density and what direction it’s heading toward. The agency is hoping to continue their work to become better at preventative measures so that towns and cities can prepare ahead of time.

Friends of Trees, a nonprofit organization in the Portland area, are not just planting trees because they help combat climate change and improve air quality, but because they also help stop major flooding and avoid erosion. While it can be expensive to maintain the trees and clean up the leaves from storm drains, these trees could prevent millions of gallons of rainfall from flooding neighborhoods as extreme weather events are expected to increase in the future.

In coastal cities in India, floods have led to hundreds of deaths and millions of people being displaced. To address the issue, scientists had to address a variety of factors: hydrology of the upstream region; river, tidal, and storm surge modeling; and a high-resolution digital elevation map of the city. A group of scientists from 13 research institutes and government organizations looked at all those factors and came up with a real-time flood forecasting system. It generated 800 flood scenarios. When it rains the model predicts the most vulnerable sites.

Through a government funding program, several communities are working on initiatives to improve their access to clean drinking water. In India, one community formed a citizen’s group, cleaned up a local pond, and restored its natural water flow. Another initiative involved more than 1,000 women from 21 villages to build rainwater harvesting structures. These projects are seen as models for water conservation efforts as climate change exacerbates the country’s ongoing water crisis.

An innovative approach to combat climate change involves growing forests and resorting natural vegetation on degraded or barren land. Known as the Miyawaki technique, planting seedlings of indigenous trees close together could speed the growth of the trees and not only offset carbon emissions, but also increase biodiversity. While the technique can be challenging to do correctly, corporations, nonprofits, and even schools have planted 285 of these forests around the world in India, the Netherlands, France, and Pakistan.

Identifying the metagenomic sequencing for new outbreaks of viruses can help to better assess how the virus is spreading, which in turn helps health officials figure out how to slow down the contagion. In the midst of a coronavirus outbreak, a tool that was first used to during the SARS outbreak is now being used to track Covid-19 in under-resourced places such as Cambodia.

Adapting to climate change takes planning and partnerships. In Missoula, Montana, partnerships with nonprofits like Thriving Earth Exchange (TEX) and Climate Smart Missoula reinforce the city’s climate planning. TEX connects cities and urban planners with professors, experts, and other nonprofits that can assist in tackling climate change issues. By layering socioeconomic data over a heat map of the city, TEX scientists could reveal populations at highest risk of extreme temperature impacts. The team then shared data with health officials, policy makers, and the community.

Squids play an important role in the ecosystem, so scientists are focusing efforts on better understanding how the species adapts to climate change. By creating a "FitBit for squid," scientists have successfully been able to monitor soft-bodied invertebrates.

Thanks to technology used in "Formula One teams and engine manufacturers like Rolls Royce," Newcastle is digitally replicating the entire city in order to project potential natural disaster occurrence and population increases. In doing so, the city is able to prepare for ways to act should a disaster occur.

The city of Houston is changing its approach to measuring the full scope of damage from Hurricane Harvey so it can get help where it is most needed and improve future flood mitigation. Using data from numerous sources, Civis Analytics found unmet housing needs were far greater than initially recorded and low-income areas were hit disproportionately harder, even though recovery funding often goes to areas with higher housing values. Now city officials are working to implement solutions based on the data in order to allocate limited funds where they will be most effective.