The NCCN newsletter focuses on climate change stories that foster greater awareness of community level climate change impacts and adaptation, and which have relevance to north-central British Columbia. Contributions from readers for future issues are welcome. Send us your ideas.

In a September 8 news release, the Columbia Basin Trust (CBT) announced the conclusion of Phase 1 of its leading-edge initiative, Communities Adapting to Climate Change. Two communities in the Columbia Basin, the City of Kimberley and the District of Elkford, have developed action plans on how to adapt to impacts of climate change at a local level. “After months of community and scientific input, the first two communities to participate in CBT’s Communities Adapting to Climate Change Initiative have completed climate change adaptation strategies,” said Kindy Gosal, CBT Director, Water and Environment. “This planning process has increased their ability to prepare for and adapt to changes in temperature and precipitation patterns, which will increase the community’s resilience to expected climate change impacts.”

The Council of Forest Industries (COFI) in BC in partnership with Forest Innovation Investment Ltd. has produced new teaching resource kits which were distributed to BC elementary and secondary schools throughout the province. The kits are intended to provide classrooms with information about the effects of climate change on our forests and how our forests and the wood products produced from our forest can help mitigate the effects of climate change. Information about the elementary kit “Climate Change and Our Forests” and the secondary kit “Climate Change: Our Forests, Our Future” can be found on the COFI forest education website and the Climate Change and Our Forests website. In a related website, COFI encourages consumers to use wood when possible for building construction and other purposes.

The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) is now providing weekly News Scans on its website. These will offer a weekly summary of the major climate-change related science, technology, and policy advances of direct relevance to the Canadian provincial and federal governments and more generally to Canadian businesses, government and civil society. The News Scan focuses on leading climate solutions gathered by the fellows and faculty associated with PICS. Feedback regarding the content or format and suggestions about interesting news items should be sent to picsscan@uvic.ca.

The CBC’s “Quirks and Quarks” radio program kicked off its 2009/2010 season with a radio documentary Oceans of Trouble. The documentary features award-winning Canadian environmental journalist Alanna Mitchell, author of Seasick: The Global Ocean in Crisis, and also includes interviews with several scientists researching various aspects of significant changes affecting the world’s oceans, some of which are directly related to climate change. Listeners can download the documentary and explore other links related to the participating scientists.

The United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has published a major scientific assessment report entitled Global Climate Change: Impacts in the United States. Thirteen U.S. Government departments and agencies participate in the USGCRP, such as the Department of State, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the Smithsonian Institution. The report summarizes key climate change concepts and science, and provides both sectoral and regional overviews of anticipated climate change impacts. Readers can also separately download the USGCRP’s guidebook Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science.

The Royal Society in the UK has released a major report examining options for geoengineering the global climate, entitled: Geoengineering the climate: science, governance and uncertainty. (4.6 MB) According to the Society’s website for the report, “Man-made climate change is happening and its impacts and costs will be large, serious and unevenly spread. The impacts may be reduced by adaptation and moderated by mitigation, especially by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. However, global efforts to reduce emissions have not yet been sufficiently successful to provide confidence that the reductions needed to avoid dangerous climate change will be achieved. This has led to growing interest in geoengineering, defined here as the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change. However, despite this interest, there has been a lack of accessible, high quality information on the proposed geoengineering techniques which remain unproven and potentially dangerous. This study provides a detailed assessment of the various methods and considers the potential efficiency and unintended consequences they may pose.”

The World Climate Conference-3 (WCC-3) held in Geneva, Switzerland from August 31^st to September 4^th has produced a high-level declaration determining that, among other action steps, the World Meteorological Organization will “… establish a Global Framework for Climate Services … to strengthen production, availability, delivery and application of science-based climate prediction and services”. Download the conference statement executive summary or full document from the conference website.

The BC Ministry of Forests and Range hosts periodic seminars aimed at sharing the latest science on climate change adaptation for forests and range, and building awareness and capacity to address climate change. The schedule and related materials for the ongoing climate change seminar series can be downloaded here (then click on the Seminar_schedule link). On Thursday, October 8^th, Dr. Tongli Wang, Associate Director of the UBC Department of Forest Sciences’ Centre for Forest Conservation Genetics, presented on “A framework for forest adaptation to climate change.”

The second annual Pacific Climate Seminar Series is now underway. The Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC) and the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) have joined together to co-host the series. All seminars will be held at 2:00 pm on the third Wednesday of every month in the Sedgewick Building, Room C168 on the UVic campus. A live webcast of each seminar will be available via the PICS website.

The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) is sponsoring a screening of the newly released feature film about climate change, The Age of Stupid, to be shown at 7:00 PM in the Canfor Theatre at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) Prince George campus on Wednesday, October 21^st. The film, which bills itself as a drama-documentary-animation hybrid, features “a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?”

A lecture entitled "The Global Warming Debate: The messy and bitter intersection of science and politics" will be presented at UNBC on Friday, October 30th at 3:30 PM in Lecture Hall 7-152 as part of the Natural Resources and Environmental Studies Institute’s Colloquium Series. The lecture will be presented by Dr. Jerry Osborn, Professor, Department of Geoscience at the University of Calgary.

In view of the forthcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December, where world leaders will attempt to craft a new global treaty on cutting emissions, 350.org has declared October 24 to be the International Day for Climate Action. The organization seeks to create momentum towards reducing and capping global CO₂ emissions at 350 parts per million (ppm), significantly below the current 385 ppm and the 450 ppm cap called for by the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report. Without the 350 ppm cap, the organization holds, “we risk reaching tipping points and irreversible impacts such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and major methane releases from increased permafrost melt”. The organization is calling for both symbolic and concrete actions to reduce CO₂ emissions.

o       Canadian Wildlife Federation climate change links: http://www.cwf-fcf.org/en/what-we-do/issues/issues-of-concern/climate-change/climate-change.html

o       Nature Canada information and links related to climate change: http://www.naturecanada.ca/climate_change.asp  

o       Royal Society web portal to climate change resources: http://royalsociety.org/landing.asp?id=1278

o       Royal Society lecture – Dr. Richard Leakey on Climate Change and Extinction: http://royalsociety.org/event.asp?id=8287

o       CO₂ Now: http://co2now.org/

o       The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) is the primary climate-change data and information analysis center of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). CDIAC is located at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and includes the World Data Center for Atmospheric Trace Gases. Readers can link to information about recent greenhouse gas concentrations.

o       UK Government’s Office of Climate Change publications: http://www.occ.gov.uk/publications/index.htm

o       Copenhagen Climate Council: http://copenhagenclimatecouncil.com/ see “Climate Intelligence” links, etc.

o       The International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) report, Adaptation of Forests and People to Climate Change. A Global Assessment Report.

o       United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report, Climate Change Science Compendium 2009.

o       Sir Nicholas Stern, Head of the UK Government Economic Service and Adviser to the Government on the economics of climate change and development, report to the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Economics of Climate Change: http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/sternreview_index.htm.

o       The Pew Center on Global Climate Change report Key Scientific Developments since the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report

o       Stockholm Resilience Centre’s critical planetary boundaries website and report, Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity.