Climate Change Innovation Challenge

The Santa Fe-based organization Climate Advocates Voces Unidas is days away from closing registration for the Climate Innovation Challenge, a program designed to help kids from across the state hone a sense of resilience and agency in response to the unpredictability of climate change.

Registration is open to groups of one to five students under supervision of a teacher, community leader or parent until  5 pm on Sept. 30.

The semester program incorporates video and film production skills into a curriculum about the capacity for communities and ecosystems to adapt to changing conditions. After identifying how climate change will impact the human and natural systems in the places they live, students are challenged to come up with creative adaptation solutions to protect the things in their surroundings and lifestyle that are most important to them. Then, they will shoot and produce a video project highlighting the threat and their solutions.

CAVU is well versed in using film to highlight local adaptation solutions to climate change. Past projects include films investigating methane emissions released from oil and gas rigs across New Mexico and a project about strategies to reclaim abandoned oil wells in the San Juan Basin.

In January, student’s short films will be submitted to a panel of judges and winning entries will be screened at the state Legislative session.

The challenge is open to fifth, eighth, and 11th graders, with curriculums tailored to the educational and developmental needs of each grade level. So far, the Santa Fe Indian School, Santa Fe High, the United World College in Las Vegas and Cibola High School in Albuquerque are among the schools from across the state that have registered, Program Director Atherton Phleger tells SFR.

Read on for a Q&A; about the differences between climate adaptation and mitigation, why adaptation strategies are never in the top 10 responses when you ask Google “what can I do about climate change?” and how talking to kids about adaptation is an effective way to prepare them for an uncertain future.

SFR: What’s the difference between mitigation and adaptation?

Atherton Phleger: Mitigation is the set of solutions and tools that people use to either reduce the rate of emissions of greenhouse gases or sequester existing greenhouse gases. So that can be doing things to lower your carbon footprint, like driving less or recycling or eating less meat, or it could be these newfangled techniques of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and turning it into limestone and that kind of thing. Mitigation encompasses the scope of what most people think of as how they can address climate change.

Adaptation is the tools or techniques or solutions that allow things that people care about to adapt to the impacts of climate change or build resilience so that when they experience climate impacts they can bounce back. So that encompasses things like dealing with increased flooding or drought, or more severe wildfires. For kids, this could mean thinking about where the water comes from to irrigate their soccer field and what alternative strategies could be for watering the field or playing soccer somewhere other than a field to adapt to water scarcity conditions, for instance.

Why is adaptation an effective strategy for teaching kids about climate change and helping them to feel more hopeful about the future?

The thing about adaptation that has helped me and I think helped a lot of other people who are really scared about the impacts of climate change is understanding that while in many ways climate change poses an unprecedented challenge, adaptation is a thing that people have been doing since they have been on the earth and it’s something that can be implemented at any scale.

… When it comes to the potential actions that kids can take around climate change, kids have more agency to personally implement adaptation than they do mitigation. A lot of things we can do to reduce our carbon footprint are not necessarily things that kids have control over—like their diet, for example, or how much they drive or fly, or how much energy they use in their house.

But kids can, for example, see a little erosion gully by their house and create a check dam. That’s a measurable, hands-on adaptation action that they can do and see the impact next time there is a heavy rain.

Adaptation helps kids start from a place of, ‘What are the things I love, what do I want to protect, and how can I keep those things running, even if the way they work in the future will be a little different than the way they work today?’

Why does mitigation seem to get so much more emphasis than adaptation when we talk about what individuals can do in their personal lives to combat climate change? 

So much of the narrative around adaptation is couched in language that implies that the apocalypse is imminent, and so all we can do now is prepare for the worst because we’ve lost the fight. … And that’s the main issue that I see—that the messengers for climate adaptation up to this point have been perceived as essentially being fatalist or doom and gloom people. … It’s also often brought up by people invested in industries like gas and oil who think we should focus all our money on adaptation because they financially benefit from people not talking about mitigation of carbon emissions.

I think that a lot of it is the messengers and the narrative that has surrounded it as being one that is even more depressing than mitigation, and so that’s part of what I’m hoping, that having a bunch of videos from kids will do is help us say this is actually not the doomsday option, this is the prudent, life affirming, a more holistic approach to talking and thinking about the impacts of climate change.

Are there big scale adaptation measures you would like to see adults also participating in right now?

Oh tons, absolutely. A lot of really effective adaptation techniques are essentially rebuilding the function of ecosystems that previously existed. I think a good example is how restoring normal fire regimes to the western forests and ponderosa forests specifically is a very effective adaptation technique because it means that the sort of more severe and more frequent fires that climate change will cause will have less of an effect because the system is operating as it should. Adaptation requires a large scale recalculating of our relationship and our stewardship to these natural systems that I think adults have a huge part to play in that.

How do mitigation and adaptation intersect with one another, and how can understanding both help people make better decisions?

The adaptation process can tell you whether or not a mitigation activity will help you withstand the effects of climate change or whether it will be maladaptive.

Let’s say you have a rural community with an electrical grid that is already subject to brownouts and blackouts, and you are interested in reducing the carbon footprint of that community. One mitigation option might be to put up a bunch of solar panels. But let’s say one of the climate impacts you are worried about is extreme heat events. One thing you can do is create cooling centers and set up your solar system so it is able to island itself from the faulty grid so that it can keep independently producing energy even in a brownout or blackout—so that next time it hits 115 for days at a time, the elderly people have a place to go that stays nice and cool. This is an example of an adaptation technique that has a mitigation result as well because you are producing your own energy and lowering your carbon footprint.

You can also have mitigation efforts that are maladaptive though … These would be behaviors that may have a net positive mitigation effect in the short term but that may ultimately result in more human misery, loss of habitat, and carbon emissions in the long term. For instance, cutting down a forest to grow corn to produce ethanol as a fuel.

Understanding that adaptation is part of the equation is a way of helping people in general but particularly people who manage resources or plan for the future make better choices about how they can prepare for the impacts of climate change.