Salon reports on National Adaptation Forum in Denver

Salon recently reported on the National Adaptation Forum held in downtown Denver in April, focusing on adapting to the new environments brought on by climate change.

Excerpt:

On the opening morning of the inaugural National Adaptation Forum, I was eating breakfast at a stand-up table in the exhibition hall when a mustachioed man of middle age plopped his cherry Danish next to my pile of conference literature, a mess of pamphlets and reports with titles like Getting Climate Smart: A Water Preparedness Guide for State Action, and Successful Adaptation: Linking Science and Policy in a Rapidly Changing World. The nametag dangling above the Danish identified the man as Michael Hughes, director of public works for the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst. Like many attendees, Hughes was part of a new national emergency-response team without being fully aware of it. He had arrived in Denver knowing little about "adaptation," the anemic catchall for attempts to fortify our natural and built environments against the epochal temperature spike in progress.

“I hadn't even heard the term 'adaptation' a month ago,” he told me, taking a bite.

He didn’t know anything about the 20 federal agencies that just released adaptation planning studies, or the dozen coastal states negotiating the early stages of "managed retreat" and “coastal abandonment,” buzzwords for the work, underway from Puget Sound to Brighton Beach, of accommodating rising seas by contracting the contours of the U.S. map. Hughes didn’t know about any of this. He just knew that the Elmhurst sewage and water systems were buckling under the strains of the new normal, and that his job was figuring out what to do about it. "The floods keep coming, they keep getting worse, and every time there’s damage, everyone blames me," he said. "I’m here to learn more about what’s happening, and talk to people dealing with the same problems."

Read the rest here.