Climate Change

How Did Everything Get So Political?

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 07:00:00 +0000

How Did Everything Get So Political? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/06/2023 - 00:00

Tori Peglar

Why do some issues become politicized? CU experts explain why and how voting rights, climate change and abortion became rallying cries for political parties.

Amid hills lined with grape vineyards and peach orchards, Doug Spencer, a ��ƷSM��ӰƬ associate law professor, found himself sitting in a room in Palisade, Colorado, meeting with locals about how to address the growing polarization in politics. The energy changed in the room when people realized that shifting conversations to localized issues like water rights rather than culture war issues could create more common ground.

But it’s not as simple as it sounds.

“Every issue can be branded by a political group like a corporation brands their product,” Spencer said.

It’s easy to see how with a hefty marketing budget and consistent messaging, any issue can become packaged with a red or blue ribbon to become a political product. But how exactly does something seemingly apolitical become a wedge that pits political parties against each other?

In a nutshell, the answer lies largely in three factors: if an issue helps reinforce a political party’s identity; what decisions the Supreme Court makes; and how much private money, particularly in the form of lobbying, enters the picture.

Issues As Rallying Cry for Voters

Sometimes, the road from a general-interest issue to political rallying cry is relatively straightforward. The issue just happens to be in the right place at the right time for a political party to swoop down, pick it up and run with it.

Climate change was merely an environmental issue in the 1970s and 1980s when oil and gas executives acknowledged carbon dioxide’s effects on Earth’s climate. And as late as 1989, Democrats, Independents and Republicans were equally “worried” about climate change, according to a poll cited by environmental studies assistant professor Matt Burgess.

So, why did climate change become politicized? Scholars, pundits and politicians often point to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, when 150 nations pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. signed it, but the Republican-controlled Senate refused to ratify it, arguing it would harm the economy. Fiscally conservative Republicans felt the protocol put too much of the financial burden on developed countries like the United States without asking developing countries to do the same, and arguably, they may have been right. And as Burgess points out, signing it seemed to go against Republican rallying cries around corporate deregulation and free-market capitalism.

Like the Republicans in Congress, conservative Libertarian Americans questioned why corporations and the public should pay a high price to slow climate change, especially since it was impacting so few Americans. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was more at stake economically to move from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Today, renewable energy is often the cheapest form of power. But it wasn’t in the 1980s and 1990s.

“Twenty years ago, the downsides of climate change were seen as far off and the economic pain was seen as real and imminent,” said Burgess. “Now both of these things have changed.”

Conversely, Democrats — spearheaded by Vice President Al Gore — saw climate change as a moral issue that needed regulation, regardless of its cost or that its impacts weren’t immediately felt. Flashforward to 2019 when that moral take on climate change took center stage in the Green New Deal in which progressive Democrats sought to bring greenhouse gasses to net-zero and address economic inequality and racial injustice.

Like climate change, abortion also got swept up into partisan politics.

When Roe v. Wade passed in 1973, it gave women the right to an abortion — but it wasn’t immediately a partisan issue. In fact, the Supreme Court was majority Republican-nominated, and five of the six Republican appointees voted to legalize abortion.

“In Roe v. Wade, the court was divided more on legal types of things,” said ��ƷSM��ӰƬ law professor Jennifer Hendricks. “It wasn’t until after Roe v. Wade that there was a synergy in the Republican party with their vision of politicizing abortion as an issue.”

That synergy took center stage at the 1980 Republican Convention in Detroit, as Republicans campaigned on “preserving traditional family values” and called for stronger families and a constitutional amendment to protect the lives of unborn children. Some scholars assert that the religious right’s rising power, plus the mass exodus of conservative Southerners from the Democratic party, moved abortion to the center of the Republican family values platform.

By 1992, the Republican Convention platform called for the “appointment of judges who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.” It has since guided a decadeslong openly public Republican strategy of appointing pro-life judges at all levels.

Yet there’s another force contributing to turning certain issues partisan — the Supreme Court.

Supremely Transformational

Yet there’s another force contributing to turning certain issues partisan — the Supreme Court.

Take 2013, for example, which was packed with milestones. Apple released the iPhone 5s with touch ID, Lance Armstrong admitted on Oprah to doping during his Tour de France wins, and the Boston Marathon bombing shook the country. That same year, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision in the Voting Rights Act that previously required states with a history of racial voter discrimination like Mississippi and Texas to get approval from the federal government before making any changes to voting procedures. Both associate law professor Douglas Spencer and women and gender studies associate professor Celeste Montoya point to this ruling, known as Shelby County v. Holder, as a major turning point for partisan battles related to voter rights.

“Part of the justification from Justice Roberts was we don’t need this anymore because we’ve moved beyond this,” Montoya said. “The very next day states were able to establish laws that restricted voting rights. The shift from voting rights to voting privilege is pretty significant and has opened the door to the notion there are right voters and wrong voters.”

Within 24 hours, Republican-dominated Texas, Mississippi and Alabama implemented strict photo ID laws. By 2016, the ACLU was challenging 15 states that passed voting restrictions before the 2016 presidential election. The ACLU notes that red states tend to pass restrictive voting laws while blue states tend to pass expansive voting laws.

“Democrats say everyone should vote, and Republicans say that Democrats are only saying that because it will help them,” Spencer said. “It starts to move the conversation away from the root of democracy and democratic ideals.”

Dark Money

In the years since, it’s spurred a frenzy of private spending to influence election outcomes.

The rise of special-interest groups — that fund politicians and research — is also steering issues toward the partisan divide. In 2010, the Supreme Court, through its Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, allowed corporations and individuals to give anonymous, unlimited donations to political campaigns. This decision reversed 100 years of federal restrictions on corporate, nonprofit and labor union funding.

In the years since, it’s spurred a frenzy of private spending to influence election outcomes. In 2010, oil and gas companies donated approximately $35 million to U.S. congressional candidates. By 2018, this number ballooned to more than $84 million, according to a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Private money also funds thought leaders. In the case of climate change, billionaire industrialists and brothers Charles and David Koch gave more than $145 million to climate-change-denying think tanks and advocacy groups between 1997 and 2018.

“There’s the special-interests angle, where the fossil fuel industry supported misinformation about and denial of climate change,” Burgess said, noting it’s well-documented in books like Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.

At present, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Vermont are suing five large oil and gas companies for their alleged role in delaying climate policy and increasing the climate impacts, risks and costs incurred by state governments.

Glimmers of Hope

The good news? Not all issues stay political. Spencer sees the rise in ranked-choice voting as a way to reduce acrimony in politics. With ranked-choice voting, you rank candidates in order of your preference. If someone receives 50% plus one of the votes, they win the election. If no one has the majority vote, the person with the fewest votes is eliminated, and the results are retabulated. This repeats until someone wins a majority.

Ranked-choice voting has been used in Maine and Alaska for statewide elections, and in cities like Fort Collins, Colorado, and Evanston, Illinois. U.S. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski won her 2022 election in Alaska via ranked choice voting, as did Alaska House Democrat Mary Peltola.

“It’s been shown to be more fair in terms of racial and partisan representation, and you don’t need districts to have ranked-choice voting,” Spencer said. “Big changes like this will be necessary to reset our politics.”

And curiously, Republicans and Democrats are finding common ground on climate change, at least at the state level. Last year, Burgess and researcher Renae Marshall looked at nearly 1,000 decarbonization bills that passed and failed at the state level between 2015 and 2020. Republican-controlled governments passed almost one-third of decarbonization bills.

“The boom of renewables is creating economic opportunity,” Burgess said. “If you look at the 10 congressional districts with the most planned and operational renewable energy capacity, nine of them are represented by Republicans in Congress.”

Why the Republican support? Market forces, combined with government research and development subsidies, have made renewable energy often cheaper than fossil fuels, Burgess said. Plus, more Americans are experiencing the effects of climate change firsthand, including devastating floods, intense heat waves and year-round wildfires.

So, why didn’t any Republicans vote for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the first comprehensive climate legislation to pass in U.S. history, committing $360 billion to fight climate change? Burgess noted that Republicans supported similar policy elements at the state level. But it also included health care and tax provisions, which proved to be thorns in Republicans’ sides.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if one of Biden’s legacies is that he brought the Democrats to the center and passed climate change policy Republicans won’t want to get rid of and that they passed in their state legislatures,” Burgess said.

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Illustrations by Ward Sutton

CU experts explain why and how voting rights, climate change and abortion became rallying calls for political parties.

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How Natural Disasters Impact Vulnerable Populations

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 06:00:00 +0000

How Natural Disasters Impact Vulnerable Populations Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/11/2022 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

When Lori Peek (PhDSoc’05) started graduate school in the Department of Sociology in 1999, natural disasters were still largely framed as “acts of God” — isolated events only occasionally impacting an unlucky few, with everyone equally vulnerable to their wrath.

Today, with climate change fueling bigger and more frequent wildfires, hurricanes and floods, and many people experiencing multiple disasters in their lifetime, a different picture is emerging.

“There is growing recognition that these are not ‘great equalizers,’” said Peek, director of the CU Natural Hazards Center. “People at the margins suffer first and worst.”

For two decades, Peek has applied a social science lens to the study of natural disasters, touching down on site within days of hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, tornados in the Midwest, earthquakes in Alaska and wildfires in the West to explore not why buildings collapse and how to make them stronger, but rather who lived in those buildings and what happened to them.

Peek’s research has elucidated how social fault lines around race, gender, age, disability and income often determine who is hit hardest or recovers fastest.

“Hurricane Katrina was a huge marker moment,” said Peek, who traveled to New Orleans immediately after the 2005 hurricane, as terrified residents waited on rooftops for help to arrive. “You had people dying in the streets of a major American city. There was no denying how much your station in life can literally determine if you live or not.”

Peek notes that vulnerable populations are often at a disadvantage before the disaster hits: They might not have the resources, like cellphones and Wi-Fi, to stay informed — or the time, social networks or transportation to leave when necessary.

Individuals over 65, particularly those with a disability, are often most likely to die. And in the aftermath of disasters, people living on the margins often end up homeless.

“In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, we see communities come together in the most extraordinary ways.”

“Disasters often become a mechanism for pushing the poor out of a community,” she said, referencing mobile home parks in Boulder County that were destroyed and never replaced after the 2013 flood.Children are also prone to mental health problems long after the event, she said, particularly if their schools are closed and communities dispersed for a long time.

In contrast, those able to get back to school, connect with friends and find support from their community can not only survive but thrive, she has found.

“In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, we see communities come together in the most extraordinary ways.”

She hopes that just as the findings of her engineering colleagues may someday inform new, stronger structures, her work can inspire social policies to make vulnerable populations more resilient both before and after disaster strikes.

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Climate Change Fueling Violence, Hunger for East African Pastoralists

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Climate Change Fueling Violence, Hunger for East African Pastoralists Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/11/2022 - 00:00

Dan Strain

Kenya and Tanzania are home to diverse groups of nomadic herders, or pastoralists — peoples like the Maasai, Turkana and Samburu who depend on cattle for their survival and cross wide expanses of grasslands to keep their cows fed.

They also engage in occasional cattle raiding. Men arm themselves with AK-47s, which you can buy for around $8 in parts of East Africa, and sneak into their rivals’ territory in the dead of night to steal cows. Sometimes, the consequences are deadly.

��ƷSM��ӰƬ researchers John O’Loughlin and Terrence McCabe had long wondered: In arid regions of the world like these wide pasturelands, could climate change make violence worse?

"The future of peoples like the Maasai or Turkana may depend on tackling all of these challenges and more together."

“When people live on the margins already, it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge to take desperate measures,” said O’Loughlin, professor of geography.

To get to the bottom of that question, O’Loughlin and McCabe, professor of anthropology, teamed up over the last decade to conduct several surveys of communities across Kenya. They discovered that people who fled their homes to escape drought, including some pastoralists, were over three times more likely to be victims of violence than Kenyans who remained in place.

But the situation is complicated: In many pastoralist communities, traditional elders often meet with leaders from nearby communities, even sworn enemies, to hash out their differences. Those kinds of leaders seem to significantly reduce the risk of disagreements devolving into bloodshed, even in the midst of severe droughts.

O’Loughlin and McCabe worry, however, that East Africa’s pastoralist peoples may be losing their ability to adapt to a changing environment. The team surveyed more than 500 people from Isiolo County near the center of Kenya four times from early 2020 to early 2022. Their preliminary results suggest that life in this region is getting worse as people contend with the COVID-19 pandemic, a historic locust invasion and repeated droughts.

"The future of peoples like the Maasai or Turkana may depend on tackling all of these challenges and more together," McCabe said.

“What I’m worried about is that people who have been resilient to these kinds of environmental changes for centuries will lose their resilience,” he said.

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Class Action: Fighting Climate Change Through Girls’ Education

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Class Action: Fighting Climate Change Through Girls’ Education Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/11/2022 - 00:00

Helen Olsson

When Anna Iwanciw (IntlAf’22) was in high school, her class watched the documentary Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, prompting her to become a vegetarian and reduce her personal carbon footprint.

Iwanciw feels her education directly impacted her views on climate change. And now she wants all women to have access to the same things she’s learned.

“I’m a firm believer that everything is interconnected,” Iwanciw said.

She points to a 2021 report by the Malala Fund, a nonprofit that advocates for girls’ education, which points out the double-edged sword of gender inequity in education. By 2025, climate change is on track to be a contributing factor in preventing some 12.5 million girls yearly from completing their education, according to the report.

“Whether it’s flooding or escaping wildfires, these girls suddenly become refugees of the climate crisis,” Iwanciw said.

On the flip side, education has the potential to mitigate the climate crisis by giving young people the tools to challenge its root causes, the resilience to handle disasters and the knowledge to find solutions.

“There’s a stigma in some countries that women shouldn’t be educated,” said Iwanciw. “And that’s really to the detriment of our society.”

While at CU, Iwanciw has become an ardent advocate for girls’ education through a social media internship and volunteer work with Girls Education International, a nonprofit dedicated to providing girls in remote locations with education. She also produces Girls Ed podcasts, interviewing people like women’s rights activist Anbreen Ajaib, executive director of Project Bedari, a Girls Ed partner in Pakistan. The agency also works with Project Wezesha in Tanzania, which focuses on issues like providing safe transportation to school.

Iwanciw has already seen the impact of the nonprofit’s work — and the overlap between education and climate change. Saraphina Matombi Matias, a student from Kagongo, Tanzania, who was supported by Girls Ed and Project Wezesha, is now teaching people in her village about the environment and encouraging them to plant trees and manage waste properly — all while working toward a bachelor’s degree in education at the University of Dodoma.

“Basically, if we educate women, we could potentially save the world,” Iwanciw said.

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After a Wildfire, What Happens to Water?

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 06:00:00 +0000

After a Wildfire, What Happens to Water? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/11/2022 - 00:00

Kelsey Simpkins

When Western wildfires break out, water may first come to mind as a critical resource for helping extinguish it. But what about after the flames finish?

A 2022 CU study on the growing impact of wildfire on the Western U.S. water supply found that large forest fires can significantly increase the amount of water in surrounding streams and rivers up to six years after a fire, impacting regional water supplies and increasing risks for floods and landslides. The results suggest that water and natural hazard management will need to be more prepared for wildfire impacts. U.S. wildfires — which have quadrupled in size and tripled in frequency since 2000 — are only projected to escalate.

“It is something organizations need to educate fire-prone communities about, so we can be prepared for short- and long-term impacts.”

“We’re likely going to see a lot more fires,” said Ben Livneh, co-author of the study and assistant professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering. “Like we saw with [Boulder County’s] NCAR and Marshall fires, this is going to be a clear and present danger.”

Historically, forest-based streams and rivers increased in predictable amounts in response to rain or snowfall. However, from 1970 to 2021, those amounts declined due to warming and evaporation.

Wildfire adds another layer to the equation.

“When you bring so much fire into the mix, it fundamentally alters that relationship,” said Livneh, who also serves as director of the Western Water Assessment and is a fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES).

The study examined 35 years of data from 179 forest basins in the Western U.S. between 1984 and 2019, including 72 sites where at least one large wildfire occurred. In areas where 20% or more of the forest burned, area streamflow was 30% greater than expected, for an average of six years post-fire.

It’s the first paper to show this increase persists in all four seasons after a fire, in all manner of vegetation, topography and elevation.

This water surplus could in part be a good thing, given the overall decline in the past 40 years. But it also comes with elevated landslide risks and a need for Western communities to invest in a greater diversity of water sources, as ash-laden water is low quality and expensive to treat, according to Livneh.

Due to the uncertainty of where or when future forests will burn, wildfire is not currently factored into assessments of the effects of climate change on Western U.S. streamflow.

“It is something organizations need to educate fire-prone communities about, so we can be prepared for short- and long-term impacts,” said Livneh.

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Alum Aims to Improve Nepal’s Air Quality

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Alum Aims to Improve Nepal’s Air Quality Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/11/2022 - 00:00

Kiara Gelbman

Nepal has some of the worst air quality in the world. The Health Effects Institute estimates more than 42,000 deaths were attributed to air pollution in the country in 2019 alone.

Prateek Shrestha (MMechEngr’15; PhD’18), who is from Kathmandu, Nepal, wants to motivate the youth in his home country to address the problem through a small quadcopter drone he and his team created that will take aerial measurements of air pollution in Nepal. He hopes the measurements can spread awareness to residents about the poor air quality and inspire similar projects throughout the country.

“The mountains that I used to see from the north side of my house while growing up were invisible for most of my college days,” he said.

“Air pollution is a global problem that sees no international boundaries.”

Over the years, they disappeared behind fugitive dust and diesel emissions.

Shrestha, who now lives in Henderson, Colorado, started his drone project in 2019 to exemplify what “people can do at a personal level if they are truly motivated,” he said.

After building a team of researchers — including a pico-satellite startup in Nepal called Orion Space — and academics to further expand the initiative, Prateek now works on the project at the advisory level. Currently, they are working on a system that can deliver data from low-cost air sensors mounted on the drone in real time to a ground station based in Kathmandu.

“Countries like Nepal, which are very low income, feel the brunt of climate change disproportionately,” said Shrestha. “What we need is a collective level of preparedness for the harsh conditions that climate change can bring, and increasing our awareness to these issues is the first and most important step.”

Outside of his drone project, Shrestha remains committed to the environment in his work. As a research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Lab, he examines energy performance of residential buildings, such as how residential buildings built with 3D-printed concrete could impact energy performance, and how to ventilate buildings with fresh air at minimal energy and cost.

He credits much of his current work to ��ƷSM��ӰƬ, especially his time working with air-quality expert and engineering professor Shelly Miller on indoor-air-quality research, and researchers from engineering professor Mike Hannigan’s lab.

“Air pollution is a global problem that sees no international boundaries,” Shrestha said.

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The Colorado-Brazil Program on Sustainable Development Education

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 06:00:00 +0000

The Colorado-Brazil Program on Sustainable Development Education Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/11/2022 - 00:00

Grace Dearnley

The tropical forests of Brazil are legendary for their breadth and beauty. But beneath the canopy, concerns about the forests’ role in carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation overlap with the rights of those who live in and off of the forests — rights to develop the area, lift oneself out of poverty, make a living or preserve one’s culture.

In May 2022, 10 graduate students in CU’s Masters in the Environment (MENV) program journeyed into the Amazon and Atlantic forests with the Colorado-Brazil Program for Sustainable Development Education to consider those intersections.

They studied how stakeholders in these areas work for sustainable development while navigating the tensions between land-use and conservation; preservation of traditional, remote communities and access to more urban resources; and forest-dependent livelihoods and sustainable supply chains.

The three-week program trained the cohort of professional master’s students to work at the science-policy interface, teaching them skills to help communities worldwide mitigate climate change, conserve biodiversity and promote sustainable livelihood objectives while keeping human interest at the heart of problem-solving.

“It’s a wake-up call to think about bottom-up solutions that really work for the people in the regions we talk about; places with millions of people who are dealing with poverty versus conservation. It helps students factor that into the work they go on to do,” said Colleen Scanlon Lyons, program leader and CU associate research professor.

While the MENV program provides real-world experience, perhaps most heartening — and unique to the program — are the relationships it fosters. Designed to initiate lasting international collaboration, the program joins CU students with master’s students from both Brazil’s University of Amazonas and its Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, forging bonds and insights students will carry far into their professional careers.

Said David Meens, director of CU’s Office of Outreach and Engagement: “There is no substitute for being in that boundary-spanning context where you are developing partners, developing programming together and considering the interests of folks involved who have very different positions and very different economic and cultural situations.”

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Turning Stories into Action

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Turning Stories into Action Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/11/2022 - 00:00

Emily Wirtz

Climate justice is all about dignity.

That’s according to Phaedra Pezzullo, an associate professor of communication at ��ƷSM��ӰƬ.

“Climate change is disproportionately impacting those who have created the least global greenhouse gases, and too often they are left out of conversations about what to do about it,” she said. “To address climate chaos, we have to uphold, improve and practice a more inclusive understanding of dignity.”

This spring, Pezzullo led the foundational graduate course for the Certificate in Environmental Justice, in which students uplifted voices from Colorado communities disproportionately impacted by climate change.

"It's a people problem... Humans are the major drivers of climate chaos, and we have to transform our own species to solve it."

“Being able to see themselves in stories is empowering and allows [communities] to act,” said Anthony Albidrez (MJour’23), who took the class while working toward his graduate certificate in environmental justice.

The course grew out of a project led by the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment to prioritize areas for environmental action. The state worked to quantify air particulates and water pollution while CU students created corresponding narratives — expected as of press time to launch in June 2022 — featuring impacted communities.

“Scientific language can be hard to dive into,” said Albidrez. “When people understand more, they can take the information they’ve learned, act on it, shift policy changes and hold the government accountable.”

Funded by grants from Mission Zero, Payden Teaching Excellence, the College of Media Communication and Information Dean’s Fund and the Department of Environmental Studies Colloquium Series, the course gave students a chance to help Colorado policy makers understand the local impacts of climate change — and engage community members for solutions.

“Even if a place is identified as one of the most polluted, it’s also a beloved place to people who live and work there,” said Pezzullo.

The course aligns with the work of the Center for Creative Climate Communication and Behavior Change (C3BC), which Pezzullo co-directs. In partnership with other campus groups like the Just Transition Collaborative and RISE: Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity, the C3BC’s multidisciplinary faculty and students connect with communities whose voices have been excluded from conversations about climate policy.

“To fix climate chaos, we have to engage people,” said Pezzullo. “It’s a people problem — not a wolf problem or a whale problem. Humans are the major drivers of climate chaos, and we have to transform our own species to solve it.”

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Justice for Earth, Justice for Humans

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Justice for Earth, Justice for Humans Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/11/2022 - 00:00

Research shows human activity is gradually increasing Earth’s temperature and causing more frequent natural disasters. These disasters have enormous impacts on human life — from more frequent droughts and wildfires to polluted air and deforestation that threatens traditional and Indigenous ways of life. These seven stories examine the ways CU students, faculty and alumni are exploring the impacts of climate change on human life and human rights.

Turning Stories into Action

The Colorado-Brazil Program on Sustainable Development Education

Alum Aims to Improve Nepal’s Air Quality

After a Wildfire, What Happens to Water?

Class Action: Fighting Climate Change Through Girls’ Education

Climate Change Fueling Violence, Hunger for East African Pastoralists

How Natural Disasters Impact Vulnerable Populations

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Illustrations by Sally Deng; Photos Phaedra Pezzullo; iStock/dutourdumonde; iStock/TriciaDaniel; iStock/brittak

Human activity is gradually increasing Earth’s temperature and causing more frequent natural disasters. These stories examine the ways CU is researching the impacts of climate change on human life and human rights.

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CU Research Finds Climate Change Affects Small Mammals

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 06:00:00 +0000

CU Research Finds Climate Change Affects Small Mammals Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/02/2021 - 00:00

Emily Heninger

Small mountain mammals like marmots and ground squirrels are experiencing the effects of rapid climate change.

In a 13-year study published earlier this year, CU ecologist and associate professor Christy McCain found that small mammals in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains are shifting their ranges to higher elevations in response to warming temperatures.

“For mammals and any living organism... a main determinant of where they live and flourish is climate,” said McCain, who is also curator of vertebrates at the CU Museum of Natural History. “They are very much evolved to live in a particular set of climates that allow them to live and reproduce successfully.”

During the past several decades, however, temperatures have been warming faster than many species can adapt. To stay within their niche climate, animals must follow the cooler temperatures up the mountain — shrinking the available area of their range.

McCain and her team studied 47 mammal species from the Front Range and San Juan Rockies, including the golden-mantled ground squirrel, pygmy shrew, pine squirrel and Western jumping mouse.

By comparing field data with museum records, they found these species have moved uphill an average of 430 feet since the 1980s. Montane mammals — those already living at higher elevations, like the yellow-bellied marmot — experienced the most dramatic changes, moving their ranges up an average of 1,135 feet.

“Some of [these species] might not be charismatic to everybody, like the tiniest shrew... but they’re indications of the wider biodiversity that’s changing in Colorado’s mountains,” said McCain. “If we don’t curb this change, our grandchildren might not see some of these species in the future.”

Despite the daunting challenges of a changing climate, McCain stays positive by focusing on what she can contribute through her research.

“I see it both as a person... and as a scientist,” she said. “There’s a lot that we can study. We can delve deeper into each species’ biology — and understand what might help them.”

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Photo from McCain Lab

Small mountain mammals like marmots and ground squirrels are experiencing the effects of rapid climate change.

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Climate Change

How Did Everything Get So Political?

Issues As Rallying Cry for Voters

Supremely Transformational

Dark Money

Glimmers of Hope

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How Natural Disasters Impact Vulnerable Populations

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Climate Change Fueling Violence, Hunger for East African Pastoralists

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Class Action: Fighting Climate Change Through Girls’ Education

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The Colorado-Brazil Program on Sustainable Development Education

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Turning Stories into Action

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Class Action: Fighting Climate Change Through Girls’ Education

Climate Change Fueling Violence, Hunger for East African Pastoralists

How Natural Disasters Impact Vulnerable Populations

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CU Research Finds Climate Change Affects Small Mammals

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