Survey: Climate Change a Concern but not a Priority to Oregon Coast Professionals

Posted on February 15, 2013 by kightp

Many public officials and community leaders on the Oregon coast believe their local climate is changing and the change will affect their communities. But, overall, addressing the changing climate is not among their most urgent concerns.

These are among the findings of a 2012 survey by Oregon Sea Grant at Oregon State University (OSU).

Sea Grant surveyed coastal professionals, elected officials and other local leaders and found that approximately 60 percent of the 140 survey respondents believe the local climate is changing. By contrast, 18 percent think it is not, and 22 percent don’t know.

While most believe that their professional efforts toward addressing climate change would benefit the community, both elected officials and other coastal professionals also believe that a combination of governments and other organizations should be the ones to initiate local responses to the likely effects of climate change.

Overall, actions appear to be lagging behind beliefs and concerns, according to Oregon Sea Grant’s communication and the leader of the survey, Joseph Cone. “As of last May, many coastal professionals – about 44 percent of the survey respondents — were not currently involved in planning to adapt to its effects,” said Cone.

Cone will discuss the survey findings on Wednesday, Feb. 20, in a brief talk to the OSU Climate Club “Conversations Across Disciplines” Lunch, in room 348 of Strand Agricultural Hall on the OSU campus. The lunches are open to the public; bring your own lunch. Coffee and cookies are provided.

The survey results placed climate change effects next to the bottom on a list of seven significant “potential stressors on your community during the next ten years.” Coastal professionals scored climate change effects considerably lower (46% of respondents moderately to extremely concerned) than the top-ranked stressors: a weak economy, and tsunami or earthquakes (approximately 70% moderately to extremely concerned for each).

The hurdles to planning most often noted by survey respondents were lack of agreement over the importance of climate change effects, and a lack of urgency regarding them. Where planning has begun, the survey showed it mainly in an early fact-finding stage.

Anticipating this, the survey asked coastal professionals to identify their specific climate change information needs; and they ranked a variety of environmental and social questions as “highly needed”:

Information about flooding or saltwater intrusion
Species and habitat vulnerability
Predictions of ecosystem impacts
Social and economic vulnerabilities
The cost of climate adaptation
How to communicate climate risks

The survey was administered online to 348 individuals, including some who had responded to a similar Oregon Sea Grant climate change study in 2008 which sampled Oregon coastal managers and practitioners. A report on the findings was prepared by OSU doctoral candidate Kirsten Winters

The Oregon survey was based in large part on a California coastal assessment conducted by California Sea Grant and its partners, and is part of a national Sea Grant study on coastal communities and climate change adaptation, led by Cone.

Learn more:

Read or download the 2012 survey report, Coastal Climate Change Survey Results for 2012
Read or download the 2009 report, “An Analysis of a Survey of Oregon Coast Decision Makers Regarding Climate Change“
Oregon Sea Grant’s ongoing efforts in climate change research and public engagement

Free-choice lab launches blog

Posted on October 28, 2011 by kightp

Welcome Oregon Sea Grant’s Free-Choice Learning Lab to the blogosphere!

The lab, based at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, employs cutting-edge research tools and technologies to study informal science learning. The knowledge will be put in practice in the form of new and improved exhibits in the HMSC Visitor Center, which is managed by Sea Grant.

The blog, launched last week, will to record the work of graduate research assistant Harrison Baker and other graduate students as they design, build, test and refine the new exhibits.

Under the direction of Dr. Shawn Rowe, Sea Grant’s Free-Choice Learning program specializes in conducting and applying research on the learning that happens when people choose to visit science museums, zoos, and aquariums in their leisure time, making specific and conscious choices about what they learn. The program was recently awarded a $2.6 million, five-year, National Science Foundation (NSF) grant – the largest ever received by Sea Grant – toward the creation of the new lab, which will employ the Visitor Center’s exhibits as tools for studying how people learn in a free-choice environment.

Oregon Sea Grant publishes book about sustaining salmon ecosystems

Posted on August 30, 2011 by newberrc

The following publication may be purchased from Oregon Sea Grant.

Pathways to Resilience: Sustaining Salmon Ecosystems in a Changing World.

“Resilience holds the key to our future. It is a deceptively simple idea, but its application has proven elusive.”
—Jane Lubchenco, administrator of NOAA

Fishery management programs designed to control Pacific salmon for optimum production have failed to prevent widespread fish population decline and have caused greater uncertainty for salmon, their ecosystems, and the people who depend upon them. Strengthening salmon resilience will require expanding habitat opportunities for salmon populations to express their maximum life-history variation. Such actions also may benefit human communities by expanding the opportunities for people to express diverse social and economic values.

The 11 essays in this book represent the most-forward thinking about resilience and Pacific salmon collected to date, and they point to new ways we may consider and interact with this iconic fish. It should be of interest not only to those active in fisheries but also to policymakers—and, by extension, to those interested in the resilience of other ecological and social systems.

By linking theory with practice, the authors of this volume have made a quantum leap forward in understanding how to manage critical populations. A must read for resilience scholars and practitioners.
—Lance Gunderson, Professor of Environmental Studies, Emory University

All too often, our attempts at conservation fail because we think too small. We fail to see connections, the broader context, and longer-term processes. The authors of this volume think big. Pathways to Resilience is just what we need for animals that migrate thousands of miles and cross ecosystem and political boundaries at will. This is worth reading and taking good notes.
—Jack E. Williams, Senior Scientist, Trout Unlimited

Oregon Sea Grant video cover wins Silver Award

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Rick Cooper

The cover for Oregon Sea Grant’s video Preparing for Coastal Climate Change: What Oregonians Are Asking has won a Silver Award in the “Best Cover—Print/Other” category of the 2011 Magnum Opus Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Custom Media. There were 560 entries in this year’s competition, and the Silver Award was the top award given in the “Best Cover” category.

According to Magnum Opus, professors from the Missouri School of Journalism, along with leading custom-publishing professionals, judge the awards based on “informational and entertainment value, quality of writing and display copy, creative use of imagery and typography, and consistency of color palette and style.”

David Murray, director of the awards competition and editor-in-chief of ContentWise, said, “Your entry shone bright among an incredibly competitive field and bested the work submitted by your peers in the practice of marketing communications from around the globe. You should be proud.”

The jacket and label for Preparing for Coastal Climate Change were designed by Patricia Andersson of Oregon Sea Grant. The video was produced by Joe Cone, assistant director of Oregon Sea Grant; edited by Stevon Roberts; and supported in part by a grant from the NOAA Climate Program Office.

Copies of the video are available for $3 each plus shipping and handling from Oregon Sea Grant, 541-737-4849; or through Oregon Sea Grant’s e-commerce site at marketplace.oregonstate.edu. You may also view excerpts of the video on Sea Grant’s website.

New publication explores structured decision making

Posted on May 4, 2011 by kightp

A new publication from Oregon Sea Grant looks at structured ways in which groups of people can come together to understand a problem and overcome common human errors in judgment as they evaluate potential solutions.

Structured Decision Making: Using decision research to improve stakeholder participation and results is the latest title in Oregon Sea Grant’s series on the research and practice of public science communication.

Written by Robyn S. Wilson, assistant professor of Risk and Decision Science, at The Ohio State University School of Environment and Natural Resources, and Joseph L. Arvai, Svare Chair in Applied Decision Research at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business and Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment, and Economy, the 12-page publication looks at recent research on group decision-making, and offers guidelines for developing a process that’s likely to produce results.

“Stakeholders” – those who have an interest in a particular project or problem – are often invited to take part in public hearings, workshops and meetings; many times, the authors note, the results are less than satisfying for everyone involved. Too often, such meetings “give the impression that opportunities for input are simply a diversion to draw attention away from where the “real” decisions are being made.”

Better results can be achieved, the authors suggest, by using structured, research-proven processes in which participants have an opportunity to “understand the problem, express and clarify their issue-specific values and concerns, and carefully weigh the pros and cons of different actions or options.”

The new publication provides an overview of structured decision making (SDM), an outline of how it can work, and discussion of pitfalls that can get in the way of success. References to specific SDM tools are included.

Other titles in the Sea Grant series look at topics including:

Insights from behavioral research for those who communicate with the public
Common assumptions about public communication
Public outreach and behavior change
Understanding specific stakeholder communities

All five publications are available as free downloads, in printable .pdf and text-only versions, from the Oregon Sea Grant Web site.