Early to Rise

I don’t like talking about the weather. I have plenty of meteorologist friends that can ably do that on my behalf. In fact, our book about climate change isn’t as much about the climate as it is about its impacts and what can and should be done to prepare and respond. (If you’re looking for a great discussion on the weather aspect of climate change, Heidi Cullen’s book is a very accessible, and thought-provoking, text on where we could be headed.)

But the weather is the easiest frame of reference when it comes to climate change—it’s right there in front of us, relatable, and people have a pretty good feel for what it means—and certainly what lessons can be learned from our current environment. And when I see something in June that’s being monitored as a possible tropical depression, I think about what kind of mindset a functional manager needs to adopt in order to do their job.

“And they shall call her ‘Debby.’ Image taken the morning of June 22, 2012, by Accuweather

See, hurricane season in the Atlantic technically runs from June 1 through November 30, so anything is possible during that timeframe when it comes to tropical storms. But anyone who has ever booked a Caribbean cruise knows that your cheapest rates are in August, primarily because that’s when severe storms and hurricanes are most likely to rain on your (tropical) parade. Traditionally, hurricane season isn’t in full swing until the late summer.

But NOAA has already looked at things from a historical perspective, and what they found was that Hurricane Season 2012 jumped the gun, noting that

The Atlantic season has already gotten off to a quick start...with tropical storms Alberto and Beryl forming during the month of May.  This is the first time since 1908 that two tropical cyclones developed before 1 June. 

Consider the other severe weather events 2012 has already delivered to the United States. March was the setting for a rash of powerful storm systems, something that research meteorologist Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storms Laboratory noted was a result of optimal tornado conditions arriving earlier than in previous years.

March 2, 2012, tornado in Henryville, In., part of a system that killed 7 people.

The question becomes this: how can functional managers develop strategic plans when some things (like severe weather) arrive earlier, while others stay later (like longer frost-free periods and longer periods of pest proliferation)? Your calendar is completely out of whack. The impacts to your operations are multiplying and morphing right before your eyes. And that becomes a question of risk assessment and preparedness.

In the book, we pose the question of risk on each of the seven functional chapters. One thing we found over the course of this discussion is that organizations must assess associated risk that come with discrete events, along with vulnerabilities to their assets and processes. These factors will vary from place to place, but risk assessment process remains the same: understanding the event and its impact, looking at potential damage to what you do, and then determine its overall likelihood. This isn’t a novel way of looking at things, but rather a good method to apply to the climate change issue, and the unique set of problems it could bring with it.

Is this a cultural shift? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s the same jarring consideration as how a flu pandemic might force people to forgo shaking hands. But if we’re to really adapt to a changing climate, that means shifting the way we think—or at least broadening the things we’re considering in order to help safeguard our way of life.

Climate Change on the Mind

In 1985, David Lee Roth began extracting himself from Van Halen’s shadow by releasing his EP Crazy from the Heat, with cover art of Roth waste deep in the waters off of the Seychelles Islands.

Twenty-seven years later, one has to wonder if Mr. Roth, even then, had climate change on the mind.

Seychelles, of course, is at significant risk to the impacts of a changing climate. Rising temperatures present a number of issues that must be adapted to, certainly from a public health perspective. Less obvious among them, though, is mental health.

The June 20 official start of summer arrived with furnace-like temperatures all along the east coast. This, after several weeks of awful wildfires in the western United States, which have forced evacuations from California to Colorado. And as firefighters valiantly work to stop thousands of acres of wildfires, and cities activate their health systems designed for severe heat events, there’s been no break from a stressful sequence of events—which certainly falls under the area of mental health—and the need to consider how public would deal with these events in extended and rapid succession.

The High Park fire west of Fort Collins, Colo. is being called one of the worst fires in Colorado history. Photo courtesy of PBS.org.

You can call it the mental aftermath.  A 2011 study by Australian researchers found that several years of continued catastrophic weather events on that continent have resulted in Cold War levels of anxiety and insecurity in children.

This extreme anxiety and stress are logical responses to extreme weather events—this on top of well-documented stressors like lack of access to food and water. A recent report by the National Wildlife Federation outlines how the uncertainty caused by unpredictable weather causes people to become depressed, even suicidal. The report, developed from conclusions of a high-level panel of psychiatrists, psychologists, and public-health and climate experts stated two hundred million Americans will be subject to stress because of climate change. 

Think about Hurricane Katrina and the doubling of mental health issues that occurred post-Hurricane Katrina.  A 2005 study of 283 children displaced by Hurricane Katrina revealed that they were nearly five times more likely than a pre-Katrina national comparison sample to have "serious emotional disturbance." This mental health category is similar to PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—and accounts for children's distress and social, behavioral and functional impairment.

Hurricane Katrina’s wake left four states with disaster areas, including all of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Public managers have an opportunity to view each of these events as case studies as they move forward in developing a response strategy. There is critical information to be gleaned with regards to how their communities respond to those problems unique to their area.

Stakeholders in the public and private sectors will need to ensure adequate community health services with enough capacity to handle a wide array of mental health challenges, including displacement, death, depression and anxiety.

One community’s heat wave is another community’s wildfire, but the common element is that people will be confronted with stressful situations—and that’s a pretty good baseline to start with.

Making Supply Chain Music for a Better Climate

I have played guitar—albeit not very well—since my teenage years. Until I started studying supply chains and sustainability, I didn’t think much about the environmental implications of making a guitar. As it turns out, guitars and other musical instruments are often made from old growth woods, like mahogany, spruce, and ebony, prized for their acoustic qualities, and harvesting this wood can sometimes do more harm than good. Some guitar makers are finding ways to use the traditional old growth woods by selecting sustainable sources.

A flaxwood guitar, made by breaking down non-endangered European spruce and binding it with a special polymer.

Old growth wood deforestation is a central concern in discussions of climate change (for more on forestry issues, check out our chapter on land use in Climate Change: What You Can Do Now). In 2009, talks at the Copenhagen Summit centered on that very issue, with participants struggling to balance economics, biodiversity, primary forest loss.

“Some environmental groups are pressing for conservation of old-growth forests—the most carbon-dense, and biologically-rich state of forests—to be the centerpiece of [reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation], while industry and other actors are pushing for "sustainable forest management" or logging using reduced-impact techniques to be the primary focus of [reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation].”

I have long believed that many of the issues that we now see with sustainability and risk in the supply chain are due to business spending the past two decades outsourcing processes and globalizing operations. The result is more complex supply chains with less visibility into sources of material. As Gibson Guitar Corporation found out, that lack of transparency can lead to trouble if you don’t get the wood you think you are buying or suppliers mislabel the raw materials. Although Gibson was never charged with any wrongdoing, federal agents disrupted manufacturing operations on the suspicion that Gibson had received illegally harvested and exported wood.


Getting more visibility over the supply chain—understanding who is doing what and how it can be verified—is a first step to making the supply chain more sustainable. That is why a recent story about Taylor Guitars buying an ebony mill in Cameroon stood out to me as a good sustainability and risk management practice. By purchasing the mill, Taylor hopes to gain more control over the sourcing and processing of ebony to ensure the wood is sources sustainably.

Taylor Guitar’s Cameroon-based ebony mill

Given the recent trend of outsourcing, Taylor’s vertical integration may seem like a questionable decision. But purchasing a critical material supplier can pay off in the long run. First, Taylor is ensuring a source of supply for a critical and constrained raw material, which will reduce uncertainty in the future. Second, with a customer base that is fairly sustainability savvy, there is a great risk if unsustainably or illegally harvested wood found its way into a guitar. By taking control of the supply chain, Taylor protects themselves from this risk.

The interesting aspect of this story is the role of customer education in sustainability. Despite its name, ebony is not always a pure black color, but there is a perception that ebony must have that dark color. Taylor realizes that educating customers about sustainable wood choices will lead to more sustainable harvesting, less constraints in the supply of ebony, and no loss in guitar quality. As company founder Bob Taylor notes, “We need to use the ebony that the forest gives us.”

I may not be the next Guitar Hero, but the supply chain needed to make a quality guitar offers lessons for all of us. Gaining visibility and control over your supply chain can help take sustainability actions and reduce risk. Educating customers about the sustainability and performance of the materials in the product can support implementation of sustainability practices without losing the market. Who knew you could learn so much from a guitar?

“Floating to Victory on a Wave of Oil”: Shifting the Military’s “Operational Energy Force Structure”

Over the past holiday weekend, I thought much about my experiences as a teenager, during which I participated in honoring our fallen by placing flags at their graves for Memorial Day. I remember speaking with my grandfathers, both Army Air Corps veterans, about their experiences during WWII and the challenges that they faced during those perilous times. Remembering Earl Curzon’s famous quote that the Allies in WWI “floated to victory on a wave of oil,” only reinforced for me the truth of the famous saying that “those failing to learn from the mistakes of the past are bound to repeat them.”

In terms of energy security, I’d assert that we not only have the potential to repeat our mistakes, but also could double down on the scope of their national security and economic impacts, not if, but when energy supply chains are disrupted. Now, these stakes can be even higher with greater energy vulnerability, natural resource constraints, and climate related threat multipliers.

In my last post, I mentioned concept of diversification and its importance in our operational fuels moving forward. Our warfighters have relied on petroleum-based jet fuels since the dawn of the jet age and on marine diesel and fuel oils for even longer. These are the energy commodities around which the vast majority of our military capabilities have been designed for. In a way, our weapons platform mix or force structure is an apt analog to our operational fuel paradigm. A weapons platform’s purpose is effectively to deliver steel on target. Likewise, operational fuels purpose is to just deliver BTUs to our force multiplier technologies, whether jet turbines, compression ignition engines or field generators.  

In a way, our workhorse—conventional petroleum fuels—are a good analog to our B-52s. Both have served our warfighters well for generations and will continue doing so into the future. However, while one of our first jet-powered and most enduring “bomb trucks,” the B-52s are not the only weapons platform in our military’s arsenal for delivering steel on target. A diversified set of weapons platform capabilities allows us flexibility for changing mission sets and for a rapidly evolving global security environment. While B-52s can deliver ordnance in multiple roles, it is not as well suited to close ground support and tank killing as, say, the venerable A-10 “Warthog.”

Likewise, our growing fleet of MQ-9 Reapers, with their extreme loiter time, advanced sensors, and more limited ability to carry ordnance, provide flexibility and options for accomplishing new mission sets, such counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.

This diversity of force structure likewise applies to our operational fuel options, more precisely their supply chains and feedstocks. My colleague, Taylor Wilkerson, in his chapter on supply chain risk management and building resilience reflects this approach. We will certainly continue using our petroleum-based fuels (“B-52s”), but should we support our military services efforts to diversify their operational fuel supply chain vulnerabilities, such as alternative fuels and biofuels? What are our operational fuel “A-10s” and “Reapers” should we be investing in? What should our military’s operational energy force structure look like moving forward? Certainly these are open questions, but our warfighters deserve reduced vulnerability provided by diversified operational fuel supply chains. If there are side benefits, such as performance enhancements and reduced air and GHG emissions, why should these be detractor to their use, particularly if they support great combat capability and potentially reduce lifecycle maintenance costs (reduced engine teardowns)?

While down at the NDIA’s E2S2 conference last week in New Orleans, I sat in an insightful panel discussion on “Energy Security Grids / Infrastructure,” discussing over a decade of work and lessons learned in securing our nation’s critical electrical infrastructure. Of note, a representative from Entergy, the local electrical utility, shared their experiences post hurricanes Katrina and Rita and, later, Ike—all of which spurred them to take a proactive risk management approach (as part of an integrated climate adaptation plan) that informed investments and partnerships to build resilience both with their infrastructure and with their customers.

These analyses, planning and outreach effort are projected to reduce this utility’s anticipated annual losses by billions of dollars moving forward. Proactive risk management fundamentally informs organizational cost and budgetary decisions, and this is, in many ways, analogous to the military services efforts in alternative operational fuels. Another speaker on this energy security panel noted that 9/11 spurred the US government to focus on security but that Katrina forced them to reevaluate and face the critical necessity to build in resiliency into our critical electric grid infrastructure.

This begs a similar question for our operational fuel mix: we are certainly ocusing on energy security, but is the current approach and support sufficient for our military’s alternative fuels to be a resilient and diversified operational energy force structure moving forward? My hope is that our leaders will have the foresight to allow them to choose their path proactively without a detrimental catalyst to action, such as a Persian Gulf closure impacting petroleum prices.

Warm Winter; Early Spring = Climate Change Uptick in Insects and Pollen

The public health side of climate change hasn't exactly been under the radar, but some elements of the impact of a changing climate have. Heat hasn't been overlooked, for example; but you've likely heard less about a rise in insect populations, such as ticks.

Cornell University professor of natural resources and extension wildlife specialist Paul Curtis studies human-wildlife contact and the potential for disease transmission. Curtis believes 2012 will have increased risk for tick borne disease like Lyme disease. “In areas with abundant oaks and mice, it appears tick numbers will be very high based on data collected at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. While the current mild winter weather does not cause a rise in tick populations, it can change tick behavior. Adult ticks, which are slightly larger than a sesame seed, are normally dormant in winter. Ticks start to seek a host for a blood meal whenever temperatures rise well above freezing. The warm winter of 2011-12 induced earlier than normal tick activity.”

Relative sizes of several ticks at different life stages. In general, adult ticks are approximately the size of a sesame seed and nymphal ticks are approximately the size of a poppy seed.  
Source:  CDC

For those of you interested, a good source of information on preventing Lyme disease is the CDC. Their site has information on preventing tick bites, removing ticks and other topics like signs and symptoms of the disease.

Another disease carrying insect that is coming on strong and showing up earlier than normal this year is the mosquito. Parents are asking local government officials, “….my children are under mosquito nets. I want to know what are you going to do today?” CDC has quite a lot of information on the diseases spread by mosquitoes including West Nile Virus and several varities of encephalitis.

The treehole mosquito (Aedes triseriatus) transmits the virus that causes La Crosse encephalitis. Source CDC.

Allergy sufferers are also having a bad year with pollen counts reaching record levels early.  This fits in with CDC's take on aeroallergins increases due to climate change.

This year’s early interest in Lyme disease, mosquitoes and allergy points to one of the interesting things about human health and climate—the number and types of indirect ways that changing climate patterns can potentially affect health.

Weather and climate patterns that have been constant on the human time scale now appear to show steady and relatively rapid alterations. Although it’s easy to recognize the direct affects from those changes, such as direct heat illness or even death from heat waves or potential drowning from flooding following major storms, the indirect health effects are more numerous and generally less obvious. In our book I introduced many of the indirect health effects that occur in the areas of air quality, water or food borne illness, insect or animal-vector disease, mental health and aggravation of underlying chronic illnesses. For example:

• Air quality - higher temperatures increase air conditioner use and the related increase in fossil fuels to meet electricity demand generates more particulate matter—when you add in the increase in low-level ozone during heat waves—there is the potential for new cases of lung injury and we are likely to see persons with existing respiratory disease (asthma or COPD) have problems.
• Water and food borne illness – extreme weather, both flooding and drought, can affect water and food supplies. While floods can carry biological and chemical contamination to drinking water supplies, droughts can reduce availability of water supplies and also cause higher concentrations of potentially harmful chemicals as water evaporates.
• Insect and animal vectors of disease – Temperature is only one climatic factor affecting the complex life-cycle and population ranges of disease vectors. However, as warmer winters and extended Spring through Autumn breeding seasons allow for increased vector populations across larger geographic area there is further opportunity for disease spread. Geographical ranges for ticks that can carry Lyme disease or Rocky Mountain Spotted fever and for the mosquito species that carry malaria, dengue and West Nile virus have already grown.
• Mental health – Extreme weather and associated anxiety and stress from displacement, job loss and inability to access food and water can cause depression, sleep disorders, drug and alcohol abuse.
• Chronic illnesses – Chronic illnesses of the heart, respiratory tract and other body systems can be aggravated by the effects of heat waves, flooding, drought, forced displacement from home, shortages of suitable food and water supplies and disruption in clinical care access .

I think you can see that while the direct effects of climate and weather events on health will be concentrated around the time and place of the event, the indirect effects will be more abundant; will last longer; will affect larger numbers of people; and as a result; will cost more to address.

Smart Business: Making a New Case for Action on Climate Change

I began this post by thinking about who we wrote this book for and why. After all, it’s just a book—the audience should be pretty clear, right? And we’ve been adamant that we designed this book to speak to a larger audience than just scientists and politicians.

To be fair, at least scientists and politicians are speaking about the climate change issue. No matter what side of the coin they’re on, dialogue is usually a productive thing if it goes on long enough. But our book attempts to reach people far beyond those groups for a very simple reason: there are others who have a hand in action.

Climate science, as my esteemed colleague Rachael Jonassen points out, is complicated. The data is tough to wade through (which is why LMI designed its Climate Change Knowledge Engine to allow greater accessibility to the data). And we’re at a crossroads where people can either figure out a path toward action by becoming an engaged stakeholder, or wait, and discover that the issue has become substantially more difficult to manage.

The challenge remains convincing people that this is smart business.

A new study by researchers at Stanford University has revealed the disconcerting notion that in the United States over the past two years, public support for adopting policies to address climate change has fallen.

In the Stanford study, the authors found that, in addition to a growing distrust for environmental scientists by some demographics, there was a decline in the number of people who wanted government action on the issue—five percentage points each year, in fact.

The rise in distrust is not unexpected. Part of this is a general atmosphere of distrust that’s developed over the past decade in what’s real and what’s not. We see it everywhere from digital photography to scientific data—certainly with the climate change issue. Once a seed of doubt has been planted, it’s tough to regain lost trust.

Likewise, the desire to see less government action is understandable. We’re in lean times, and the political divide in this country largely revolves around how taxpayer dollars should be spent.

But I believe there’s another issue: messaging. It’s not the first time that this has happened—the unfortunate phrase global warming is still in wide use, rather than the more accurate climate change. But at the core of a changing climate is a threat that must be comprehended without a set of well-defined impacts.

Fairly straight forward.

For instance, it’s easy to make the case that you shouldn’t light matches and throw them in a wastebasket filled with paper. The result of that action is a very easy thing to demonstrate. But the impacts of a changing climate are more fluid, and there is greater range to the severity. We have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen and a strong feel for the time frame, but it’s impossible to be more precise—you won’t hear anyone say with a straight face that in 5 years, 7 month, and 12 days the Southwestern U.S. will be in a crippling drought. There’s no wastebasket fire to point at and say, “See?!?”

So while the public might struggle to see a broad impact, managers of organizations have a better feel for the issue. They already look down the road and make strategic decisions to ensure their organization’s sustainability. They’re making investments now that will pay off later. The problem is that no one is talking to functional managers about climate change, no one is helping them understand the issue and the risk, and no one is outlining the possible steps they can take. There’s a serious lack of enough understanding that is needed make the case for the investment their organization’s resources. A different approach is needed.

So what would this different approach be, and what makes us believe it can be an effective one? I think it goes back to the heart of why a thriving organization earns its success—they think strategically, they use their resources wisely, and they understand the risks facing their organization.

Simply put, it means appealing to purse strings over heart strings.

Right, but why do you really do it?

Look, the case that addressing a changing climate is the right thing to do remains a valid argument. But it’s not an entirely convincing one—I’m reminded of Helen Lovejoy lamenting “Won’t somebody please think of the children!?”—and certainly not when shareholders are involved.

But shareholders do care about the profitability and sustainability of the organizations they invest in (and to this end, taxpayers should be viewed as investors in the federal government). The message surrounding climate change should be that it makes sense for the health of any organization, whether it’s in the private sector or the public sector.

And in fact, what we found is, yes, that case can be made. It’s a strong one. It involves addressing climate change by applying tools that any successful organization is probably already using—cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment, and life-cycle analysis. It means strategic investments that don’t damage the long-term health of an organization.

Which brings us back to the Stanford research and the notion that, more and more, people don’t want the government to lead this effort. Let’s put the power in the hands of the private sector by helping them understand how their organization can benefit from acting on climate change. Let’s show them a path that makes them more profitable, more efficient, and at the same time addressing an issue of critical importance. That’s who this book is for, and that’s what this book is trying to accomplish.