isaacpalomo's blog

**Disclaimer: This blog post was adapted from a term paper for Dr. Christopher Scott's, Adaptation and Resilience in Water Resources Systems seminar GEOG 6960. **

The U.S. Southwest is rapidly becoming an urbanized region that is characterized by an intense urban heat island and summertime heat waves. At the city scale, high levels of urbanization in addition to local rising surface temperatures can affect the quality of life for several areas across residential communities, public and commercial spaces, etc. Heat within cities arises from different ways in which the built environment impacts energy exchange between the surface and atmosphere. This relationship causes unevenly distributed heat patterns across urban areas and some places tend to be hotter than others. Implementing green infrastructure shows promise to enhance the resiliency of urban areas (Benedict and McMahon, 2012). However, in several situations, the lack and disproportionality of green spaces withinin low-income, marginalized communities may further increase the vulnerability to heat and augment stress to communities that are already considered to be at a greater risk to heat (Read More).

El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), better known simply as El Niño or La Niña, is normally a hot topic in the Southwest. La Niña is associated with dry winters, as we experienced most recently during 2010–2012, while El Niño winters generally are soakers. Both events occur, on average, every two to seven years, but lately not much has been happening. Up until recently, scientists have been unsure about what will happen to ENSO in a future warmer climate. However, over the past several months a couple of papers have been published arguing that we do know what will happen. (Read More)

Continuing the theme from previous blogs, this post completes the Assessment of Climate Change in the Southwest U.S. blog series with another perspective from one of the coordinating lead authors of the chapter on adaptation and solutions, “Climate Choices for a Sustainable Southwest.” Susanne Moser, the Director and Principal Researcher of Susanne Moser Research & Consulting, is a leading expert on adaptation, science-policy interactions, decision support, and climate change communication. Below she gives her opinion on the same questions we’ve asked the other authors in this series. (Read more)

The fifteenth chapter of the Assessment of Climate Change in the Southwest United States, entitled “Human Health”, explores the current state of knowledge with regards to climate-related public health threats, such as respiratory ailments from dust and fire-related particulate matter, changes in disease transmission and risk, and heat-related morbidity and mortality. 

Key findings: When it comes to climate impacts on health in the Southwest, the authors focus on three areas—air quality, heat extremes, and diseases: (read more)

This blog is the second in a two-part series about using feedback from rural Arizonans to improve climate change adaptation research in the region. 

In my last blog, I wrote that discussions with many groups of rural Arizonans revealed that they are highly aware of and concerned about changes that are occurring in our weather and climate, and that they already are engaged in adaptation efforts. What to do with that information? We used qualitative methods to analyze the group discussions, and then developed a model of rural Arizonans’ approach to climate change adaptation. (Read More)