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UHI Workshop - 10/31/2023 - Follow Up

sreece — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 22:02:00 +0000

Monday, November 13, 2023

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UHI Workshop - 10/31/2023 - Follow Up

Thank you to everyone who registered to attend the 14th Urban Heat Island (UHI) Workshop hosted by The City of Tucson’s Landscape Advisory Committee (LAC) in collaboration with University of Arizona CLIMAS.

“Mythbusting on Heat” Discussions will focus on finding opportunities for Tucson to develop innovative solutions to mitigate the Urban Heat Island(UHI) effect and effectively communicate about and respond to extreme heat events.

Recording of the UHI Workshop is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogva89GQ410 and presentations are hyperlinked below:

Alison Meadow - Associate Research Professor, Office of Societal Impact, University of Arizona “Climate Assessment for the Southwest” (0:00)
Irene Ogata - Tucson Water, Conservation & Stormwater Resource Division “Introduction to the UHI Workshop” (5:25)
Mike Crimmins - Professor & Extension Specialist - Climate Science, University of Arizona “Climate Change in Arizona” (7:00)
Ladd Keith - Assistant Professor of Planning & Sustainable Built Environments, CAPLA, University of Arizona “Improving Urban Heat Planning and Media Coverage of Extreme Heat“ (43:00)
Tom Dang - Science and Operations Officer, National Weather Service - Tucson “The National Weather Service - Urban Heat Island Workshop” (1:17:00)
Kristi Currans - Associate Professor, Urban Planning, CAPLA, University of Arizona “Assessing Cool Corridor Heat Resilience Strategies for Human-Scale Transportation” (1:59:00)
Josh Behounek - Business Development Manager, Davey Resource Group “Decreasing the Feedback Loop with Smart Tree Inventories” (2:27:00)
Mark Norton - Director, Arizona Division of Occupational Safety & Health “ADOSH Heat Illness Prevention SEP” (2:59:00)

Resources:

Berkeley Earth - July 2023 Temperature Update

Planning for Urban Heat Resilience

Plan Evaluation for Heat Resilience: City of Tucson, AZ

Assessing Cool Corridor Heat Resilience Strategies for Human-Scale Transportation Project Website

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Re-Thinking Land and History: Working with Navajo Mountain Soil Water Conservation District Members

sreece — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 20:31:25 +0000

Thursday, October 26, 2023

Re-Thinking Land and History: Working with Navajo Mountain Soil Water Conservation District Members

By: Majerle Lister

Diné lands were intentionally chosen for development interventions by soil scientists and Federal administrators. By 1937 the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a branch of the Federal government, had already implemented a few rounds of voluntary livestock reduction in the Navajo reservation to mitigate overgrazing and soil erosion. Livestock reduction was justified on the belief that Diné livestock practices were to blame for soil erosion and silt accumulation in the Hoover Dam (originally called Boulder Dam). After 1937, more rounds of livestock reduction were imposed on Diné people and plans to compensate them for their loss of livestock income failed. Livestock reduction increased poverty in the Navajo reservation and increased pressure on Diné to seek wage work rather than traditional subsistence practices that provided a cushion of independence. Diné pushed back against the reduction but the psychological, spiritual, and economic damage continues today. As an historical event retold by elders, Diné today draw upon it to understand the world and it serves as a warning toward government overstepping its authority. As a Diné PhD candidate, the livestock reduction influences my research question regarding Diné lands, development, and sovereignty. These themes are articulated together by Diné people, elected officials, and administrators in formal and informal meetings. Land development and political questions about land use are conjoined by depoliticized discourses about soil erosion, livestock units, and range management. Thus, political questions about land are naturalized by scientific measurement. This emerged from the historical soil investigation and experiment conducted in the Navajo Nation.

During the livestock reduction, the BIA sent out soil technicians into the Navajo Nation to study the health of the soil and current land practices. These soil technicians were the vanguard of the US Department of Interiors Soil Erosion Service (SES) and the subsequent US Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Services (SCS). These technicians created soil laboratories and demonstrations to measure the soil as well as teach Navajos about soil use and degradation. Additionally, the SCS produced land management surveys that were housed at University of Arizona’s Special Collections and University of New Mexico’s Center for Southwest Research and Special Collection. In each report, Diné land was categorized as ‘inaccessible and barren’, ‘waste’, ‘mountainous’, or ‘area producing run-off’. Except for the names of Diné land users, Diné people, histories, and cosmologies were absent in the soil studies. The data collected in each report was geared towards identifying sites of intervention to make land and soil more productive and economically valuable.

The vocabulary of land productivity and value parallels the Federal government’s attempts to transform Diné livestock owners either into small farmers or wage workers during this time of livestock reduction. SCS prioritized land and soil improvement that could be accomplished by water management. The engineering report for Tonalea (Tó Nehelį́į́h) advocated for irrigation projects that included dams, dikes, sand fences, and wire rocks to control water flows and flooding that would increase farming lands and make them more productive with rational water use.

Without historical context, these land management surveys read as disinterested and interconnected reports of the US Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service. Each Navajo land survey opens with a heavy description of the site; telephone location, roads, water flows, vegetation, rodents, family sizes and numbers, livestock capacity, cultivated lands, farming methods, wage work, typologies of land, and climate. These descriptions are directed towards identifying a plan of intervention on behalf of the Diné people by the Federal government. A picture is created using these descriptions with a focus on land improvement –Diné land emerges as an object of study and intervention in these land management reports.

The reports conducted on my community felt distant despite my recognition of the description of geographic features, community buildings, and roads. I spent time at the University of Arizona Special Collections archive looking at 1930s’ Navajo land management surveys. The written findings from these land management surveys incorporate engineering studies, land planning reports, range management reports, agronomy reports, and sociological surveys of different Diné communities. After sharing what I found in the archives, the maps were of great interest to other Conservation District members. They were interested in connecting local histories to the land management surveys by locating some sites designated for improvement projects.

Each community survey read like echoes devoid of life and experiences that are tied to places. In my meetings with Navajo Mountain Soil and Water Conservation District (NM-SWCD) members we noticed that local histories that we were familiar with were absent from the surveys. The five of us looked over the reports commenting on the writing style and data collected. The lands and communities document looked familiar and dissimilar to each of us. The members were impressed by the data and often wished they could conduct a similar survey in their communities.

In our discussions, they told local histories with traditional names for mountain ranges, washes, canyons, and valleys. Two district members, Willie Greyeyes and Betty Dodson, talked about a map of a farming area near Shonto that was included in land range management surveys (See map 1). With the help of the district members, I quickly sketched the surrounding area with the names of the canyons while talked about the local histories of these canyons that included the direction of water flow, family settlements after the 1864 Long Walk, early traders (S.I. and Cecil Richardson and the Wetherhills), other tribes (Paiutes), and Diné cosmologies (See Sketch 1). With the help of my very rough sketch, the land survey farming map felt more familiar to them. This prompted me to think about the local histories and traditional geographies that were absent which made these land survey maps feel distance and alien.

Furthermore, I visited two sites from the land management surveys, Tonalea (Tó Nehelį́į́h, “where the water emerges/collects) and Cows Springs (Béégishii Bí Tó). In my search for these sites, I was joined by Vicki Kee, a Navajo Mountain Soil and Water Conservation District member (NM-SWCD). Tonalea is one of three districts where I plan to find land improvement sites, along with Shonto and Kayenta. We drove through dirt roads passing homes and corrals looking for signs of the SCS project. The first site we searched for was four miles south of the old trading post. There was no map of this site but the surveys provided a description that we followed. After following the direction of Vicki Kee, we found that the site is located in the Hopi Partitioned Lands (HPL), a land status that emerged from the 1974 Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute. It was covered by overgrown vegetation and required four-wheel drive. We found dikes that had been built to divert water away and stop the flooding of crops. Vicki Kee told me that Diné families used to live and farm in the area until they were relocated because of the land dispute.

I also visited Cow Springs (Béégishii Bí Tó) to find any signs of the Cow Springs Irrigation Project proposed in the land management survey (see map 2). Cow Springs is located seven miles northeast of old trading posts along US-160. The next stop was finding any signs of the Cow Springs Irrigation Project proposed in the land management survey. Cow Springs is located in Navajo Partitioned Lands (NPL), another land status created the Navajo-Hopi Land dispute. The project proposed building a dam with a spigot to provide water for the farms south of the springs. This would have increased the number of productive lands and the crop production of farming lands. But this project proved difficult because the whole area was overgrown with invasive tree species that inhibited travel (see photo 1). The spring and lake were dried out. No such dam was found but there were other earth dams with unknown origin dates. We speculated that the dam may have been built but was destroyed with the construction of the railroad that would transfer coal from Black Mesa to the now-demolished Navajo Generating Station. This railroad was built in the 1960s because of the controversial Peabody Coal mining project in the Navajo Nation. The railroad cuts through where the proposed dam was located.

Working with the Navajo Mountain Soil and Water Conservation District and the Land Management Surveys, my research unpacks the political history of Diné land and soil through development projects. The land management surveys tells one side of history. I am interested in connecting local histories to the archived land management surveys to produce local histories from the NM-SWCD perspectives. This connection is important to me because it reveals a complex political history that is obscured by these soil maps devoid of Navajo participation and meaning. NM-SWCD provided great insight into what was missing and how these maps could be repurposed for benefit of Diné. The NM SWCD district members noted that such history would be beneficial to younger Diné interested in local history, soil science, agriculture, or livestock.

The group meetings where we examined maps revealed the lack of Diné geographies and histories that made each community familiar and complete. Willie Greyeyes and Betty Dodson added to the maps a sense of history, experience, and practice that was absent. In exploring old sites of SCS projects with Vicki Kee, the local history of Tonalea and Cow Springs became entwined with the materiality of old and missing infrastructure. The infrastructure of dikes in the first site prompted discussions between Vicki Kee and I about unused farm areas, relocated families, and emotions associated with the land dispute. The missing, or perhaps never built, Cow Springs dam infrastructure prompted discussions of the land dispute, water storage, fishing, climate change, and coal leases and mining. The SCS projects were oriented towards framing, planning, and intervening in Diné communities – now eighty-six years later they are part of a layered history of land dispute and management. The SCS projects made Diné lands and soil into objects of study and intervention with intended ideas of future use. But a land dispute altered where Diné would be living, what lands were considered Diné, and added additional layers of institutional arrangements in Tonalea. The Cow Springs area and accompanying development plans are shaped by the history of coal extraction.

I plan to conduct more visits to mapped areas and sites of agricultural development in the land surveys accompanied by NM-SWCD members. Additionally, I am interested in exploring the possibility of creating maps with the NM-SWCD members that include traditional Diné names of geographic features.

Map 1: Piute Canyon Farms (Moyles, 1938)

Sketch 1: Sketch of Canyons created with Willy Greyeyes and Betty Dodson

Cow Springs Irrigation Project Map, (Moyes, 1937).

Photo 1: Cow Springs, Navajo Nation

Moyes, C.L. (1937a). Engineering Report Unit One. Reports of a Land Management Survey, Navajo Reservation (Box 1, Folder 1). University of Arizona Special Collections, Tucson, Arizona.

Moyes, C.L. (1938). Engineering Report Unit Two. Reports of a Land Management Survey, Navajo Reservation (Box 1, Folder 1). University of Arizona Special Collections, Tucson, Arizona.

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What's going on with the rains?

sreece — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 20:18:13 +0000

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

What's going on with the rains?

By: Talia Anderson

“Había más regularidad unos diez años atrás,” recalled a farmer as he took a break from bending his corn stalks in half to dry, explaining how the rains in Guatemala were more regular 10 years ago. His account of how the rains had changed was one among many from the families we interviewed in the departments of Totonicapán and Chiquimula, Guatemala in fall 2022. The timing and amount of rainfall are especially important for farmers in these regions – the vast majority of them have incredibly small farms and rely on the rains to produce food for the year.

Corn drying after harvest to be used later for tortillas or next year’s seeds. Only the best cobs get saved for seeds.

While many farmers have noticed recent changes in climate – the rains aren’t as regular as they used to be or they are arriving late – a clear climate change signal has yet to emerge from measurements of rainfall from weather stations and satellites across most of Guatemala. My research focuses on understanding this mismatch and why the climate data don’t seem to show the same changes the farmers have noticed.

To start, I, along with a team of 16 undergraduate students and community members from Totonicapán and Chiquimula, interviewed over 700 farming households. We asked them about patterns in rainfall over recent years and how they compare to their memories from a decade or even longer ago. One farmer indicated that 2022 was the year that broke the “7 años de verano” (7 years of summer). Another shared that they planted before the rains started in the past, but now they wait until they have arrived, indicating the timing is not as reliable as it once was. Their accounts provide unique insight into what changes have occurred in their communities and on their farms.

Half of our research team on their way to interview households.

To complement the interviews, we installed a set of new weather stations across the complex mountain terrain. Measuring rainfall differences across gradients of the steep slopes provides another way to evaluate changes. The stations allow us to see if rainfall measurements captured from high above by satellites can record the differences in rainfall on the ground from the highest peaks to the lowest valleys.

By combining the accounts of farmers, the weather station measurements, and satellite information, I will be able to assess change and variability in rainfall and extreme events from multiple perspectives and across spatial and temporal scales. Because much of Guatemala lacks long-term historical weather station records, this integration of diverse sources will lead to a better understanding of current and future changes. This is critical as Central America is a global hot spot for future drying, meaning less rain and warmer temperatures. These future decreases will create new challenges for millions of farmers and their families, like the ones we interviewed who rely on rainfall for agriculture.

One of the weather stations we installed in the department of Chiquimula among a field of corn that has been bent over to dry out before harvest.

As I start my CLIMAS fellowship, I am just beginning to combine information from interviews and the climate data, and have yet to understand why the mismatch exists. So why should we care about this mismatch? Since my first fieldwork experience – 8 years ago coring trees to study past rainfall patterns in Guatemala – I have been fascinated not only by learning new research methods to study the complexities of climate across mountain landscapes, but also by the ways in which humans are affected by and adapt to changing environments. My current work builds on collaborations I have developed since then with Agroclimate groups who provide seasonal forecasts to farmers, as well as my interests in climate variability and human experiences of environmental change. Resolving the mismatch between what farmers have observed and the climate data can help us better understand changes that are occurring now and in the near future to improve forecasting efforts and to create more useful climate information that supports farmers and their agricultural decision-making.

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Flood Justice in South Texas

sreece — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 21:59:12 +0000

Friday, September 22, 2023

Flood Justice in South Texas

By: Lucas Belury

It was an open and blue Texas sky on the 3.5-hour drive south from San Antonio, Texas to the Rio Grande Valley. Yet when I arrived in this four-county region at the southern tip of Texas-Mexico border, I quickly realized the topic of this research trip – destructive seasonal floods – were predicted to happen that very week. In meeting after meeting with community-based environmental justice organizations, I heard similar stories about the ongoing challenges of flood injustice in the colonias – low-income, largely Mexican and Mexican-American, informal communities that are particularly susceptible to flooding. Within 48 hours of arriving, sandbags filled the entrances of storefronts and tornado watches were in effect. I began checking weather reports hourly out of concern that these potential floods would inundate the very communities I was there to serve. I thought to myself, how can I support these post-aid efforts? Would I just be in the way? Selfishly, I wondered if this would derail the carefully planned workshop I had been organizing and had travelled to facilitate.

Perhaps most jarringly, I began to read about free sandbag distribution programs that city governments throughout the Valley offered. All you needed to receive this simple flood mitigation tool was an address to prove residency in these cities. Providing an address sounds innocuous, but the very people most at risk of these seasonal floods are unincorporated colonia communities, the very communities I aimed to support with this research, and the communities who would be denied this simple flood mitigation support because they lived on the outskirts of these cities. While there were ultimately no floods from this storm, a deadly tornado swept through a colonia near Brownsville, Texas – a border town on the eastern edge of this region.

Photo by author: While facilitating the FLUJOS RGV launch heavy rains and floods were predicted. This small business used sandbags to block the potential inundation.

My connection to the Texas-Mexico borderlands is not simply intellectual, it’s also personal. I was raised in a mixed-race family with relatives on both sides of the border. As children we would visit the home of my Abuelitos [grandparents] in the rural mobile home where my mother and her brothers and sisters were raised. As a child in Austin, Texas the racial segregation of the city was (and remains) palpable where Black and Latinx families fight for affordable housing in a rapidly gentrifying, but historically redlined, East Side. This experience inspired my career in advocacy and restorative justice. I worked in the housing and environmental justice space for several years with community-based organizations across the US, many along the US-Mexico border. During this time, I learned the devastating cost of floods on homes, health, and economic prosperity in the Rio Grande Valley.

The vulnerability to flooding in these communities is perpetuated by FEMA’s denial of post-flood aid and the limited support for flood mitigation infrastructure by the local and federal government. Often FEMA denies aid based on ‘deferred maintenance’, meaning the quality of the home was too poor to justify aid. The result has been exclusion of these already low-income and largely Latinx communities. This injustice – which, given the predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American population of these communities is largely racialized – is precisely what these community-based organizations are fighting against. A critical barrier for these community organizations, which includes housing and legal aid non-profits, labor organizers, and public health organizations, is the lack of quantitative data. Put simply, we have no database showing where repeat floods are happening nor the duration or impact of inundation events. Without these data, convincing the local government to provide flood support has been challenging and local organizations worry that federal flood mitigation infrastructure grant applications are less competitive.

To fill this data gap, I co-developed a research project with Dr. Beth Tellman’s Social[Pixel] Lab called FLUJOS - RGV (Flood Justice Utilizing Satellite Observations – Rio Grande Valley). This collaborative research project includes several community-based organizations, with the Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (TRLA) as our chief collaborator and utilizes satellite imagery to detect the extent and duration of past flood events. FLUJOS - RGV launched with an in-person kickoff in May 2023 and brought various organizations together to discuss how satellite imagery might support their advocacy efforts. The research project is driven by the question: how can satellite imagery for flood detection empower communities to challenge flood injustice? To ensure that the data produced by this project is impactful, FLUJOS – RGV utilizes the human centered design concept of co-production. Human centered design serves as a model that not only sees researchers and collaborators as equal contributors but centers local perspectives in developing the project database and in understanding how this database can be utilized to challenge flood injustice. As contributors we are asking our partners to share not only their knowledge of floods, but to walk us through their specific and detailed data challenges. In doing so, FLUJOS centers the local knowledge of partner organizations and the lived experience of colonia residents. Now that we’ve launched FLUJOS RGV I am excited about our upcoming workshops (September 2023) to co-develop a comprehensive list of major flood events in the region and better understand the Theories of Change for our partner organizations.

Image by Cassidy Schoenfelder: I facilitated the FLUJOS RGV launch by discussing with participants what ‘Flood Justice’ meant to them

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Mapping tarps and stories to spotlight inequitable disaster recovery

sreece — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 22:25:38 +0000

Friday, September 8, 2023

Mapping tarps and stories to spotlight inequitable disaster recovery

By: Hannah Friedrich

Amidst the pandemic in 2020, I was living in Corvallis, Oregon, when wildfires lit the sky blaze orange and draped hazy smoke across the state for weeks. A year later, the Pacific Northwest heat dome brought unprecedented temperatures. These two episodes laid bare the impacts of a changing climate. During the fires, homes were destroyed, and people were displaced to nearby hotels and shelters. Hundreds of elderly, houseless individuals, and outdoor workers died from prolonged heat stress during the heat dome.

As time passed, the fires and heat dome faded to the background in state and national news, only to be replaced by the latest disaster. While the news coverage dissipated, the stories and memory of the events lingered with me. I wondered what was still being done for households and individuals without support networks to recover. How many homes were being rebuilt? How many were still living in hotels? How many were without air conditioning? How could answers to these questions be tracked at the individual or building level and be used to inform decision-making about allocating resources or planning for future extreme events?

These thoughts stayed with me on my move to Tucson. During my first week as a Geography PhD student at the University of Arizona in August 2021, another event grabbed headlines, this time hundreds of miles away on the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Ida struck southeastern Louisiana, causing massive electrical outages. My concern about the long-term recovery response to the heat dome and wildfires remained while following accounts of Ida’s aftermath. One article netted my attention. It was a news story about blue tarps being installed on the roofs of damaged homes to protect structures until roofs could be repaired. The blue color of the tarps was striking (e.g., Figure 1).

Figure 1. Blue tarp on a home in North Lake Charles in August 2022. Photo by author.

As a Geographer who uses satellite imagery (images taken from satellites of the Earth’s surface) to understand human-environment interactions, I immediately wondered if the tarps could be seen from space. A quick search of the latest available high spatial resolution imagery confirmed my suspicion that blue tarps were detectable in satellite imagery (Figure 2). Satellite imagery is routinely collected thru time, providing an archive of imagery of the same location. This stream of historical data allows remote sensing scientists to trace changes in features on the earth’s surface. My discovery of the blue tarps seen in satellite imagery was an opportunity to answer the question of how to track recovery in a systematic fashion for months to years after an event.

Figure 2. PlanetScope image scene of 3-meter resolution acquired over a neighborhood in North Lake Charles on November 30, 2020 (two months after Hurricane Laura and one month after Hurricane Delta).

Being from the Midwest with little experience in preparing for and recovering from hurricanes, I spoke with a researcher who studied disaster recovery on the Gulf Coast about my idea of using satellite imagery to map tarps and track recovery. They brought to my attention that while the road ahead for those affected by Ida was long, Hurricanes Laura and Delta, which hit southwestern Louisiana just a year prior in fall 2020, was a series of back-to-back storms that was even further buried in public and national attention. Due to a myriad of reasons, the response to Laura and Delta was severely lacking, owing to prolonged recovery. Imagery from Lake Charles a year after the event still indicated a number of tarps remained on homes. Not only was the duration of tarps remaining on homes startling, but the uneven timing of where and when tarps had been removed showed patterns of disparate recovery rates between majority white and Black neighborhoods in Lake Charles (Figure 3). The different rates of blue tarps being removed indicated that while recovery was delayed for everyone, the delays were more pronounced for communities of color.

Figure 3. PlanetScope imagery shows that tarps remain on longer for majority Black residential areas compared to majority white residential areas.

While satellite maps reveal patterns of recovery as proxied by blue tarps, they do not capture the everyday challenges and decisions individuals and households experience in recovery. I thought back to accounts of wildfire and heat impacted people in Oregon and wondered what stories existed in Lake Charles - stories that needed to be heard and shared. This has led me to develop a dissertation project that marries the maps of tarps with individuals’ experiences of recovery to contextualize patterns revealed in each approach. I’ll be spending the next academic year living in Lake Charles, interviewing residents about what recovery means to them and, in particular, the role that insurance has played in aiding and hindering the recovery process. By using maps and stories to hold the spotlight on places and people that are overlooked, my aim is accumulate evidence of where recovery is inequitable to prioritize areas for rebuilding. In the face of narrow attention and support from past and coming storms, I aspire to have my research advocate for more just recovery and adaptation to future hurricane impacts along the Gulf Coast and beyond.

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