By Teal Potter, WSU Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources
How do you work to address climate change in your job? I feel my body’s stress response when I think about that question, and I expect many of you do too. It’s overwhelming. Most of us don’t have the necessary supportive network to figure out what specific actions are worth focused effort, nor do we have support if we get to the acting phase. The Climate Analogs Academy aims to address these two major barriers that often thwart climate action.
Building the Climate Adaptation Network
The Academy focuses on U.S. Cooperative Extension professionals due to their unique position as trusted advisors with farmers, their investment in communication skills, and their experience in learning from and partnering with diverse resources and organizations.
We focus on making climate adaptation concrete and actionable for specialty crop Extension professionals through our program framed around the ‘climate analogs concept’. This concept, most simply explained, is understanding which locations in the country currently experience your future climate.
For example, Cheyenne Sloan is a Blueberry and Small Fruit Educator in southern Michigan. Her modeled analogs include areas near Salt Lake City and southcentral Oregon. Now she has a clear mental image of how different the climate could be for growing blueberries. Anyone can use the tool to get find their analogs, but the Academy takes the concept further. We used the climate analogs tool to select applicants, aiming to match participants with someone who lives in one of their climate analog regions and can expand on climate-specific farming practices, pest monitoring, etc.
The Curriculum
In January we began a virtual workshop series in which we prioritized time for dialogue between participants to learn about each other, their expertise, and their challenges.
Workshops
- Intro to Climate and Agriculture
- Climate and Specialty Crop Supply Chains
- The Analog Concept
- Climate Hubs 101: Introduction to the Climate Hubs
- Climate Hubs 201: Regional Discussions
- Analog-Dialog
- Climate Science Policy
- Careers Training for Graduate Students
- Communication with Agricultural Stakeholders
- Planning and Executing Effective Workshops
- AgroClimate Tools for Fruit and Vegetable Production
- Climate and Weather Data Analytics for Decision Making in Fruit and Vegetable Production Systems Using R
Study Tours
To further foster connection, each of the ten participants travels to another participant, ideally in their climate analog region to tour farms and research centers. This summer we are hosting three study tours across the U.S. with the help of local Extension participants. Stay tuned for future blogs on these study tour experiences. Tours for this first cohort were in Monterey County, CA, across the state of DE, and the third covering an even bigger area: Dallas, TX to Oklahoma City, OK.
These study tours are expected to be the most impactful piece of the Academy by revealing the true potential of the climate analogs concept to make climate adaptation more actionable for Extension professionals and the USDA Climate Hubs. As we round out two of three study tours this August, we’ll soon learn from the participants whether they would recommend we send everyone visit their true climate analog locations or keep the groups larger like we did this year, even if it means some people don’t get to visit a modeled climate analog location.
Climate Adaptation Project
For the final component of the Academy, beyond the virtual workshops and study tours, participants are tasked with scoping a small project that fits within their current work but allows them to push further into the realm of climate adaptation. We matched participants with members of the hosting project team, which boasts a range of modeling, policy, and outreach expertise to scope projects. Projects include:
“I will be developing a newsletter article describing the marine layer, its relevance for coastal California agriculture, historical trends, and implications of climate change. We will also compare fog trends for multiple locations to place it in the context of climate analogs in California.”
Monica Cooper, ANR Advisor, CA
“I’m doing a variety trial to test watermelon varieties with superior heat tolerance traits grown under plasticulture at sites in central Oklahoma and southern Texas.”
Micah Anderson, Horticulture Extension Educator, OK
“I am leading authorship of a factsheet about extreme heat in northern highbush blueberry. It will define extreme heat, summarize current and projected frequency of extreme heat events for important production areas of NHB, provide air temperature thresholds for flowers and fruits, and current and prospective mitigation measures for the short- and long-term.”
Lisa DeVetter, Associate Professor of Small Fruit Horticulture, WA
As our inaugural cohort closes out their year with the Academy this fall, we are excited to implement participant feedback into planning for our second Academy cohort. Applications for the second cohort will open in early September — make sure to check out the Climate Analogs Academy webpage and stay tuned with CSANR’s Perspectives on Sustainability blog for future perspectives on the development of the Academy and study tour experiences.
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