Good morning everybody, or should I say good afternoon.
My name is Ryan Fischer.
I'm a member of the Darwin Festival committee.
Welcome to our 47th annual Darwin Festival here at Salem State University.
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It now gives me great pleasure to pass the microphone, as it were,
over to my colleague in the Geography and Sustainability department,
Professor John Hayes, to make a formal introduction.
Over to you, John.
Thank you, Ryan, really appreciate it.
Good morning, everybody, and thank you all for coming.
Today.
The Geography and Sustainability Department is honored to host a visit of
Doctor Shayna Sadai to the 47th Annual Darwin Festival of Salem State University.
Dr.
Sadai is an independent scholar in the Five Colleges Consortium in Massachusetts.
She received her PhD in Geosciences, specializing in geography and climate
science from UMass Amherst.
She did a postdoctoral fellowship with the Union of Concerned Scientists out of
Cambridge, MA, and her Bachelor of Science degrees are
in physics and astrophysics.
And then she had a Master of Science in Applied Math and all of those degrees are
from UMass Amherst.
The Geography and Sustainability Department at Salem State has been
hosting an invited speaker at the Darwin Festival since 2002.
Hard to imagine that seems so long ago.
And we are very pleased to have Doctor Sedai with us today and she's continuing
this tradition.
We also thank the Charles Albert Reed Trust for sponsoring our invited speakers
over these past 20 plus years.
And absolutely, positively of course, Geography and Sustainability thanks the
Darwin Festival Planning Committee for the opportunity to host a speaker during
their wonderful festival.
Doctor Sedai is a climate scientist and a critical physical geographer at the five
colleges.
Her research is interdisciplinary.
She combines the the physical science of future climate change modeling and sea
level rise modeling with ecology and social science so that she can analyze
climate justice of non human animals and the implications for advancing kind of a
new feel like a new branch of climate justice for called multispecies climate
justice.
So again, we are just so thrilled that Doctor
Shayna Sadai is with us today to speak on the topic of sea level rise and
multispecies climate justice.
I will now turn it over to Professor Shayna Sadai.
Thank you so much for that introduction and for hosting me here.
So yes, this talk is about multispecies climate
justice and sea level rise.
And I want to start by acknowledging my amazing co-authors on this work.
They're all former undergraduate students of mine who have since graduated.
There's Ava Sharp, Rory Crisfield, Elizabeth Rankin, and Caitlin Bolzon,
and I am very grateful to have had such amazing research assistants on this work.
Next slide, please.
So I'm going to start by going over a little bit of sea level science.
So my primary background is in climate and sea level science.
And then I also do critical physical geography.
So that'll be sort of woven in there.
And then I'll talk about multi species climate justice theory, what that is.
And then we'll get into the three sections of our research chapter that I'm
presenting today, which is on the distribution of sea level
rise impacts on non human animals, recognition of diverse forms of life and
adapting to rising sea levels in a way that centers justice for all.
Next slide, please.
So this project began as this concept for a research project where we would start
with a systematic literature review.
Basically, we went through 10 years of the published
peer reviewed literature in the fields of ecology and conservation biology and
looked for publications on how sea level rise was affecting animal communities.
And then we wanted to interpret those results through climate justice theory
with a focus on multispecies climate justice.
And so the work itself has kind of evolved into two different projects.
We started with the systematic literature review,
but that is going to be a separate publication.
And the part that I'm going to present today is the multispecies climate justice
interpretation of what we found through the systematic literature review.
So I'll reference the systematic review and the research that we drew from on how
sea level rise impacts non human animals, but I'll focus on aspects of climate
justice theory that relate to those different case studies.
And the chapter that I'm presenting today is part of a forthcoming book that I Co
edited called Multispecies Climate Justice Liberatore Futures for Human and
More than Human Worlds.
And it's Co edited by myself, Sylvia Sapuentes and Stephanie Rutherford.
And I also want to thank the grant funders that supported this work,
which is the Culture and Animals Foundation.
Very grateful to them.
Next slide please.
OK.
So climate change, you're all well familiar with it.
Greenhouse gas emissions are occurring and as a result of greenhouse gas
emissions, the composition of the atmosphere is
changing.
There is an increasing concentration of carbon dioxide and methane and other
greenhouse gases, and that is impacting the radiative
balance, that balance between incoming solar
energy and outgoing long wave radiation from the Earth.
And as a result of radiative radiation balance shifting from greenhouse gas
emissions and rising greenhouse gas concentrations,
we have accumulation of heat in the Earth's system which is leading to
widespread impacts, which can include, you know, heat waves, sea level rise,
ocean acidification intensity, tropical cyclones and many other
detrimental impacts.
Greenhouse gas emissions are primarily occurring due to the combustion of fossil
fuels, but there's many other sources such as
emission sources from animal agriculture, from F gases that are used in like air
conditioning refrigerants, from many other sources.
And underlying all of that are systems of oppression and unjust socio political
systems and heavily polluting industries.
So emissions don't happen in a vacuum, they happen because of political and
economic decisions.
And as we are seeing in this plot here of global mean surface temperature over time
since 1940, global average temperatures are rising
significantly and that is accelerating.
In recent decades.
We've just had the third warmest year on record.
We continue to have record-breaking heat and it's leading to a lot of detrimental
impacts to life on Earth.
Next slide please.
So sea level rise is just one of many consequences of climate change and a
little bit about the physical mechanisms of sea level rise.
So on average across the Earth, sea levels have risen by about 0.2 meters,
only around 8 inches from 1900 to 2018.
This sounds like a small amount, but the impacts of it are quite vast and
are impacting shorelines all over the world.
And not only is the sea level rising, but the rate at which it's rising is
accelerating over time.
So even if we look at just the past couple of decades of data,
sea level was rising by about 2mm per year in 1992.
And at present day it's rising by more around 4 1/2mm per year.
So more than double the rate in just a little bit of time.
And sea level rise also doesn't occur like a bathtub fills up with water,
where the water level goes up by the same amount everywhere.
Instead, it's highly variable at the regional
level due to a complex interplay of different factors that drive sea level
rise.
And so these plots are just showing some of what that spatial variability of sea
level rise looks like.
This was from a study that was in 2018 using satellite altimetry data.
And you can see in the places where there's darker red around,
like the tropics around the western boundary currents,
there is higher regional sea level rise in some areas than in others.
But the global signal is that, of course, it is on average rising across the Earth.
Next slide, please.
So the things that are driving sea level rise, of course,
is the greenhouse gas emissions leading to the accumulation of heat.
And what is that doing?
It's causing thermal expansion of the water column.
So some of that heat, over 90% of that heat is going into the
oceans.
And as that heat enters the oceans, it causes the water column to expand via
thermal expansion.
And so that's one of the main drivers.
And the other main driver is the melting of land ice,
meaning the ice sheets in Greenlands and Antarctica and global mountain glaciers.
And we can use attribution science to try to figure out how like how we can
attribute the rising sea level to climate change and even to specific types of
emission sources.
So I'm using example from one of my own peer reviewed publications that came out
last year, which was about trying to determine the
responsibility of industrial fossil fuel polluters to rising sea levels.
And So what we did, we showed, what we found in that study was that over
the full historical period that we can trace fossil fuel greenhouse gas
emissions to, so 1854 to 2020, we can look at fossil fuel emissions over
that.
And attribute them to just a small number of corporations that are major fossil
fuel producers.
And so we found in this study that over that time period,
we can attribute 24 to 37% of present day sea level rise to emissions from products
produced by these carbon majors.
So ExxonMobil, Chevron at state owned companies.
And this plot is showing in the darker blue the sea level rise that has occurred
up to present day, and in the lighter blue,
what would have happened if industrialized fossil fuel development
had never happened.
So we can clearly see the effects of fossil fuels driving higher sea level
rise.
And other parts of the study showed that even just those past emissions of fossil
fuels produced by the carbon majors will lead to higher sea levels out to the year
2300 and possibly even beyond.
Our model only looked out to 2300, but it is the signal is attributable.
Next slide, please.
And so if we think about what's happening now and what will happen into the future,
globally averaged sea level rise is going to continue occurring for centuries to
millennia.
And the ultimate magnitude how high sea levels will go will depend on emission
scenarios that happen from here into the future.
And so this plot is showing that under a high emission scenario,
if the world does not act and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,
we can end up in one of the red scenarios, which is particularly bad,
where sea level rises quite significantly.
And this plot is only showing out to 2100.
But there are other versions of this plot that look out longer.
They're just really hard to fit on slides that show that sea levels will continue
going up into the future beyond 2100.
But if we contrast the red lines to the blue lines,
the blue lines being lower emission scenarios where the world collectively
acts to reduce emissions, and then yes, sea level still rises,
but it rises by a much smaller amount.
And that smaller amount of magnitude of sea level rise allows for easier
adaptation options.
So we want to minimize sea level rise as much as possible by reducing greenhouse
gas emissions as soon as we can, because sea level rise is not reversible
on human relevant time scales.
And so once that sea level goes up, it's going to take a lot to bring it back
down.
We need heat to come out of the ocean and we need global regrowth of ice sheets and
glaciers.
So this is a long term problem that we need to be thinking about.
Next slide, please.
And then the impacts of this are of course, we're familiar with a lot of them,
flooding and inundation, extreme sea level events,
meaning that storm surges happening on top of already risen sea levels will lead
to even worsening flooding impacts.
There's also erosion of shorelines and there is solidification of freshwater.
So especially like if we think about freshwater ecologies like freshwater
swamps near coastal spaces, as sea level starts to rise and that
salty water gets into a freshwater ecosystem,
it starts to change and disrupt the ecosystem.
And so all of these types of impacts of sea level rise directly harm animals and
disrupt ecosystems and multi species communities.
Next slide, please.
And alongside rising sea levels, there's also the other climate impacts.
So if we think about an animal trying to a species trying to adapt to sea level
rise, they're also trying to adapt
simultaneously to other climate change impacts that are occurring more frequent
and severe heat waves, precipitation changes,
strengthening tropical cyclones and other anthropogenic stresses like habitat
fragmentation, hunting and poaching and various types of
pollution.
Next slide, please.
And so I wrote this other paper in 2022, my first climate justice and sea level
rise paper, where we looked at the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement,
which is the global agreement to try to get climate change under control.
And we thought about the ways that the Alliance of Small Island States,
which is a group of island nations that, well, they're not all island nations,
but most of them are island nations that work together in international
negotiations to push for the strongest possible climate action.
And they are often referencing the ways in which they are impacted by sea level
rise.
And so we use three aspects of climate justice theory in this paper.
Thinking about distribution, the mismatch between responsibility for
emissions and the burdens that are falling on those who are not responsible
for emissions.
Recognition justice, meaning acknowledging the existence
rights of diverse people, diverse beings, and the first ecologies and then
procedural injustices, which is about how the uneven political
power dynamics shape responses to sea level rise and can limit options for the
strongest and most ambitious climate action.
And the plot here is just showing how sea level rise source from Antarctica
projected into the future, even under a moderate emission scenario,
is going to disproportionately impact members of the Alliance of Small Island
States, which are all labeled on this map
disproportionately in comparison to their very,
very low emissions contribution that they have had over the historical period.
So we're drawing from the same justice framework in the multispecies climate
justice chapter.
Next slide, please.
So multispecies climate justice has been an emerging sort of framework.
And in 2021, Checker ET al wrote a paper sort of like
laying out the foundations of multispecies climate justice theory.
And they noted 2 drawbacks in some common climate justice framings,
which are that they don't include the voices of multiple types of others,
so that could mean other species, and that's what they're referring to in
the paper.
And that the common climate justice framing should also question human
exceptionalism and the violence that it can enact.
Next slide, please.
And so in that paper they call for this more inclusive approach and they state,
quote, a multi species justice lens expands
climate justice by decentering human the human and recognizing the everyday
interactions that bind individuals and societies to networks of close and
distant others, including other people and more than
human beings.
And they stress throughout this paper that they do not mean to like,
decenter the ways that climate justice must be applied to humans.
But they want to not decenter, but expand and have human climate justice
and more than human climate justice be integrated together so that we are
thinking about humans and the more than human world at the same time.
Next slide, please.
And I also just want to shout out this very excellent artistic piece.
It's a multipedia storytelling project on multispecies climate justice.
It's done by some friends of mine that is an artist collective in Romania.
It's called We Fly, We Crawl, We Swim, and it's just a really beautiful film
about this concept.
So I highly recommend everyone check it out.
Next slide, please.
OK, so getting into the three main portions
of our chapter here.
So we start with the distribution aspect of it.
So distributive justice would be even distributions of burdens and benefits in
any particular situation.
And when we think about the injustices of sea level rise,
wealthy and powerful humans have driven greenhouse gas pollution while
systematically marginalized humans and more than human communities bear the
burdens.
So there is a mismatch in the distribution of burdens and benefits here.
Benefits meaning like, you know, corporations that are making a lot of
money from greenhouse gas pollution and burdens,
obviously meaning flooding and inundation from sea level rise.
Next slide, please.
So this is all drawing from the systematic literature review,
and these are some examples that we found when we were looking at all the peer
reviewed literature on how animals are impacted by speech, by sea level rise.
This first example is taking a bit of a paleoclimate view and thinking about
what's happening at present day.
So this is the case of the African Penguin.
African Penguins live off of the coast of South Africa on islands that are around.
Around that southern region and the African Penguin experienced detrimental
population declines as a result of the sea level rise that occurred following
the last glacial maximum.
And so these plots are showing from 22, 000 years ago on the left hand side to
present day on the right hand side, where the top panel is showing how sea
level rose as the last sea glaciation occurred.
And then the second panel is showing how island area started to decline as sea
levels rose because those islands were becoming more permanently inundated.
And the third panel shows the population of the African Penguins declined
significantly as sea level started to rise following the last glaciation.
And so they had significant population impacts due to sea level rise,
but a portion of the population was able to survive and adapt and they did that by
moving to other islands.
So they sort of redispersed amongst the islands that were still available to them
as sea level started to rise.
But now at present day, they are vulnerable to the current sea
level rise and also to other stresses like attacks from outdoor cats,
other types of pollution.
And so those impacts also have to be taken into account.
And so the moral of this story is that resilience of a population of a species
to pass sea level change does not guarantee resilience to present and
future sea level rise.
Adaptation assistance may need be needed in cases like this and other conservation
efforts to try to safeguard the African Penguin population.
Next slide please.
Other distributive impacts that we found were around solidification of freshwater.
And so these are two examples.
The first being the Mellenbarb fish, which lives in rivers in South India and
they experience high levels of stress from rising salinity.
So they start to experience respiratory dysfunction and various types of
physiological stress that can lead to death of the melon Barb fish.
And another example was saltwater crocodiles, which, you know,
the name implies that they are adapted to evolve to be able to live in saltwater,
but they also rely on freshwater swamps, and those are especially important during
their reproductive cycle.
So they need freshwater swamps for breeding and nesting.
But those freshwater swamps are increasingly being threatened by sea
level rise as that salty ocean water starts to grade the freshwater swamp.
And the salinity intrusion is impacting population numbers currently.
So those are two examples of how solidification is impacting more than
human animals.
Next slide, please.
Another thing that came up a lot in our systematic literature review was the
importance of how sea level rise is impacting migration routes.
So the way the animals use space can change throughout the year and especially
for species that have long distance migrations,
they're particularly vulnerable to the impacts of sea level rise.
So this is looking at the Asian Australasian Flyway,
which is a particularly important region in the Pacific for migratory birds.
And along their flyway route are many, many islands.
And so each of those stopover points that is used by a particular species,
they have to be able to rest and they have to be able to find food.
But as some of those islands start to be impacted by sea level rise,
and as some of them could even become permanently inundated,
they can no longer be effective stopover points,
which forces the population to change their migration routes or forces into
bottleneck points where a large percentage of the population might have
to pass through 1 remaining island stopover point space in a particular area
as they go.
And so this study from Ewamura ET All and several other studies showed that long
distance migratory shore birds can have significant population reductions as sea
level rise starts to impact their migratory stopover points.
Next slide please.
And along this idea of of island stopover points and island impacts,
atolls are particularly at risk.
So atolls are very low lying islands that are created from former volcanic calderas
and they are have elevations that can Max out at like 10, 10 feet, so very,
very flat.
And they also have freshwater lenses which are their source of freshwater and
so particularly important.
And so atolls are at risk for permanent inundation.
But even before permanent inundation occurs,
that salinity intrusion and also storm surge impacts can impact populations that
live in atolls.
Next slide, please.
And extreme sea level events, which are from storm surge flooding
usually can cause particularly detrimental impacts.
So there's the mean sea level, there's the high tide and low tide.
And then when a tropical cyclone comes in, there's also the storm surge as the storm
pushes water up onto the shore.
And if storm surge happens to occur during a high tide,
then you have even higher impacts.
And as the average sea level starts to rise,
all of these things get worse and worse.
And then simultaneous to a stream extreme sea level event,
you also have heavy precipitation and high winds.
So these are particularly difficult, difficult things to deal with.
Next slide please.
And to give an example of how storm surge flooding impacts animal communities,
this is the flying foxes of Micronesia.
So Micronesia is in the Pacific, sort of near the Philippines alongside
the coast of Asia.
And the flying foxes are starting to experience impacts to their roosting
sites.
They rely on breadfruit trees as one of their primary food sources and also for
roosting sites.
And the breadfruit trees are being impacted by repeated storm surge flooding.
And over the long term, the flying foxes are projected to
experience significant habitat loss as all of these situations start to start to
deteriorate and the apples are already so low lying.
So this is a particularly difficult type of situation to deal with.
Next slide, please.
And then some other impacts that came up through the systematic literature review
are storm surge flooding as it impacts a very small species that live really close
to coastal areas and don't travel far.
And these are three different coastal species that we found were impacted,
the Florida Moleskink, the Alabama beach mouse and the Florida
reef gecko, all of which are at risk from widespread
habitat inundation during strong tropical cyclones.
Next slide please.
And one impact that we were not expecting to find was rocky Cliff collapse.
And so this was an impact of erosion.
We found this study looking at green sea turtles in the Red Sea off the in on the
coastal the coastline of Saudi Arabia.
The turtles come on shore to nest, but as erosion is impacting the rocky
areas around the coast near where they're nesting sites are,
they found that there was significant turtle mortality due to rocky Cliff
collapses.
And so this was an impact of sea level rise that we had not even expected to
find when we started out doing the systematic literature review.
Next slide, please.
So moving from distribution to recognition.
So researching these impacts of sea level rise on animal communities is
particularly important so that we understand what is occurring.
But within the conservation literature more broadly,
we also wanted to point out that there is like unevenness in who gets studied and
where they get studied.
So within the conservation literature broadly,
there's an under representation of insect communities,
of amphibians and of invertebrates.
And there's also a geographic bias in the literature where there's relatively few
studies from Africa and South Asia and more studies that have occurred in North
and Central America and in Europe.
But we also want to point out that the conservation literature also shows that
study alone is insufficient for enacting for for ensuring survival and
conservation success.
So one example being that marine invertebrates are understudied,
but marine vertebrates like sea turtles that are studied remain threatened
despite the tension, the attention that they receive.
So next slide, please.
So recognition is a piece of the puzzle.
Recognition, justice means respecting the existence
rights of all, everyone, all living beings and shorelines.
As we started to think about this research,
we were thinking about the concept of sacrifice zones and how shorelines can
run the risk of becoming sacrifice zones to sea level rise and the importance of
recognizing that coastal space and the need to preserve the safety of all
inhabitants, human and more than human alike,
in the coastal zone.
Next slide, please.
So in the recognition justice section of the paper,
we concentrate on the case study of the first documented extinction due to
climate change which occurred in the Torres Strait.
So the Torres Strait is this marine area between Papua New Guinea and Australia.
And the part that's labeled in red is Mazam Kaur, also known as Bramble Cay.
This is so this region is called the Torres Strait,
and that Mazam Kaur is an island within the Torres Strait.
It's the area is inhabited by the Indigenous Torres Strait Islanders,
but it is administered politically by Australia and it's an area that's
experiencing really high rates of sea level rise,
higher than the global average.
So more like 6mm per year versus the current average of 4mm per year.
So this shows the importance of taking into account regional variability in the
sea level rise impacts.
Next slide, please.
And so the Mazum Cower Mukis is was a small rodent that is also known as the
Bramble Cay Malonis melonus.
They lived exclusively on that Mazum Cower island and there were several 100
individuals of the Mukis that were alive in the 1970s.
Conservation biologists documented them at that time.
The Torres Strait Islanders documented them at that time.
And by 2004, there was only a couple dozen individuals
of the species left.
And the reason for that was repeated storm surge, flooding,
erosion and salinity stresses.
And that that combination of factors led to the decline of 97% of the island's
vegetation.
The vegetation is important because the Mookie needed it for both food and for
shelter.
So as the vegetation started decline, the Mookie started to decline.
And that shows that relationality between animal and plant communities.
Next slide, please.
And so a recovery plan was drafted because clearly this was something that
was recognized that was happening, that there was a steep population decline
due to sea level rise.
But our recovery plan was never put into action.
So a conservation, A conservation action plan that just
wasn't enacted.
And ultimately the mookies was declared extinct in 2016,
but the last individuals probably perished before that sometime between
2009 and 2014.
Next slide please.
And when we talked about this in the paper,
we drew a little bit from Brett Blanche Burley,
who is a multi species climate justice scholar who wrote a paper in 2022 about
aspirational climate justice aspiration, meaning like breathing.
And she conceptualizes in the paper breathing as a process,
being relational between polluters, those rendered vulnerable and the climate
itself.
And so when we were thinking about what the Mukhis had experienced,
many individuals drowned during storm surge flooding events and drowning stops
breathing.
So it is an aspirational injustice we claim in in our chapter due to the
greenhouse gas pollution and the lack of recognition of the survival needs of the
mookies.
And we also drew from Alexis Pauline Gums's work in this part of the chapter.
Alexis Pauline Gums wrote the book on drowned black feminist lessons from
marine mammals where she also talks about breathing.
And this is a quote from it.
What's the scale of breathing?
All animals participate in this exchange of release for continued life,
but not without the plants.
The plants in their inverse process release what we need,
take what we give without being asked.
And the planet wrapped in ocean breathing, breathing into the sky.
And if the scale of breathing is collective beyond species and sentience,
then so is the impact of drowning.
So we talked about this as being clearly a climate injustice that the Mazib Kaur
Mukis and the entire multi species community of the Taurus spray tortoise St.
was dealing with.
Next slide please.
And so the Torres Strait community, the mookies would have required
adaptation assistance and probably some form of human assisted relocation and
that required funding from the government of Australia, which did not come through.
But the local Torres Strait Islanders had a very they loved the mookies.
It's a important part of the multi species community.
And there's a local artist collective, they are called Arab Arts,
and they created this artwork to draw attention to the case of the Mukhis and
the need for safeguarding the remaining inhabitants of the Torah Strait.
So all of this artwork are members of the collective created it out of found
materials made from beach debris, so like discarded Nets that wash up on
shore and other types of marine debris.
And they made these beautiful artworks, which they have shown in many art shows.
And they also have an Instagram page and they share it online.
Next slide, please.
And this is a quote from Jimmy John's the day,
one of the artists in the Arab Arts Collective where he says the Sankei is
sacred.
For us, the days we have to try to maintain the
bank because it's washing away since the Milomas is gone,
the next best thing we can do is look after the turtles.
And with climate change, all the nests near the water are starting
to wash out.
So using the artwork to bring attention to the needs for multispecies climate
justice within the Torres Strait community,
both for the Islanders themselves and for the turtles and for the other inhabitants
of the multispecies community there.
Next slide, please.
And so the Torres Strait Islanders have taken a lot of action in a lot of
different ways, including through the legal system.
They had this case in 2022 with the United Nations Human Rights Committee
where they alleged that the government of Australia was violating their human
rights by continuing to produce greenhouse gases.
And this is part of the testimony.
Keith Pabai was one of the the people in this case.
He is the one in the bottom right with the purple shirt and the red,
the red floral.
He says I know every species of plant, animal and wind on the island.
The way the vegetation changes, what to harvest at different times of
year.
That is the cultural inheritance that we teach our children.
So it was a crucial part of their them making the case to the UN Human Rights
Committee that they need the multi species community and that the land,
the animals and the people are all integrally connected and that high
polluters are impacting their rights to live safely.
They won this case but as yet Australia has taken insufficient action and so this
is seen as a huge win for climate justice.
But the actual like implementation of the ruling is yet to be fully realized.
Next slide, please.
So moving from recognition to action, so the loss of the Mazib Kaur Mukis is a
warning for the impacts of recognitional and procedural injustices.
There was the failure to adapt the conservation adaptation plan which led to
the extinction and there's also been Australia's now failure to comply with
the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruling.
And both of those are procedural injustices,
some sort of power differentials within the decision making process led to there
not being sufficient action.
And so when we think about adaptation to sea level rise in the action that needs
to be taken, that is a that is based in political
decisions, whose interests are being protected?
What resources are available and how are they being allocated?
How are these decisions being made?
Next slide, please.
And so this procedural injustice, procedural justice is equitable and
inclusive decision making processes.
And then injustice is whenever power is wielded by some to the detriment of
others.
Next slide, please.
And so when we drew, when we drew out the framework for how we
wanted the last part of the chapter to be, when we were thinking about adaptation
and procedural justice, we drew heavily from Angie Pepper's work
on adapting to climate change, what we owe other animals.
Angie Pepper is an applied philosopher and she had these 4 tenets of how to
assist non human animals in adaptation to climate change.
And the first thing was ensuring that human built built environments protect
all who live there regardless of species.
The second thing is not to jeopardize adaptation responses of freely living
animals.
The third thing is to remove human barriers to autonomous animal adaptations.
And the fourth thing is to facilitate the adaptation of non human animals who
cannot autonomously adapt for whatever reason.
Next slide, please.
So under that first one, adaptation for all,
thinking about common sea level rise adaptation options,
there's often the construction of hardscaping.
So this is like things like sea seawalls or other like physical barriers for the
water.
There's also relocation, which is usually an absolute last resort
because almost no one wants to be forced to have to relocate due to climate change.
And then there's also ecosystem based adaptation,
which is a much more inclusive approach and generally does take into account the
multi species communities to some extent.
But we also need to think about how adaptation for all really means
adaptation for all, for humans, for non human communities.
And so hardscaping adaptation projects.
We we drew from this paper by Domingue and that was published in 2022.
Simone Domingue, which was looking at how hardscaping
adaptation projects in coastal Louisiana have harmed Black and Indigenous
communities in the bayous and also simultaneously harmed local ecology.
Next slide, please.
And so one example is from Terrebonne Parish,
where Louisiana communities that felt sidelined in the adaptation planning
process teamed up with biologists to try to find more inclusive solutions.
And this is 1 quote from one of those projects.
It's not just land that we're restoring.
We're restoring habitat.
There's a plethora of life besides human life that's dependent on these places.
The microscopic life, the insect populations, the mammals,
the birds, the nesting birds, the marine population,
all of these are dependent on the land that we restore.
So they were talking about taking more inclusive approaches that center all who
live there.
And in the Domingue paper, when they were talking about people
feeling sidelined and adaptation processes,
a lot of the ways that those adaptation members were adaptation measures were
being pushed forward in political spaces whereby focusing on the greater good,
focusing on like who like the broadest needs.
But when you have the social construction of the greater good,
communities that are already marginalized can be pushed to the side.
So this is trying to push back against that and.
Find more inclusive approaches next slide, please.
And there were a few really excellent examples of adaptation initiatives that
center adaptation for all.
One of my favourites is the Wampum adaptation framework.
This is from Shinnecock scholar Kelsey Leonard and was published in 2020.
So she's a member of one of the Northeast tribal communities and she put together
this framework for sea level rise adaptation that centers Indigenous
viewpoints where it's witnessing the natural world,
both human and non human relations, acknowledging the traditional teachings,
mending the shoreline, saying environmental sovereignty,
protecting future generations, uniting with other communities to build
capacity and moving only as a last resort.
And so this is a great example of a framework for adaptation that takes into
account all all all who live in the space.
Next slide, please.
And this is one other example is restoration of coastal spaces using
Hawaiian indigenous low eye techniques.
And these can actually expand water bird habitats and counter the space that is
being lost by sea level rise.
And so these are traditional agroecological practices and they can
contribute to the recovery of water birds that are presently endangered.
That's what the modeling from this paper from Harman ET All showed.
So this is another another way of looking at adaptation planning that is centering
both human and more than human communities.
Next slide, please.
I'm running out of time, but I only have a few slides left.
So the second tenant from Angie Pepper's work was about an autonomous adaptation.
And so one example of this that we found in the systematic literature review was
that of the silver rice rat, which lives in the lower Florida Keys.
So they were monitored over 17 years.
And over that time, sea level was of course rising in the
Florida Keys.
But the rice rats enacted their own autonomous adaptations by moving to
higher elevations as the sea level started to rise.
But one thing that we want to point out in the paper is that, yes,
that isn't worked over these time scales, this 17 year time scale,
but sea level rise, the rate is accelerating,
as I said earlier.
And without emissions reductions, this type of autonomous adaptation is not
sustainable in the long term because there's only so high you can go,
you reach the highest elevation.
If the sea level keeps rising because the emissions reductions have not occurred,
then you're still going to have negative impacts.
And so we wanted to note here that we should learn from what happened to the
Maz Kaur Mukis and try to prevent losses of beings like the Silver Rice Rat and
the Alabama Beech Mouse.
Next slide, please.
The third tenant from Andy Pepper was about removing barriers.
And so maladaptation is the concept that you can enact adaptation measures,
but sometimes they have harmful outcomes.
And so maladaptation is the term for when an adaptation project causes harm.
Next slide, please.
And so one example of this is seawalls that are constructed on the coast of
Florida.
So sea turtles need to use beaches for their nests.
But if seawalls are constructed, then the turtles often can't get as high
up onto the beaches as they want to go.
And so they end up making their nests closer to the shoreline in front of the
seawalls.
But that is a place where overwash is going to hit the wall,
wash back out the nest.
And so this has significant negative impacts on nests,
sea turtles and so this we use this as an example that removing some of these
barriers and replacing them with an ecosystem based adaptation project would
be a much more inclusive approach.
Next slide, please.
And also in the section on removing barriers,
we wanted to note that we don't just mean constructed barriers like seawalls.
We also mean political barriers, the political boundaries,
and we need cross-border assistance to allow for migration.
Natural migration should be the right of all humans and more than human beings.
But the construction, enforcement and securitization of
political borders is obviously having profound detrimental impacts on the
natural migratory movements of humans and of more than human communities.
So we call for recognizing the fact that securitization of political borders has
numerous harmful impacts on both humans and more than human animals.
Next slide, please.
And then the last tenet from Angie Pepper was about adaptation assistance.
So this would have been what the Mazib Kalramoukis needed,
would have been adaptation assistance to move.
They couldn't have naturally moved themselves to a new island.
They would have required human assistance for that.
And the giant tortoises that live in the Seychelles are also candidates for
migration assistance.
They're very large.
They're slow moving.
They cannot necessarily move to another island on their own,
but they can be moved with assistance if needed.
However, some of the places that they were moved
to, they're also experiencing other threats
like poaching.
So this is about, you know, really thinking about holistic approaches
and how to minimize the harm and also noting that migration is always going to
almost always going to be a last resort.
So, like, it would be much better to prevent sea
level rise, prevent the worst extensive sea level
rise than to have to enact relocations and things like that.
Next slide, please.
So, yeah, just to sum up, we were thinking about the way that the
distribution of sea level rise burdens was impacting different species and that
we need a broader understanding of how these changes are occurring and what
species are being impacted by them.
And then we need a relational lens on ecological diversity that is recognizing
the existence rights of all diverse beings, of humans,
of more than human beings, of everyone.
And then representation in law and policy spaces to allow for planning,
for adaptation and of course, interdisciplinary collaborations and
outreach.
And then next slide, please.
And so I just wanted to point out here some sea level rise advocacy,
sea level rise responses.
Island and coastal communities are always talking about impacts of sea level rise.
And I want to go back to what I said at the start,
that the Alliance of Small Island States has been one of the strongest voices
within international negotiations pushing for strong climate action.
They are the ones who came up with the phrase 1.5 to stay alive,
talking about limiting temperature rise and getting that more ambitious goal of 1.
5°C, limiting temperature rise to 1. 5°C enshrined within the Paris Agreement.
I also want to point out the advocacy of Vanuatu who brought the climate change
advisory opinion case to the International Court of Justice.
I work directly on that case and I also work directly on the case of the
Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law,
which brought a advisory opinion case to the International Tribunal for the Law of
the Sea.
And within all of these, the testimony that was submitted by
Islanders always gets back to the fact that they are part of multi species
communities and that the land, the animals,
and the people are all interconnected and all need to be thought of inclusively.
So these are just some advocacy efforts that are currently occurring.
And then the last slide just has my contact information.
Thank you all for listening.
So everybody, if you have any questions while Doctor
Brown, who's just done what I was about to ask
him, stop sharing the slides.
Please post them on the Q&A.
Anyone who is in the panel with us, the Q&A won't work for us.
Professor Hayes, if you have questions, you'll have to ask them directly.
But Jason, should I kick off with one question?
Sure, that'd be great.
Thank you.
So Doctor Zeda, the first question I have is from William
and I think you may have mentioned a little bit about this right at the start,
but his question is how is sea level rise actually measured?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So traditionally it was measured by like tide gauges,
but they're those only get data from specific tidal tide,
specific coastal locations.
And the coverage of tide gauges is very uneven and has like different geographic
spread and different temporal spread in different regions.
But nowadays, within the last couple of decades,
we've really moved towards measuring a lot with satellite altimetry,
which is using radar altimeters to measure the height of the ocean surface.
And so that's really expanded our ability to see sea level rise as it's occurring
globally at all parts of the ocean rather than just at specific title locations.
Great.
I have a question here from Sarah who says,
I know you mentioned that some species are most affected by climate change and
habitat changes due to sea level rise.
Can you kind of remind us about some of the species that are being harmed again?
And then and then sort of a follow up, how can we,
how can we start to make a difference?
What are the small first steps that we can do?
Yeah, these are great questions.
So within our study, when we were looking through the
systematic literature review, we were looking for any publications
within the conservation and and ecology literature where sea level rise and a
particular species were mentioned.
And so some of the ones we found were like the silver rice rat,
the Alabama beach mouse, the Florida reef gecko, green sea turtles.
There's a lot of different species that are being impacted in different ways.
Some of them are being impacted by salinity intrusion.
Some of them are being impacted by storm surge flooding.
And so there's a really big diversity of what species are being impacted.
And in terms of advocacy efforts, I think the same with all types of
climate change advocacy is like to keep talking about it to keep forming like
collective responses.
So student organizing groups are great for this.
Political organizing groups can be great for this and to just keep talking about
the need for the the three main types of action around climate change,
greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, stopping the production of greenhouse gas
emissions by like noting specifically what their sources are like the carbon
majors and to push for emissions reductions.
And then the second piece is pushing for adaptation responses.
And this can even happen on a local level.
So thinking about like how is sea level rise impacting your own communities and
what types of responses are already being enacted and how can you help out there?
And then the third response to climate change is around loss and damage.
So recognizing the fact that adaptation is not going to be able to prevent all
harms and some loss and some damage is going to occur,
and how do you get that restitution when Lowe's losses and damages start to happen,
usually there needs to be some sort of financial compensation.
So just to keep talking about all of these things and thinking about the ways
that you can work with other people that share your thoughts on this and to try to
build, build power together.
Great.
I have the next question.
But before I ask it, just to remind all the students in the
webinar, once the Q&A is completed, we will share the QR code for you,
register your attendance.
So I have a question from Derek.
Has there been, to your knowledge, another documented extinction from
climate change other than the Bramble Key melamies?
That's a really good question.
I think that there has been another one, but I do not remember the specifics off
the top of my head and I'm so sorry about that.
It's a really good question though.
I have a question from one of our colleagues asking,
is your work part of this?
This is from Lynn Fletcher.
Is your work part of the Center for Breeding Indigenous Knowledges and
Science at UMass?
Oh, that's a good question.
So it's not specifically that center.
Some of my former, like my former PhD advisor is one of the
people that's involved in that.
But that center got funded right after I left the institution,
so I have not been involved with it.
That sort of like came into being as I was leaving to go to the Union of
Concerned Scientists.
So I'm not directly involved.
But I think it's a wonderful thing that they now have going on there.
And yeah, it's really great.
Maybe I will be in the future if I end up, you know,
circling back to E Mass or something.
I have two questions that I'm going to combine because they're very similar from
Kathia and Gracie.
What can we do now in the short term and what can we do in the long term to help
protect animals from sea level rise?
Yeah, I mean, it's such a specific geographic thing,
like the impacts in a particular location are going to be so,
so centered on that location.
So I think like globally talking about the need for emissions reductions,
because that is the thing that will limit the severity of sea level rise.
But there's also, I want to also talk about like
compassionate conservation and, and that sort of movement.
I think that's a really great movement that's happening.
You can look at places like the wild animal initiative.
I used to be on their, their like they're like Advisory Board
type thing.
They are thinking about ways of enacting conservation with like an approach
centered on the individual experiences of animals rather than just on the
collective species.
So both things simultaneously conservation of the species and the lived
experiences of individual animals under climate change.
So I would recommend checking out the Wild Animal Initiative and the
Compassionate Conservation movement to think about how to limit suffering.
And then what can we do now versus in the long term?
I mean, climate change is going to continue to
occur throughout our lifetimes.
Like there's never a stopping point in our advocacy.
We're always pushing towards climate justice and towards minimizing the harm
for all.
So the things that we can do now are set up communities of care for ourselves also
because doing that work is really hard.
And it can come with, you know, mental health challenges,
especially when what we see happening in the political sphere does not align with
the type of climate action that we want to be seeing.
So I think setting up ways for you to take action collectively,
but also ways to take care of each other while taking action.
Love that.
Yeah.
So this question is from Steven.
You mentioned some species being ignored like insects and other invertebrates.
Can you provide any examples from the literature on sea level and ecosystem
change impacts on those kinds of ignored species?
Yeah, we had a tough time like we kept looking
for specific impacts to insects and not not having the easiest time finding them.
We ended up finding like one or two papers that referenced insects.
And one thing that I was thinking about was I,
I absolutely love monarch butterflies.
And I was, as I was thinking about bird migration
routes, I was thinking about monarch migration
routes and the ways that like when monarchs have to cross ocean space,
as sea level rise starts to happen, the, and the land is lost, the, the extent to,
of the ocean that they have to fly over without stopping, it's longer.
And I was like, has anyone written about this?
And I could only find one like little USGS publication that even mentioned that
monarch butterflies could be impacted by sea level rise.
So I think like there, there is, there is just like more to be studied in
a lot of these places and for a lot of these species.
And then we when we were doing the systematic literature review,
we found a lot of publications on broader ecosystem change and we excluded those
from our final search.
Just that we actually we found thousands and thousands of papers in our literature
research.
And so we had to make exclusion criteria.
So we didn't, we focused on ones that named specific
species rather rather than a broader ecosystem change.
I'm not sure if that actually answered the question,
but that's that's what came to mind for me when thinking about that.
I have a question from Noel, one of John's colleagues in the Geography
and Sustainability department.
How does sea level rise challenge the national sovereignty of sorry,
sovereignty of small island nation states, especially when land loss,
population displacement and external control over adaptation or relocation
decisions threaten their political economy and legal status as independent
states?
And this is in the context of, especially when it comes to the country's
rights to sue for climate change.
Yeah.
So this is an excellent question.
So I wrote about this a little bit in my 2022 paper on the Alliance of Small
Island States and Climate Justice Issues within the UNF Triple C.
So there's a little bit about that there, but so much has happened since I
published that paper in 2022.
And so I want to point out for the answer to this question that it lies in the
advisory opinion that was issued by the International Court of Justice last
summer.
And that opinion, the island nations that brought that case
to the ICJ specifically brought this up, the idea of national sovereignty.
And if sovereignty is lost, as places like have the potential to be
permanently inundated and the ICJ opinion says that sea level rise does not impact
national sovereignty.
So within the ICJ case, national sovereignty should be absolutely
not, not impacted by sea level rise.
Like nations should not lose their national sovereignty even if they lose
their land.
However, what that means in practice is very much
an open question after the issuance of that advisory opinion.
And so there's a lot of people thinking about this, you know,
that the AO just came out a couple months ago.
And since the AO does say that sea level rise doesn't impact national sovereignty,
but the reality of the situation is so detrimental,
is this is like an open question that we now have of legal guidance on,
but that we're going to be needing follow up litigation and other types of things
to to look at.
And also, I'm just going to plug that I have a,
a commentary piece out in Nature climate change from this past fall on the
advisory opinion cases and the need for epistemic plurality and epistemic
diversity.
All right.
Do we have time for one more question, you think, Frank?
Yeah, one will.
Definitely.
All right, so this question is from Taylor.
Who says who decides which species get legal protection globally?
Government agencies, scientists, NGOs.
And how can someone nominate A newly identified endangered species?
And practically, are protections usually limited to whole
species, or can they cover subspecies, local populations or microbes?
And how is that boundary determined?
OK so this is a really good question but I don't know the specific answer.
I'm not a conservation biologist, but I would say the IUCN is probably the
place to check.
Like how species get added to the IUCN and then how that gets taken seriously on
a national or sub national basis is varies pretty widely across different
political climates.
So I don't think I have a a specific and satisfying answer to this question,
but I think it's a really good question, really good.
John.
I'll pass it back to you to formally thank Doctor Sedai,
and then I'll share the QR code for our students.
All righty.
Well, thank you, Shana.
Just what a stimulating talk for the students and the audience.
Just this to you to see the intersection that you brought together of climate
change impacts, sea level rise impacts ecology globally
and specific and then this social and political justice component for the
students that that this is the real world.
We have to we have to it's interdisciplinary and we benefit from
this, this approach and this training and this
approach.
So again, thank you so much.
Doctor Shaynas and I we just thrilled to have your have you here like to thank the
audience for their questions.
I, I just was great to hear all those
questions, my colleagues and other and students.
What a what a great, what a great afternoon webinar.
So thanks again.
Thank you so much for having me.