Mark Stemen
— curator —
Mark Stemen is Professor of Geography at California State University, Chico.
At Chico State, I teach eight classes every year. I have around 135 students per semester cycle through three sections of my Sustainability Issues course, where they learn all the terrifying things some of us already know about the state of the environment (syllabus).
As many of you know all too well, lecturing on all of this destruction can get pretty depressing, for both students and faculty. To counter that, I created a class to give my students and I an opportunity to enact positive change on our campus and in our community.
We have worked on local food security by building community gardens and redesigning the local farms market. We improved the urban ecology by planting street trees and cleaning the local creek. We always wanted to work directly on climate change, but I could never figure out a meaningful project that could be completed in a semester.
Then I found Cal-Adapt. Cal-Adapt changed my life by changing how I could teach—and I am hoping it will do the same for you.
For most Californians, the climate issue remains geographically distant and easily dismissed. Teachers reinforce this distance in our classrooms when we describe potential climate impacts that are hundreds if not thousands of miles away.
Cal-Adapt.org challenges this dynamic. The California Energy Commission (CEC) partnered with the Geospatial Labs at UC Berkeley to “downscale” the global climate models and the result allows anyone to model climate in California down to the level of zip code. This site describes Cal-Adapt in detail and provides examples on how to use it in high school, college, and university classrooms.
The CEC initially developed Cal-Adapt for electric utility professionals to assess how climate change will impact their infrastructure in California. In my classes, I discovered the tool also applies to projects on public health, criminology and creative writing. One group of college students, for example, used the tool to explore past connections between heat waves, hospital visits, and crime rates.
My secondary goal was to provide people with a path forward, and hope for the future. To that aim, students wrote fictional stories set in the future that reflected back on successful adaptions, under the heading Dispatches From the Future.
I have used Cal-Adapt in four different class projects:
Scroll down to read about these four projects and get the course materials for each one, including syllabi, readings, videos, assignments.
— a “how to” video for elementary courses with a set of lesson plans for introductory courses (including 2-3 hours of in-class instruction and activities; 4-14 hours of out of class assignments) and a ready to use hand-out Introduction to Cal-Adapt.
In July of 2020, Dr. Mark Stemen (CSU Chico) demonstrated how to utilize Cal-Adapt.
This video is part of the “Using EE to Lower the Emissions Trajectory & Adapt to High Heat” academic project developed by Strategic Energy Innovations (SEI) and CSU Chico.
To request the full curriculum, complete this form.
In 2019, I worked with a team of 10th grade students from the Terra Linda High School in San Rafael. They used Cal-Adapt to model the future climate of Marin County, including the increase in extreme heat events. They then surveyed the community on impacts and adaptations, and later propose their solutions to the City of San Rafael in April 2020, for inclusion in the City’s Climate Action Plan.
The students are enrolled in the Marin School of Environmental Leadership (M-SEL), a “school within a school” located within a comprehensive public high school.
M-SEL’s version of Cal-Adapt in the Classroom is considered a LEAD project. Leadership and Environmental Action Development (LEAD) Projects are semester-long group projects completed each semester of 9th grade and sophomores participate in a longer, more challenging project. The project choices are designed to address one or more of the following environmental themes: climate, transportation, energy, water, waste, and food. These projects provide a chance for students to work with community partners interested in making change in the community and are meant to challenge and develop the students’ 4 C’s skills.
Our LEAD project focused on the climate change impact of extreme heat, specifically for the residents living in the disadvantaged community of the Canal District. Students used the Cal-Adapt tool to forecast the increase in the number of extreme heat days in San Rafael in the coming decades. They found that historically (1960-1990), San Rafael has experienced an average of four extreme heat days (95 degrees and higher) per year. For 2020, Cal-Adapt projects that San Rafael will experience an average of six days with temperatures 95 degrees or higher per year. For 2050, the average number of extreme heat days rises to nine annually.
They also researched heat waves (four days or more of extreme heat). While Cal-Adapt projects an average of up to nine extreme heat days per year by 2050, some years will have more and some years will have less. They found Cal-Adapt projects three future heat waves for San Rafael in late June and early July:
The students surveyed residents on their personal adaptation strategies. To make sure they heard all voices, in addition to surveying the general population, they reached out to the disadvantaged community of the Canal District with surveys in English, Spanish and Vietnamese. The different results revealed the way wealth and income influenced the responses to extreme heat.
When asked about ways they or their family members handle an extremely hot day, turning on the air conditioning was the primary response for people outside the Canal, while travel to air conditioning was the primary response to people living in the Canal. The same split can be seen when people were what activities were limited by the heat. People in the Canal avoided cooking in the heat. Few (none) outside the canal mentioned not cooking, under the assumption they have air conditioning to cool the house back down. Both groups avoided exercise. Canal residents could not do physical work; non-residents could not walk the dog.
People in the Canal tended to stay local if they left the home looking for a cooler location (mall, shopping, movie) while others often mentioned leaving town or going on vacation. In general, people in the Canal tended to list “stay home” more than others.
The students presented their findings to the City of San Rafael’s Climate Action Plan Forum via Zoom (due to the pandemic) and submitted a final report.
The students shared their final recommendations with the community in the form of stories (based in the future) that describe successful adaptations that have made life better for San Rafael residents. The adaptation does not eliminate the increase in temperature, but their stories show how the adaptation can make the hotter days more bearable, and in some cases, even enjoyable if it involves play.
Some of the potential adaptations to extreme heat they discussed are:
Here is the Extreme Heat Team’s introductory video, final report, and final stories.
In 2019, the high school students are drafted an Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan (EHPP) based on the Chico Plan. The Chico EHPP was created by a Civic Spark Fellow working with Dr. Stemen and creating such a plan was the top recommendation of the 2017 Climate Vulnerability Assessment.
READ THE EXTREME HEAT TEAM’S DRAFT FINAL REPORT:
City of Chico – Extreme Heat Event Preparedness Plan
ASSIGNMENT: LEAD Research Paper
Chico State University announced in January of 2018 the development of a new master plan for the campus. Students raised questions about the impacts of climate change on the new buildings. The answers were less than reassuring. So, in the Fall of 2018, we circled back home. Using Cal-Adapt climate tools, my class generated a climate forecast for California State University, Chico. The students explored potential impacts based on the three traditional division of the university: academic affairs, business affairs, and student affairs. Impacts in hand, they then wrote Dispatches From the Future, fictional accounts of future campus life that looked back on the successful adaptations made to the same climate impacts they projected.
Students presented the “vulnerability assessment” in two parts: a climate impact report and an adaptation story. The students used Cal-Adapt as well as the projections from the previous year’s assessment. Since no Adaptation Planning Guide (APG) exist for college campuses with a list of adaptations, the students had to imagine the campus adaptations based on the previous year’s work.
The students were instructed to tell a story looking back on a successful adaptation that made life better in 2037. The class spent a good amount of time exploring the subject of story-telling, specifically the ability of story to overcome the psychological barriers to accepting and acting on climate change identified by Per Espen Stoknes. The setting for their stories is graduation weekend 2037, the 150th anniversary of Chico State. The students read a number of articles on the power of story, as well as Randy Olson’s Houston, We Have a Narrative and his ABT (And, But, Therefore) template, all with the goal of making them master storytellers.
The lack of a professional framework—we were narrators, not reporters—allowed for more creativity and personality in the work. Students could dream again, and while those dreams were built on nightmarish premises, they nevertheless drew hope from seemingly hopeless circumstances. Some chose to focus their work on their majors while others choose to focus on their extra-curricular activities. A surprising number choose to focus on mental health.
Since the adaptations were in response to a climate impact, I had to create a fictional “climate history” for students to use to tell their stories. The graphic data presented on Cal-Adapt is not meant to show actual future conditions but rather potential conditions and trends. Students averaged the data from 2032-2042, for example, to arrive at their projections for 2037. For the historic “climate events,” they needed to write the dispatches; however, I treated the yearly climate projections as an annual data record.
In my climate history, for example, 2031 was “the year without a winter.” Cal-Adapt forecasts no snow for Butte Meadow, the headwaters to the creek that runs through campus, and the low temperature is predicted to never drop below 32 degrees. In my history, the 2020’s are the “decade of fires,” with three major fires in seven years. In retrospect we realized that Cal-adapt predicted the Camp Fire of 2018, but the actual fire was ten times bigger and struck ten years sooner. This really freaked us out!
A fellow faculty member had been expressed intrigue in the project prior to the beginning of the semester, as it complimented work he was doing in how own class. We ultimately paired up for a concluding event, the Community Action Planning Talks. These talks bring students together to hear about an issue and then make plans to address it. The previous year, students and community members identified insufficient lighting in areas throughout the city of Chico as a key safety concern. They responded by hosting the Keep Chico Lit Rally to actively bring awareness and change towards this issue. My students presented their work for the 2108 CAP Talks and a plethora of actions came from it, including a campaign to get climate change taught in every field of study and a declaration of a climate emergency from the student government.
Their work is available at chicostate2037.com.
SYLLABUS: GEO 506, Community Service in Geography (Stemen, Fall 2018)
COURSE READINGS AND RESOURCES: GEO 506 (Stemen, Fall 2018)
ASSIGNMENT: “Dispatch from the Future,” GEO 506 (Stemen, Fall 2018)
The goal of this two-part assignment is for you to forecast future climate impacts on CSU, Chico and identify potential adaptations or changes to campus operations that will allow those operations to continue. To overcome the dissonance that people feel when hearing about climate change, you will describe the adaptations in story form, written from the future looking back.
Midway through the 2016 semester, I discovered that Cal-Adapt was a component of a much larger project in climate adaptation planning. The State of California divides climate adaptation planning into a nine-step process. The first five steps constitute a climate vulnerability assessment. The second four steps constitute the adaptation plan to respond to those vulnerabilities. In 2017, I decided to design a class that would create climate vulnerability assessments for the City of Chico and Butte County to assist both in meeting state-mandated adaptation plans. In retrospect I bit off too much, but we were ultimately able to produce an assessment for the City of Chico and collect useful data for the county.
In 2017, students used Cal-Adapt and the California Adaptive Planning Guides (APG) to produce their climate vulnerability assessments. The APG was developed by the California Emergency Management Agency and California Natural Resources Agency, and it details the nine-step process for local and regional climate vulnerability assessment and adaptation. The guide was “developed to allow flexibility in the commitment of time, money, and scope” as well as to “educate municipal planners on the hazards posed by climate change. ” These twin purposes also make the APG a valuable tool for educating students in a classroom setting, and I was able to use this flexible structure to support independent student inquiry while also producing a useful report for planners.
The students were aided by a Civic Spark fellow, who turned out to be a crucial partner on the project. Civic Spark is a Governor’s Initiative AmeriCorps program dedicated to building capacity for local governments in California to address climate change, water, and land-use needs. During the 11-month service year, Civic Spark fellows support the state’s response to climate change by working with local governments to complete research, planning, or implementation projects. At the same time, fellows receive substantial professional development training and access to a network of local, regional, and state sustainability leaders. This internship program is a great opportunity for our recent graduates. It is also a great place to get support for our own climate action. The City of Chico and Butte County split a Civic Spark fellowship position in the fall, and the fellow provided the connection between students and city and county staff. Our fellow was able to step up and fill in any gaps in the students’ research. They also compiled all the student research and formatted a climate impact report for the county and the climate vulnerability assessment for the city.
The project was ambitious, and not without its faults. The students organized themselves into teams based on sectors—Public Health, Socioeconomic and Equity, Water Management, Biodiversity and Habitat, Forest and Rangeland, Agriculture, Infrastructure—defined in the APG. The APG organizes the assessment reporting based on sectors, so that is how I divided the class. In contrast, Cal-Adapt divides by impacts: temperature, precipitation, wildfire, snowpack, sea level rise. In hindsight, the Cal-Adapt framework turned out to be a better way of framing the discussion. I believe thinking about climate change by impact is more intuitive for students who struggled listing all the impacts for their sector. It would have been better to organize the students by impacts—temperature, for example—and then discuss how the rise in temperature will impacts the various sectors because the impacts are often similar across sectors.
The two different scales were also problematic. Chico is compact and has an easily identified set of impacts. Butte County is sprawling, and impacts are less understood or uniform. There is little farmland within the city, for example, while the county is primarily agriculture. The city has no timberlands, but the eastern edge of the county is heavily forested. Moreover, the climate impacts to wild flora and fauna are vast and hopelessly complicated, varying watershed to watershed. Chico is located entirely within the Big Chico Creek Watershed. There are five distinct watersheds in Butte County.
In conclusion, I believe it is possible for any civically engaged teacher and their students to produce a useful climate vulnerability assessment for their town (especially if they have assistance like we did) but a county level assessment is too much for most classes.
The assessment is available at chicosustainability.org.
SYLLABUS: Community Service Practice in Geography, GEOG 506 (Mark Stemen 2017).
ASSIGNMENT: Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment
RESOURCES:
California Adaptation Planning Guide: Planning for Adaptive Communities (2012)
California Adaption Planning Guide: Defining Local & Regional Impacts (2012)
California Adaptation Planning Guide: Understanding Regional Characteristics (2012)
California Adaptation Planning Guide: Identifying Adaptation Strategies (2012)
NOTE: Students in this 2017 class discovered that SCRUM – The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time to be effective in organizing their group work.
In the fall of 2016, my students used Cal-Adapt to forecast different climate scenarios and their potential impacts on Chico. The class was a kind of pilot project with a short incubation period. Cal-Adapt was a new tool I had only discovered that spring, and I spent much of the summer putting together a class I had no way of knowing would work. I did not know about the Adaption Planning Guides or SB 379’s adaptation requirements—I discovered those as the project progressed. I just knew that Cal-Adapt was the shit and I wanted my students to get in on it.
Cal-Adapt’s graphic layout caught my attention immediately, and the depth of its data picked up where my classes had previously left off. I was often uncomfortably vague when I lectured about climate change for lack of more precise measurements. It is going to get warmer. We need to prepare. But how much warmer my students asked? Cal-Adapt provided the specifics. It estimates average temperatures in Chico will increase 5.3 degrees by 2050 (71.1-76.4) and 8.6 degrees (79.7) by 2100. Average increases are listed in specific numbers, but the extreme heat tool provided even greater detail. Extreme heat is defined as the hottest 2%. For Chico, that is 104, another hard number, with an average of four per year. Using Cal-Adapt, I could show students that Chico was not only going to have more extreme heat days, but how many it was projected to have: an average of sixteen extreme heat days by 2030, with as many as 30 days possible in some years.
One way to describe climate change is to say current extremes will become future averages. My initial idea was to forecast the climate and then compare to past scenarios of weather extremes in Northern California. So, I collected a lot of readings around three such events: the 2005 heat wave, the Fire Siege of 2008, and the 2015 drought. We also discussed the recent historical precipitation that led to the collapse of the Oroville Dam spillway as an additional baseline for our findings.
The impacts of heat are more universal across a region than fire and flood, which made them easier to study. I was able to recreate the daily temperatures for the summer of 2005, which Cal-Adapt forecasts to be the average summer by 2030. The question them became: what will life be like at those temperatures, and what kind of negative effects can we expect our community to face? I had a pre-nursing student in class who expressed interest in the likely connection between heat waves and hospital visits. She requested visitation records from Enloe Hospital during 2005 and discovered a significant increase in hospital visits. Course readings mention the possible connection between heat and crime. When I requested the logs from the same period, however, I found no correlation between the two. The only correlation between heat and crime was in a decrease in noise complaints. It was either too hot to make noise, or everyone was inside with their air conditioner on and couldn’t hear it.
My students also used Cal-Adapt to project the future climate scenarios for precipitation and considered how changes to seasonal precipitation patterns would affect life in Chico. They learned that certain city streets would flood more often under their projections because current storm drain infrastructure could not handle the increased water. With increased heat comes drier conditions; my students discovered that the city had no fire plan for a heavily forested park that extends from the fire-prone foothills to the center of town. They also learned that police chief himself was worried about the increase in temperatures and on his own he had been researching water-cooled ballistic vests.
From the outset of the project, I saw its potential for impact on work being done at City Hall. So, I approached the City Manager, who I had worked with before, and asked him to allow my students to share their findings with the department division heads. He agreed, under very strict limitation—essentially, students had a two-week window to prepare and present their findings with officials. The work paid off. The findings of the 2016 course led to changes in the City of Chico’s General Plan with the notable inclusion of climate adaptation language. Additionally, the new plan instructed staff to prepare a climate vulnerability assessment that would comply with SB 379.
The mission of the 2016 class went beyond preparing and presenting a local climate forecast for 2030. If we wanted people to hear what we found, what we said was not nearly as important as how we said it. Espen Stoknes’s book, What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming: Toward a Social Psychology of Climate Action had a profound impact on how I see climate action and informed my instruction of the course. Stokes’s central thesis is that messages on climate action need to overcome five psychological barriers, what he calls the Five Ds: Distance, Doom, Dissonance, Denial, and iDentity.
Often the climate issue remains distant from us, framed as an event taking place beyond our immediate surroundings.
Paradoxically, it is also presented as an all-consuming and fast encroaching doom that we have no interest in confronting. When what we learn about climate change conflicts with what we see, feel, and do, dissonance sets in.
Denial is triggered by fear of the future and guilt over passed decisions, and thus is based in self-defense, not ignorance or lack of information.
Lastly, we filter information through our cultural identity. As a country, the US fancies itself an industrious and prosperous nation—thanks to fossil fuel infrastructure.
All of these attitudes influence how people react to climate change, and it is imperative that climate activism addresses the how of its message as much as the what and why.
So how do we talk about climate change? Cal-Adapt provided the data, I wanted to find a way to talk about it that would resonate with my students.
In his book, Don’t Even Think About It, George Marshall writes, “stories are the means by which humans make sense of the world, learn our values, form our beliefs, and give shape to our thoughts, dreams, hopes and fears.” I was astounded to learn that “before we can even read and write, we have learned more than three hundred stories.” More importantly, “stories perform a fundamental cognitive function: They are the means by which the emotional brain makes sense of the information collected by the rational brain…Beliefs are held entirely in the form of story.”
I decided to write four short “Dispatches From the Future, positive stories set in the future that describe successful adaptations to climate change.” The goal was to help people imagine a possible way through the unavoidable crises our community will face in the coming years. Among the topics were the 75th Anniversary of our summertime Friday Night Concert Series, The 150th Anniversary of the local Johnny Appleseed Festival, and the 150th Anniversary of Chico State.
The latter would become the theme for 2018.
FEATURED MEDIA RESOURCES
Published on Jun 14, 2017
The Chico 2030 Project: Climate Forecasting for Everyone, by Mark Stemen
For most Californians, the climate issue remains geographically distant, so they can easily dismiss it.
Faculty reinforce this distance in our classrooms when we describe potential climate impacts that are hundreds if not thousands of miles away.
Cal-Adapt has the potential to change that classroom dynamic. The new climate-modeling tool developed by the California Energy Commission (CEC) now allows anyone to model climate in California by zip code.
My presentation will describe how students in GEOG 506: Community Service in Geography used the Cal-Adapt climate tools to forecast the climate in Chico, CA for the period 2030-2050. Students then met, data in hand, with key staff at the City of Chico to catalog potential impacts to the community and City services. Their findings and all research materials were placed on the web to allow others to continue the project.
The CEC developed Cal-Adapt primarily for use by public planners. In my class, however, we discovered the tool is also useful in the fields of public health, criminology and creative writing.
Some students used the tool to explore past connections between heat waves and hospital visits and crime rates, while others wrote fictional accounts of the near future using the forecasts available with Cal-Adapt.
This presentation will demonstrate how faculty from across the campus can use Cal-Adapt to improve the teaching of climate change in their classes.
More on Per Espen Stoknes’ book here.
Video Directed & Written by: Max DeArmon, Missy Lahren & Theo Badashi. Produced by: Maximilian DeArmon. Narrated by: Dana Smirin. Animation by: Fox In The Box Studio. Project manager: Maki Ferenc Illustration and animation – Borsi Laszlo & Kassay Reka Sound design – Laszlo Jozsef Additional music by Audio Jungle Based on “What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming” by Per Espen Stoknes. All Right Reserved. Copy written by Planetary Advocates.
Published on UCtv by Sustainable California on June 5, 2017.
Introducing Sustainable California – where you connect with your University and the real-world solutions it is providing to maintain the sustainability and vitality of our state. Become part of real-world solutions so together we can meet the 21st century challenges of global climate change while maintaining California’s unique biodiversity and sustaining the human and environmental health of California.
Published by Cal-Adapt on Mar 29, 2019
This film centers on Dr. Mark Stemen’s current and former students.
Published by Al Jezeera+ on August 27, 2019.
Published by Jeff Layne at CSU Chico, October 2, 2019.
Read the CHICO GREEN NEW DEAL, by Chico City Council members Alex Brown and Karl Ory.
Published by Our Revolution, Contra Costa, June 3, 2020.