What also remains constant, is his active research on freshwater climate adaptation, and his commentary on anthropogenic climate change and freshwater conservation and economic development trends.  

Sounds like the perfect candidate for a brain picking.  

Dr. Matthews is a climate change adaptation specialist, which is a rather interesting and unusual but important term, especially in these days of constant climate change issues and problems. He also supports the staff at the World Wildlife Federation on freshwater issues as part of the WWF Climate Adaptation Network.

What is your background? How did you get into the climate change field?

I grew up in east Texas in a small town. Like many biologists, my family got me engaged in being outside and learning about natural history from an early age. My parents were both public school teachers and politically active. Conservation was very important to them and they passed that concern on to me. My professional training is a bit unusual for a biologist. My undergraduate degree (BA) was in cultural anthropology, and I focused on ethnomusicology, which is the study of culture through musical expression. My particular emphasis was on the blues, which fit since I was living in Chicago at the time. Although I enjoyed my fieldwork, I decided that I didn’t want to get a PhD in the discipline, so I began looking for a job in the New York metro region. I eventually took a position with a university textbook publishing firm.

I enjoyed this work a great deal and eventually worked in the industry about 12 years, mostly as a book editor but also in sales and marketing. While I liked publishing, I could see that the conservation issues that had concerned me as a child were even more pressing today, and wondered if instead of contributing to environmental organizations by writing checks I could become a conservation biologist.

At the age of 32, I left publishing to take some of the undergraduate biology-major courses I had neglected in college (my first lab partner was born the same year I had last enrolled in a biology class!). After two years, I enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Texas in Austin. My advisor there was Camille Parmesan, who is an unusual ecologist. She combines solid research with a lot of outreach to policymakers. That kind of relevance appealed to me. Her particular focus was climate change: how global warming was impacting species and ecosystems. My PhD project explored some of these impacts in freshwater species. I immediately struck with how little we knew about how freshwater ecosystems were being altered by climate change, and how scary that lack of knowledge was for both conservation and economic development. How would we as a species respond to the changes I was seeing in the field? How many species were we going to lose from climate change? I finished my program in 2007 (about five years, a normal period for a US PhD), whereupon I began a postdoctoral position with the US Geological Survey, a branch of the US federal government that does a lot of conservation research.

Shortly after I accepted that position, I saw a listing for a position with WWF (the World Wildlife Fund, a large international non-profit) for a freshwater climate adaptation specialist. I had never heard of a job like that and, with the encouragement of my postdoc advisor, I applied and was hired in November of 2007.

You have a very interesting job as a climate adaptation specialist. What exactly do you do
 
For background, climate change efforts generally fall into four categories: how is the climate changing (climate change science), what are the impacts from those changes (climate impacts science), how can we alter the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (climate mitigation), and how can we help people and species adjust in practical terms to the emerging climate (climate adaptation). Biologists mostly fall into climate impacts science, which is what I was doing as a grad student. My current position is in climate adaptation, which is a very new field.

The short version of what I do is that I’m a bit like a consultant for WWF on freshwater climate adaptation. WWF has about 4,000 employees globally and works in roughly 100 countries; we normally speak of WWF as operating as a network of people and initiatives. I basically help people think about how to bring climate adaptation perspectives into their projects. I do this on several levels: within WWF in places like the Pantanal of Brazil or the Yangtze river of China, with policymakers at national or international levels, with peer organizations such as The Nature Conservancy or Wetlands International, and with other big organizations, such as the World Bank and the United Nations Environment Program. All of these mean that I spend an inordinate amount of time traveling and skyping.

Why focus on freshwater as opposed to saltwater?

The easy answer is that I’m a freshwater ecologist rather than a marine biologist. But I’ve always loved freshwaters … I feel like I grew up in a canoe, swimming, fishing in ponds and rivers, and wading through marshes. Climate change terrifies me, and the potential for horrific impacts on people and other species should worry us all. We really know very little about what to expect beyond knowing that a lot of big changes are already in progress.

What are the differences in the way one studies the affects of climate change and freshwater with climate change and saltwater?
 
There are a lot of differences. Relative to the ocean, freshwater ecosystems are generally quite small. Even big systems like the Great Lakes of North America are minute compared to the world’s oceans. That means that they’re very sensitive to changes in changes in precipitation patterns, and we’ve already seen a lot of shifts globally in precipitation from climate change. Another big difference is that people everywhere depend on freshwater, and as a result there is no real concept of wilderness for freshwater ecosystems. People can live in the middle of Asia or Africa, far from the oceans, and we can subsist in the hot Sahara or the cold of Greenland. But everywhere we need and use freshwater. And as a result, almost everywhere there is water, you also find people. In fact, some freshwater ecosystems have been managed and exploited by humans for really long periods — wetlands in east Asia have been modified for rice production in some cases for more than 8,000 years, and there are dams in Yemen and Turkey that are millennia old.  

What is anthropogenic climate change for our readers that don’t know and how has human activity which has caused anthropogenic climate change affected the marine world, if at all?
 
Anthropogenic climate change is the formal, scientific term for global warming. The earth’s climate has shifted many times throughout the earth’s history and for many reasons — many of the readers may be aware that a glacial period (“ice age”) ended about 12,000 years ago. However, humans introduced a new mechanism to alter the climate beginning with the industrial revolution, beginning roughly around 1800 AD when we began burning fossil fuels in increasingly large quantities. Fossil fuels like coal and petroleum are well named; they are from ancient organic deposits that have been chemically altered over millions of years. They represent carbon that used to be in the atmosphere but has been isolated in the earth’s crust. By burning those deposits in our cars and factories, we release that carbon to the atmosphere again, usually in the form of carbon dioxide or methane. Both of those gases are very efficient at capturing the earth’s radiant energy (infrared radiation), which then warms up the earth’s atmosphere more than it has been warmed in several million years.

The chemical mechanisms, even the predictions of the impacts, are not scientifically controversial and haven’t been for a long time. Some of Napoleon’s scientists in the early 1800s suggested that the rapid industrialization of France might alter regional climate, and a Swedish chemist measured the heat-retention properties of carbon dioxide about 1890 — and grew worried about what coal and oil consumption might mean for the future. All of this extra energy and heat has been changing the global climate system for over 200 years now, and the pace of change is rapidly increasing. We’ve seen shifts in air temperate, the rate, timing, and form of precipitation, the extent of glaciers and icepacks, and the frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as tropical storms, droughts, and floods. All of these shifts are impacting freshwater ecosystems now, as we speak.

While the climate has changed many times in the past, humans have placed lots of barriers in the way of adjusting to climate shifts. A frog or a fish species that might have moved its range to a more climate friendly area is likely to be threatened with water pollution, dams, invasive species, and highways. That means that unless we help people and species adjust, we’re going to lose a lot, and we’re likely to lose it pretty quickly. The biggest problem from a climate adaptation perspective is that we’ve put such large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, that even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today the earth’s climate would continue to change for many decades. In fact, sea-level rise would be likely to continue for centuries. It will take several hundred years to really correct many of the problems we’ve created by altering the climate.

What’s your take on freshwater conservation and what needs to be done to make others more aware of the importance of this issue?
 
At the individual citizen’s level, we all need to motivate our elected representatives to commit to much lower greenhouse gas emissions, and to implement those changes very quickly. That will slow the rate of climate change for the future — and perhaps our grandchildren or great-grandchildren will hate us a little less than they might otherwise. Morally, I think we should all also do what we can to severely limit our carbon emissions for the same reason: drive and fly less, consume less energy, and so on. But we also need to begin preparing our families and communities for the emerging climate, and much of that preparedness means thinking about water. Probably the biggest danger in most parts of the US is from extreme weather events, such as very severe or long droughts. For those of that live in the industrialized world, I believe as well that we have a responsibility to help poorer nations and wild species adjust. We have benefited from the carbon-wasteful lifestyle we have pursued for so long. They have not, and they must suffer the brunt of the consequences.  

Do you believe that someone who believes in freshwater conservation or the idea of marine conservation in general can own a saltwater aquarium?
 
As long as you’re not taking threatened species out of their natural habitat or consuming large quantities of energy to run your aquarium, I don’t really see a problem with it.

What needs to be done to combat the climate change problem, particularly how it affects bodies of water?

Most of the dilemma of climate shifts comes from two issues: we can’t do much about changes coming to the global climate system other than try to slow them down, and it’s hard to predict (in a quantitative way rather than a qualitative manner) what these impacts are going to look like in particular places at a particular time. In this sense, preparing for the emerging climate really means making a kind alcoholic’s pledge: accepting that we don’t have a lot of control over the big drivers and that a lot of change is coming.

As a result, beyond reducing the rate of climate change, the major interventions we need to implement now are adjusting our relationship to freshwater ecosystems: using less water in areas where droughts are likely to increase in frequency/severity, preparing our flood management systems where floods will be increasing in frequency/severity, moving people and species to ranges that are more suitable, and reducing the other pressures that humans have imposed on wild species that are reducing their inherent ability to respond to the emerging climate, such as the agricultural pollution you see in places like the Mississippi or Chesapeake bay.  

What outreach have you done on climate change issues?
 
I do a lot of outreach. My ClimateChange Water Blog has been up about 15 months and gets about 30,000 hits a month. I’ve spoken about 65 or 70 times since I started this position, with audiences ranging from general audiences in the U.S., scientists from India, conservation planners in Brazil, and protected areas managers in China. Annually, I travel about 200,000 miles a year, mostly giving talks and meeting with people. And yes I have carbon offsets for those emissions.

On your blog, you contend that “our time may be a critical period in history, when events began pivoting in many areas.” Explain how that refers to climate change, freshwater and marine conservation.

Climate change means that a lot of the things we’ve been doing for a long time in conservation are no longer appropriate. Hydrologists and engineers, for instance, have started talking about there being a crisis in the assumption of “stationarity” — the assumption that studying the recent past will tell us about what will be a good guide to coming decades. That’s how dams have been designed throughout the 20th century, for instance. We’ve made the same assumption in conservation — both for freshwater and marine ecosystems.

But stationarity assumes that the climate isn’t changing, and since we can’t make the same kinds of quantitative predictions about the future with the same confidence that we felt in the past, we have to create new rules and revisit our priorities. Are we making investments and decisions now we’ll regret in 10 or 20 years? Coral reefs in some regions, for instance, are likely to completely disappear as a result of warmer ocean temperatures and higher ocean acidity, so restoring those areas may not be a good investment. And our limited conservation resources may need to be spent in areas where the reefs are likely to be more resilient in the face of a shifting climate. The same is true for freshwater ecosystems. Climate change forces a new set of complex, difficult decisions on us.  

What can we do to ensure hope for the future in terms of water conservation, climate change awareness?
 
That’s not an easy question. Mostly, this is a time issue. It’s not been a scientific issue for at least twenty years now. We need policymakers and citizens with resolve and strength to get past obstacles — and to do so quickly. Clearly, we need very strong international agreements to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. And we need people to support the difficult decisions that our policymakers will explore to reduce national carbon footprints. Because of the way that the US economy and society are structured, we here in North America will face some abrupt impacts on our daily lives if we want our grandchildren to inherit a world that would be less awful than without us making those changes.

Sadly, I am concerned that climate change is not taken very seriously as an issue by most citizens or the media in the US compared to Europe, China, or even Africa; these issues have become politicized in the US but are not really viewed in the same way in most other countries. Globally, those of who are intimately involved with climate change issues are trying to get the message out. I find most that most climate skeptics are willing to hear me out and most seem to respond positively. I feel hope that most of the people I work with are good, dedicated, and smart. The message is so important. I hope we can convince enough hearts and minds quickly enough.

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