{"id":1280,"date":"2011-10-24T17:22:19","date_gmt":"2011-10-24T17:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop17durban\/?p=1280"},"modified":"2011-11-02T19:52:51","modified_gmt":"2011-11-02T19:52:51","slug":"%e2%80%9cyou-have-to-celebrate-nothing-happening-%e2%80%9d-vajjhala","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop17durban\/2011\/10\/%e2%80%9cyou-have-to-celebrate-nothing-happening-%e2%80%9d-vajjhala\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cYou have to celebrate nothing happening.\u201d – Vajjhala"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Shalini Vajjhala, Deputy Assistant Administrator, Office of International & Tribal Affairs, EPA<\/p><\/div>\n

By Emily Bowie ’14<\/em><\/p>\n

This past week the Global Mosaic students had the valuable opportunity to talk to government officials and scientists from Washington, DC about their jobs, experiences and their perspectives on both Climate Change and December\u2019s COP 17. One of these delegates was Shalili Vajjhala, the Deputy Assistant Administrator to the Office of International & Tribal Affairs in the EPA. Vajjhala was one of the few women we heard from over the two days, her message was insightful and her friendly presence was well received by all of us.<\/p>\n

Vajjhala continued the discussion we had began with Ko Barrett (Associate Director for International Affairs in the Climate Program Office at NOAA) concerning the growing area of policy surrounding climate adaptation issues. Vajjhala works both internationally as well as nationally concerning this issue, nationally she works mainly with affected, or threatened, tribal communities.<\/p>\n

One point that Vajjhala made really stood out to me. She said that adaptation is one of the trickiest political issues because \u201cyou have to celebrate nothing happening.\u201d I had never looked at climate adaptation policy this way before. Essentially, for adaptation policy to work you need to observe no changes in the subject of the policy. But if nothing happens then how can you measure success? And if there is no way to measure the success of a policy then why would the government implement the policy, or more importantly, fund it?<\/p>\n

It appears to me that most political actions are implemented as a response to something that is occurring. For instance, driving laws were put in place because accidents were happening, after the laws were put in place a measurable decline in the numbers of accidents was observed. This observation provided incentive for the government to keep funding the institutions that implemented the laws. With climate adaptation, however, we cannot adhere to this policy implementation structure. By the time we see the effects we want to avoid it will be too late to implement them. But at the same time, we cannot put in place intense adaptation policies unless we are positive it is absolutely necessary because we don\u2019t have copious amounts of money to waste. So the question really is, what amount of concrete evidence of climate vulnerability will we need in order to begin forming crucial adaptation policy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Emily Bowie ’14
\nThis past week the Global Mosaic students had the valuable opportunity to talk to government officials and scientists from Washington, DC about their jobs, experiences and their perspectives on both Climate Change and December\u2019s COP 17. One of these delegates was Shalili Vajjhala, the Deputy Assistant Administrator to the Office of International & Tribal Affairs in the EPA. Vajjhala was one of the few women we heard from over the two days, her message was insightful and her friendly presence was well received by all of us.
\nVajjhala continued the discussion we had began with Ko Barrett (Associate Director for International Affairs in the Climate Program Office at NOAA) concerning the growing area of policy surrounding climate adaptation issues. Vajjhala works both internationally as well as nationally concerning this issue, nationally she works mainly with affected, or threatened, tribal communities.
\nOne point that Vajjhala made really stood out to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":837,"featured_media":1352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19448,40558,22261,34197],"tags":[1482,1301,25625,42554,42563],"class_list":["post-1280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change-2","category-climate-change-politics","category-featured","category-key-cop17-issues","tag-adaptation","tag-climate-change","tag-emily-bowie","tag-ko-barrett","tag-shalini-vajjhala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop17durban\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop17durban\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop17durban\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop17durban\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/837"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop17durban\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop17durban\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop17durban\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop17durban\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop17durban\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop17durban\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}