Chris Funk is the Director of the Climate Hazards Center (CHC) at UC Santa Barbara. He works with an international team of Earth scientists to inform weather and famine-related disaster responses. Chris studies climate and climate change while also developing improved data sets and monitoring/prediction systems. He’s the author of Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes and co-author with Shrad Shukla of Drought Early Warning and Forecasting. While his research interests are quite diverse, a central theme uniting Chris’ work is developing both the technical/scientific resources and the conceptual frameworks that will help us cope with increasingly dangerous climate and weather extremes.

CHRIS FUNK

I guess the work that we're doing here at the Climate Hazards Center is trying to build out the science to cope with a two-degree world. And I think that we can do that. It's not going to be easy, but I think that's definitely within our capabilities, and it is already making human beings be smarter together in very empowering ways. And these are examples of people in Boulder, Colorado getting ready for the next big flood event and having conversations between the National Weather Service and local communities, or me on a zoom call at seven in the morning with my friends in East Africa as they're getting ready to cope with the next extreme. There are great examples of radio clubs in Niger who are working with their meteorological agencies and local farming communities that are pulling data that we're producing here in Santa Barbara, precipitation estimates, but then using them to decide whether they should fertilize their millet crops or not. And so there are ways that we can counter climate hazards and weather hazards by being smarter.

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One of the things I tried to share in my book Drought, Fire, Flood is that it's not hard, if you look at the data, to see how harmful and impactful climate change is right now. We're seeing horrendous droughts play out across East Africa, an unprecedented level of droughts, but these impacts are also costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And the cost of reducing our emissions is not that great. I think the estimate is something like a trillion dollars a year for the entire globe, which sounds like a lot of money, but that's about 1% of global GDP. So we can certainly afford to make a big dent in our emissions.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Andrew Medlin with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Andrew Medlin. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth. 

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).