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CHRISTINA HULBE

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

Chair Anderson and members of the committee, my name is Christina Hulbe and I am an assistant professor in the Department of Geology here at Portland State University. On behalf of President Bernstine, it my pleasure to welcome you to campus for this hearing. We are in the second week of spring term, classrooms are full, students and faculty are busy, and the rain is helping to keep us all focused on academics. We're very proud of our students here at Portland State, and I hope you have had an opportunity to meet and talk with some of them during your visit today. It is appropriate that that the Committee would choose to hold this hearing at Portland State, because sustainability and public service are key elements of our curriculum and the operations of the University.

My testimony today highlights some of the diverse work that is being done by faculty and students in the areas of environmental quality, climate change, and their connections to Oregon's economy, the health of Oregonians, and livability. Development of effective public policy requires research that interweaves science, engineering, public health, and urban planning. At PSU, this work involves dozens of faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, and the College of Urban and Public Affairs.

For example, within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Department of Environmental Sciences and Resources is home to the Center for Lakes and Reservoirs, a center established by state law to address lake and invasive aquatic species management in Oregon. Our Departments of Physics, Chemistry, and the Center for Science Education are home to scientists studying atmospheric trace gasses and particulates, and their effects on both regional and global climate.

Those studies use a combination of observational data and computer models built here at PSU. In the Maseeh College of Engineering, researchers are investigating how energy consumption, building construction and transportation planning relate to climate change, air quality and livability. In the College of Urban and Public Affairs, researchers are investigating transportation models, land use planning, and the public health impacts of climate change. The new $1.7 million NSF-funded "Feedbacks between Urban Systems and the Environment Project," is a collaborative effort among faculty from several of these departments. The goal of the project is to develop an integrated analysis framework that can be used to study the complex interactions among urban infrastructure, urban climate, air pollution, and adaptive/reactive changes in human activity, linking both science and policy. A vital component of environmental research at PSU is collaboration with state and local agencies, including the Oregon Departments of Environmental Quality and Transportation, METRO, Portland's environmental services and sustainable development agencies, community-level organizations, and public schools.

In my own department, Geology, we study physical systems that span many spatial and temporal scales. Our current climate and environment research topics include: the hydrology of Oregon's north coastal lakes and the Klamath watershed; retreat of Cascade mountain glaciers; and coastal tsunami hazards. The Klamath studies might be of particular interest to this committee. Research led by our department chair, Michael Cummings, is finding a profound change in the water balance in that region, away from annual recharge and toward mining of older water sources, deposited within aquifers more than 10,000 years ago, when eastern Oregon's climate was significantly moister than it is today. My own work involves decadal-to-millennial scale change in Antarctic glacial systems and their connections to climate and sea level, including the recent warming induced ice-shelf disintegration events on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Research conducted across the PSU campus is part of the fabric from which the scientific community crafts its understanding of the Earth environment. Our work can also assist policy makers in planning for our shared future. The faculty at PSU take the University's motto, "Let Knowledge Serve the City" to heart. On behalf of the faculty who do work in this area, I want to express our commitment to provide the results of our research to the Legislature whenever asked.

I want to thank you for coming to Portland State. I would be pleased to answer questions or help direct your questions to an appropriate member of our faculty.