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Speaker: Kathy Jacobs, Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions
Adaptation to climate change is essentially iterative risk management. It depends on ongoing evaluations of changing conditions, and of whether our efforts to manage greenhouse gas emissions and climate related risks are successful. “Assessments” are a standard approach used to evaluate the state of knowledge to address specific questions and problems. As the impacts of climate change become more visible and expensive, state and local governments, businesses, tribes and civic leaders need to incorporate climate risk into decisions such as infrastructure investment, economic development, energy system modernization, environmental conservation, and public health. These decision-makers and practitioners are looking for authoritative information on which to base plans and investments, but existing climate information approaches are not scaling up to meet society’s needs and there has been little comparative evaluation to understand which are transferable, robust applications of science and traditional knowledge.
Despite the clear benefits and urgent need for applied climate information for both adaptation and mitigation, and ongoing requests for this from practitioners, we cannot count on the Federal government to establish a sustained, applied climate assessment that meets decision-makers’ needs. An independent citizen’s committee has developed a report that recommends establishing a Climate Assessment Consortium, a new state/local/civil society collaboration to provide a foundation for use in decision-making and assess the “state of practice” of how to use climate science to manage climate risks and to scale up climate solutions. The recommendations of the committee will be discussed in this presentation.
This talk is part of the School of Natural Resources and the Environment's Fall Seminar Series.