What climate scenarios should federal agency global change researchers tackle?
Climate change is one of the most significant crises of our time, affecting not only the environment but cascading into every aspect of our lives.
There is no shortage of global scale research, knowledge, and data about climate change, but when it comes to implementing changes, organizations often struggle with knowing exactly where and how to deploy resources for adaptation.
This month’s National Academies meeting of the committee to advise the United States Global Change Research Program will develop climate scenarios to inform adaptation actions at various scales, with an emphasis on changing socio-demographics and regional climate change. The committee will also address questions about who needs this information and how to ensure research outputs are usable and support adaptation actions.
The committee aims to support federal agency global change researchers in developing usable scenarios that can complement the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios used in both the IPCC and National Climate Assessment reports.
There’s also no shortage of questions that need to be asked and answered in order to support government agencies in developing useful, U.S.-focused scenarios to support end user decision making and implementation.
Funders and researchers need to identify who needs this information
Global change research has shifted its focus from solely reducing fossil fuel emissions to helping organizations prepare for climate change impacts such as hurricanes, tornadoes and other increasingly frequent extreme weather events. To effectively support adaptation efforts, decision makers at various levels need to identify their greatest risks and determine the most effective and affordable ways to mitigate them.
These decision makers might be operating at various scales ranging from multinational businesses to local elected officials like a town engineer, for example. This USGCRP meeting is important because committee members will share their knowledge of decision makers and the types of decisions they are making, which will help the USGCRP develop tools to meet their needs.
Funders and researchers need to know what questions these folks are asking and how they make decisions
To provide useful information for decision makers, researchers need to develop scenarios that enable users to analyze tradeoffs between effectiveness and expense at scales that are relevant to their area of influence. For example, if someone is considering building stores, they need flood risk information at a more precise scale, such as census tract level, rather than county level. Additionally, it's crucial for researchers to understand the tools already in use by decision makers and identify their limitations.
Grow Well Consulting’s impact
We’ve found that our foundation and agriculture policy clients that prioritize improving the environmental and economic performance of our country’s agricultural system have been keen to learn how future climate conditions may impact or disrupt current cropping patterns dominated by corn and soybeans. In addition to understanding how the climate of the future will encourage or discourage continued corn and soybean production, these clients are also assessing other trends like electrification of transportation, which should eliminate the ethanol market, or dietary changes, like how shifts to plant-based proteins or domestic specialty crop production may interact with our changing climate to change what crops farmers grow where.
Nonprofit clients have been interested in learning how growing offsetting and insetting markets may change cropping patterns and management practices.
Still, other private sector clients are concerned with how changing weather patterns and water policies will impact the amount of water available to agriculture and what the micro and macro ramifications may be.
Although there is an abundance of research, knowledge, and data available at a global level regarding climate change, organizations often face difficulties in determining the specific locations and methods to allocate their resources for adaptation.
From our experience, organizations are struggling to adapt to the severity of climate change, and federal agencies need to support them with useful and actionable information. The future of our food system depends on it.
Trying to understand how climate change will impact your organization or what actions will best buffer your operations or supply chains from disruptions under future emissions scenarios? Grow Well can help support you in implementing the latest science and tools available.
