In this course, we're going to spend some time looking at the findings of the last National Climate Assessment. Then we'll transition to resources and examples that can help you learn about taking action in your household, in your community, or at your business. For our first two modules, we're going to dive into the latest National Climate Assessment, which equips us with a ton of information about climate risks being faced across the country. It not only identifies places where we might consider adaptation, but gives us plenty of reasons why reducing emissions might benefit our health, our ecosystems, our food systems, our communities and our businesses. It also illustrates some of the actions underway across the country to help manage climate risks. What is the National Climate Assessment? It's a report that is congressionally mandated by the Global Change Research Act of 1990. On this slide I'm showing some of the text. I've grabbed some of the language and added some of the bold text for emphasis. The Act calls on federal agencies to generate a report not less frequently than every four years. That report does a couple things. The reports should analyze the effects of global change, which has come to include and focus primarily on climate change. The reports should also analyze how global change affects all sorts of things that we care about, the environment, agriculture, energy, land and water resources, transportation, and health. As noted in the second bullet there report should be forward-looking and consider these risks over the coming decades. While you might assume that since the act is 30 years old, there would be 6-7 assessments by now, unfortunately, that's not the case. We haven't always been able to produce these in a timely manner as prescribed by the Act. The first assessment was actually produced in 2000 and then there was a hiatus during the Bush administration as the interagency group that worked on assessments pivoted their focus and they produce a series of shorter reports on individual climate topics rather than one big assessment report. These are called Synthesis and Assessment Reports. There's 21 of them, so there's one of our forests and what about water and making them fill in the list. You'll see some of these topics in the chapters that are in the big assessment now. With the arrival of the Obama administration, efforts degenerate, the National Climate Assessment resumed and we've had three reports since 2009 with the publications coming almost every four years. The most recent assessment, which we'll be covering in subsequent lectures, that one was completed in 2018. A bit about the process of creating new report. The report itself is pretty dense tome, it's hundreds of pages of material. The report preparation is overseen by staff from federal agencies. There are hundreds of contributing authors and these are authors are both from inside and outside the federal government. The process is usually a little different for each of the assessment reports. But in the last report, the sectoral chapters were led primarily by a federal agency folks and regional chapters were led by non-feds. However, you can find contributors from public, private, and academic sectors spread out among almost all the chapters. The entire report is reviewed by a committee for the National Academy of Sciences to ensure that it accurately represents the state of the science with respect to our understanding of climate change and climate risk and the state of the practice regarding the ways that we manage those risks, so there's been a lot of hands on this report. It really is a consensus document and it's supposed to represent a summary of the available research and experience that's out there. It's not really a new set of research onto itself. It's just synthesizing what is available. Here's what the most recent report looks like. The report was separated into two volumes, volume 1 as shown on the left, and it's the science portion of the assessment. It goes through the observed changes in climate at the global, national and regional scales and discuss as expected future changes that fuel climate risk. We're not going to talk about that material in this course. I've covered that in the previous course. That's part of the specialization group. The second volume shown on the right, examines the implications for climate risks and opportunities we have to prepare for those risks. We're going to spend most of our time in this course with volume 2. Volume 2 is organized into two different sets of chapters and I mentioned this a little bit earlier. There's the sector topics that are abroad, national interests, and then regional chapters that look at risks and adaptation on a more geographic basis. Here's the list of sectoral topics and you'll notice a lot of the items that we've been talking about in previous courses. There's water, energy, land use, forests, Ecosystem, Coast, transportation, air quality, human health, tribes, indigenous peoples, international interests, a whole bunch of different topics. I'm going to go through a sub-set of these sectoral topics in the first module of this course. In the second module, we'll shift to talk about more of a regional perspective. This is the map that the National Climate Assessment uses to group up different states into regions. The grouping represents a balance between lumping places together that have similar climates and to some extent, similar natural resources and economic drivers versus separating things to generate as high resolution as possible. Lastly, before we start to get into the sectors and regions, I want to emphasize that there are some themes that pop up in a lot of the chapters there really cross-cutting themes. One of these is threats to human health. These are evident, these threats in almost all regions across the United States. They include impacts of extreme heat that affects people's health directly or their productivity at work if they work outside, it can include air quality or lower air quality that accompanies heat-on-wildfire. It can include issues of water quality that could be associated with droughts or floods, as well as the challenges that arise when we have extreme events, especially when people get relocated from their homes. We are seeing impacts like these throughout the country. Future climate change is expected to exacerbate many of these impacts. A second cross-cutting theme involved threats to infrastructure. Extreme events like floods, heat waves and wildfires pose threats to energy, transportation and water systems. While these threats exist in a normal climate, if even if we ignored greenhouse gases, future climate change elevates many of these risks. Plus in a lot of parts of the country, aging infrastructure or growing demands from growing populations contribute to infrastructure vulnerability. A third cross-cutting message and a really important one that you find in a lot of parts of the assessment is, thinking about the way that risk is distributed unevenly among individuals and communities. Across the chapters have lots of examples of individuals or groups that are disproportionately exposed to risk were disproportionately suffer when impacts manifest. The factors that contribute to this heightened vulnerability are often related to disparities in wealth, in housing and food security in an access to healthcare. Those types of things in turn, are connected to some of our broader discussions of social, racial, and ethnic equity. I think that this is a very current or contemporary view about climate vulnerability that's in this report and impactful for a lot of our public policy discussions going on. Therefore, it also highlight several tribal and indigenous peoples across the country for whom climate change is a real existential challenge and it threatens culture, livelihood, and identities. In a lot of cases, some of the options for things like relocating or we're changing livelihood that is not really on the table for some of these groups. That brings us to the end of the 30,000-foot overview, the introduction for the course. Please check out the next few videos and learn more about the results that are in 2018 National Climate Assessment, as well as some of the actions that you can take to manage climate risks at home, in your community and at work.
