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The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), The American Geophysical Union (AGU),
The American Meteorological Society (AMS), The Ecological Society of America (ESA), and the Pew Center on
Global Climate Change present:
Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation
Friday, January 8, 2010
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM
Cannon Caucus Room
Cannon House Office Building
United States House of Representatives
Washington, DC
**Public welcome but space is limited and registration required**
**Lunch will be provided**
*This event is the first in the AMS Climate Briefing Series (www.ametsoc.org/cb), which is made possible, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Paleoclimate Program*
Program Summary: Human caused climate change is well underway and almost certain to continue in the decades ahead. Comprehensive risk management strategies will include efforts both to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (mitigation) and to enhance society’s ability to cope with climate impacts (adaptation). Mitigation and adaptation often get mistaken for competing, mutually exclusive alternatives when they are really complimentary approaches with differing strengths and limitations. This briefing will examine the nature of climate impacts occurring within the United States, and explore options for dealing with those impacts.
Speakers:
Michael MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs, the Climate Institute (download Presenation)
Kristie L. Ebi, Executive Director, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 2 Technical Support Unit - Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (download Presenation)
Katharine L. Jacobs, Professor, University of Arizona Soil, Water and Environmental Science Department (download Presenation)
Susanne Moser, Director and Principal Researcher, Susanne Moser Research & Consulting (download Presenation)
Moderator:
Paul Higgins, Senior Policy Fellow, American Meteorological Society
SUMMARY OF REMARKS
Speaker: Michael MacCracken
Title: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States
"Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States,” the recent assessment report prepared under the auspices of the US Global Change Research Program, has been designed to help US decision makers prepare for and adapt to recent and projected changes in climate and the impacts that are occurring and will result. Because the US is already experiencing and committed to significant changes in climate, undesirable impacts are inevitable and adaptation will be necessary. This talk will summarize the range of current and projected climate-change impacts on environmental and societal systems identified in the report, thereby starting to build a national foundation for guiding response preparation and developing effective mitigation and adaptation policies.
Speaker: Kristie Ebi
Title: Overview of Adaptation and Its Limits
Adaptation is risk management over multiple spatial and temporal scales. Over the next few decades, the extent and magnitude of climate change impacts will depend on population and regional vulnerabilities, the amount and rate of regional climate change, and adaptation policies and measures implemented. Determinants of adaptive capacity include the degree of risk perceived, available human and financial resources, technological options, and the political will to undertake adaptation. A number of factors could limit the effectiveness of adaptation, such as current infrastructure decisions affecting future vulnerability. Adaptation decisions need to be integrated across Federal to local scales, possibly requiring new institutional mechanisms.
Speaker: Katharine Jacobs
Title: Water Management and Climate Change: Challenges and Solutions
Many have observed that water is a key delivery mechanism of climate change impacts – more intense precipitation as well as droughts; changes in seasonality and quality of runoff within watersheds; and more subtle changes in the supply and demand for water for use in human and natural systems. Multiple solutions to these impacts are available, but all involve challenges: some technological solutions are expensive and/or require increased use of energy; conservation efforts involve changes in human behavior; and there are numerous challenges associated with governance of interwoven social and environmental systems. Reframing water management decisions can help reduce vulnerability and enhance supply reliability.
Speaker: Susanne Moser
Title: States adapting to climate change: The Case of California
California is among the handful of US states that have begun comprehensive adaptation planning. (Other states have called for such planning in their climate action plans but are at a much earlier stage.) This brief overview will describe the state’s process of developing its strategy, highlight some of the key recommendations, and derive a number of lessons being learned from this first step in an ongoing adaptation process. These lessons are echoes in the experience of other states around the country. The presentation will conclude with concrete suggestions how federal lawmakers and agencies can support state and local adaptation efforts.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Michael MacCracken is Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs with the Climate Institute in Washington DC, where his focus has been on proactive approaches for moderating climate change and its impacts. After a B.S.E from Princeton and Ph.D. from the University of California Davis, Mike began his career in 1968 as an atmospheric physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), where his research focused primarily on the causes of climate change and the climatic effects of greenhouse gases, volcanic aerosols, land-cover change, and nuclear war. After serving as the division leader for atmospheric and geophysical sciences from1987-1993, he accepted an assignment to serve as senior global change scientist for the newly formed interagency Office of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), serving as the Office’s first executive director from 1993-1997 and then as executive director of USGCRP’s National Assessment Coordination Office that facilitated the U.S. National Assessment from 1997-2001. During this time, he also coordinated preparation of the official U.S. Government reviews of IPCC’s second and third assessments, and, since 1990, he has served as a contributing author on several IPCC chapters and as review editor for the North America chapter for IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. Since retiring in 2002 after 34 years with LLNL, Mike has, in addition to his activities with the Climate Institute, served as president of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (2003-2007) and as a member of the Assessment Integration Team for the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (2002-2004). From 2005-2007, he served as a co-lead author for the report Confronting Climate Change: Avoiding the Unmanageable and Managing the Unavoidable, which was prepared for the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development under the auspices of Sigma Xi and the United Nations Foundation.
Kristie L. Ebi is Executive Director of the Technical Support Unit for Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Prior to this position, she was an independent consultant. She has been conducting research on the impacts of and adaptation to climate change for more than a dozen years, including on extreme events, thermal stress, foodborne safety and security, and vectorborne diseases. She has worked with the World Health Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, USAID, and others on implementing adaptation measures in low-income countries. She facilitated adaptation assessments for the health sector for the states of Maryland and Alaska. She was a lead author on the “Human Health” chapter of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, and the “Human Health” chapter for the U.S. Synthesis and Assessment Product “Analyses of the Effects of Global Change on Human Health and Welfare and Human Systems.” She has edited fours books on aspects of climate change and has more than 80 publications. Dr. Ebi’s scientific training includes an M.S. in toxicology and a Ph.D. and a Masters of Public Health in epidemiology, and two years of postgraduate research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
For the last 6
years Katharine L. Jacobs has been a professor in the University of Arizona, Department of
Soil, Water and Environmental Science and Deputy Director and Associate
Director of the NSF Center for Sustainability of Arid Region Hydrology and
Riparian Areas at the University of Arizona. From 2006 through 2009, Jacobs
was the Executive Director of the Arizona Water Institute, a consortium of the
three state universities focused on water-related research, education and
technology transfer in support of water supply sustainability. She has more
than twenty years of experience as a water manager for the state of Arizona
Department of Water Resources, including 14 years as director of the Tucson
Active Management Area. Her research interests include water policy,
connecting science and decision-making, stakeholder engagement, use of climate
information for water management applications, climate change adaptation and
drought planning. Ms. Jacobs earned her M.L.A. in environmental planning from
the University of California, Berkeley. She has served on eight National
Research Council panels, most recently chairing the Americas Climate Choices
panel on Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change.
Susanne Moser is Director and Principal Researcher of Susanne Moser Research & Consulting, a recently established firm in Santa Cruz, CA. Her current work focuses on adaptation to climate change, resilience, decision support, and effective climate change communication in support of social change. Previously she served as a Research Scientist at the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment (ISSE) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Dr. Moser is a geographer by training (Ph.D. 1997, Clark University), whose research foci for the last 15 years have been the human dimensions of global change. She has focused on uncertainties in the human dimensions of global change (causes, vulnerability, impacts, and adaptive responses), focusing on coastal areas, human health, forest-reliant rural as well as urban areas. She has worked for the Heinz Center in Washington, DC on a congressionally mandated project on coastal erosion and management, and for the Union of Concerned Scientists as their staff scientist for climate change. Her current research foci include effective climate change communication and social change, science–stakeholder (in particular decision-makers) interactions, and developing effective adaptation strategies in developed nations.
Dr. Moser is co-editor with Lisa Dilling (University of Colorado-Boulder) on a major anthology on climate change communication, called Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change, published in 2006 by Cambridge University Press. She also has published peer-reviewed papers in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Global Environmental Change, Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Environment, Global Environmental Politics, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, and Environmental Research Letters, as well as chapters in books published by The MIT Press, Cambridge University Press, and several others. Dr. Moser contributed to Working Group II of the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, and has advised former Vice President Al Gore’s Climate Project on climate change communication. Her work has been recognized through fellowships in the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, the UCAR Leadership Academy, Kavli Frontiers of Science Program, and the Donella Meadows Leadership Program.
For more information see: http://www.susannemoser.com
Please see http://www.ametsoc.org/cb for
future seminars, broadcast information, and summaries of past briefings
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