Access a range of climate-related reports issued by government agencies and scientific organizations. Browse the reports listed below, or filter by scope, content, or focus in the boxes above. To expand your results, click the Clear Filters link.
This report presents recommendations for how state governments can develop climate-resilience financial systems that help local communities invest in protecting residents, businesses, public infrastructure, private property, and natural resources from climate-driven stresses and shocks. To help states consider and act on the recommendations, a State Climate Resilience Action Checklist (page 50) identifies the essential actions that states need to take to build a comprehensive approach to resilience, including a financial system. The report also offers an Inventory of Climate Resilience Actions.
This report intends to provide policy makers, planners, project developers, technical advisors, and implementers at the local, regional, or national level with good practices of climate-resilient and gender-responsive value chain development. It aims to act as a repository of relevant tools and methodologies for identifying relevant stakeholders and engaging with them to collect data and analyse it to design interventions. Climate change threatens agricultural value chains and having a gender-responsive value chain approach is useful in analysing the climate risks, as it looks at stages during and beyond production, while using a more systemic approach to risk management.
An intensified pattern of wildfire is emerging in Alaska as rapidly increasing temperatures and longer growing seasons alter the state's environment. This publication aims to convey the rapidly changing patterns of wildfire in Alaska by looking into the phases of fire. Patterns emerging in the 21st century are the primary focus, with earlier histories of management, climate, and fire being drawn upon for context.
Natural hazards such as flooding, high wind, drought, and landslides pose major threats to communities across the United States, and reducing the threats they pose to lives, properties, and the economy is a top priority for many communities. The key goal of this guide is to help communities identify and engage the staff and resources that can play a role in building resilience with nature-based solutions.
A case study approach to calculating the economic impact of the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit.
The Western Governors’ Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are pursuing an effort to meaningfully address the large-scale infestation of invasive annual grasses on western forests and rangelands. One product of this effort is this toolkit for land managers working to combat the spread of invasive annual grasses in the West. The toolkit is comprised of a roadmap for invasive grass management, with new best management practices; case studies highlighting the application of these practices in Idaho and Wyoming; and a new geospatial data layer (which uses analytical tools to compile existing federal data) to help state and local managers assess invasive annual grasses within their jurisdictions while also offering opportunities to identify new cross-boundary collaborative projects. The roadmap and data layer are designed for easy integration into local management plans and can be tailored by state and local managers to reflect local data, knowledge, capacities, and priorities.
Each region of the United States experiences climate change and its impacts on health differently, due to the regions’ location-specific climate exposures and unique societal and demographic characteristics. This document describes the various health impacts climate change will have on different regions of the United States as outlined in the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), actions taken by the CDC Climate and Health Program’s health department partners to prepare for and respond to climate change in their communities, and relevant tools and resources.
Climate migration—the preemptive movement of people and property away from areas experiencing severe impacts—is one way to improve climate resilience. This report reviews federal support for climate migration, examining the use of climate migration as a resilience strategy, federal support for climate migration, key challenges to climate migration, and how the federal government can address them. A literature review and interviews with climate resilience experts was conducted, with 46 stakeholders selected and interviewed in four communities that have considered relocation: Newtok, Alaska; Santa Rosa, California; Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana; and Smith Island, Maryland.
High-tide flooding, often referred to as "nuisance" or “sunny day” flooding, is increasingly common due to years of relative sea level increases. It occurs when tides reach anywhere from 1.75 to 2 feet above the daily average high tide and start spilling onto streets or bubbling up from storm drains. As sea level rise continues, damaging floods that decades ago happened only during a storm now happen more regularly, such as during a full-moon tide or with a change in prevailing winds or currents.
Each year, NOAA documents changes in high-tide flooding patterns from the previous year at 98 NOAA tide gauges along the U.S. coast, and provides a flooding outlook for these locations for the coming year, as well as projections for the next several decades.
NOAA’s Environmental Literacy Program (ELP) Community Resilience Education Theory of Change communicates the overarching philosophy guiding its grants program. ELP supports projects that both inspire and educate people to use Earth system science to increase ecosystem stewardship and resilience to extreme weather, climate change, and other environmental hazards.
A theory of change is broad in scope and begins with a problem statement and ends with a goal. In between, causal pathways systemically lay out the steps, or short-, mid-, and long-term outcomes that must be met to achieve the end goal.
This report provides national, regional, and local information to support effective decision making by U.S. agricultural producers, resource managers, and other agricultural system stakeholders. A set of 20 indicators identifies high-priority agricultural and climate data products while providing the basis for tracking climate change as it plays out across American working lands, toward devising adaptive operational responses.
The report was written as input to the sustained National Climate Assessment process to provide a discrete set of variables that describe linkages between climate trends and variability and U.S. agriculture in recent decades. An additional objective is that the indicators themselves (along with the frameworks for constructing location- and operation-specifc indicators) provide an information resource that can help information service programs, such as USDA’s Climate Hubs, evaluate operational risks posed by climate change in specifc production systems across the country.
Planning for climate change resiliency is an increasingly pressing requirement for communities throughout the world and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC) region. In order to help local officials, non-profits, and communities with this process, numerous planning tools have been developed by a wide range of public and private agencies. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to explain, organize, and prioritize the tools that currently exist in order to select ones that are broadly accessible to a wide range of organizations, applicable across a range of sectors, and not overly redundant. During this selection process, a list of over 60 tools was winnowed down to a final toolkit of 18 that are particularly useful at any stage in the resiliency planning process and can be used for communities throughout the DVRPC region.
While all people living in the United States are affected by climate change, some communities and some populations are more vulnerable to changing climate conditions than others. This final report from a NOAA-funded project in New Jersey highlights current evidence regarding impacts of changing climate-related coastal hazards on socially vulnerable populations, identify opportunities to address needs of socially vulnerable populations as part of coastal community climate resilience planning, and outlines possible options for coastal management policy that may enhance efforts to address needs of socially vulnerable populations as part of coastal community resilience efforts.
Thin-layer placement (TLP), an emergent adaptation strategy that mimics natural sediment deposition processes, is one of the only viable options to protect tidal marshes from sea level rise in their current footprint. To improve the success of thin-layer placement projects, a collaborative research team at Narragansett Bay and Elkhorn Slough led coordinated restoration experiments at eight National Estuarine Research Reserves on the U.S. East and West coasts to test TLP across diverse marsh plant communities, and produced guidance and recommendations for TLP use. This guidance document is intended to help restoration practitioners, property owners, coastal managers, and funders better understand this strategy for tidal marsh restoration and resilience in the face of sea level rise.
This document summarizes the presentations and discussions that were part of the fourth in-person partner event sponsored by the NOAA in the Caribbean Initiative. The workshops were held the week of August 19, 2019, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. Topics included the use of nature-based solutions to combat coastal erosion and flooding, including due to hurricanes, and adaptation planning in response to global climate change.
The world continues to emit greenhouse gases while the planet's climate is changing faster than ever. This report intends to take up the latest and most essential scientific findings published in an extraordinary year—the climate science year in review.
A growing number of local governments are taking steps toward climate adaptation, mostly through the development of climate adaptation plans. However, the rate and pace of adaptation action has significantly lagged behind planning, especially in mid- and small-sized municipalities where resources are often limited and local politics may further delay action. This report describes how to use economics to build support for climate adaptation. Using case studies from cities large and small, it highlights how to effectively use economic data and methods, provides eight types of economic analyses for climate adaptation, and explains how to clearly communicate economic data to different audiences.
This report focuses on making the case for climate adaptation, providing specific insights and recommendations in key sectors: food security, the natural environment, water, cities and urban areas, infrastructure, disaster risk management, and finance. It is designed to inspire action among decision makers, including heads of state and government officials, mayors, business executives, investors, and community leaders.
This report and the accompanying community spotlights provide an overview of climate change science, reasons why action is needed, how science supports decision making and planning, ways to adapt to climate change and limit the severity of its effects, and how such efforts can help build resiliency. The report illustrates the ways in which science can help individuals, communities, businesses, and government agencies make informed decisions. By working together to identify solutions and bring about positive change, we can reduce the risks faced by current and future generations.
The Design Guidelines serve as a reference for residents, business owners, and developers to translate flood resiliency strategies into best practices. They include a resilience toolkit to address building form, building envelope, and site access; description and supporting information on technical and cost considerations, insurance factors, and sustainable design co-benefits; guidance on urban design, accessibility, and public realm matters related to changes in elevation between a site and surrounding infrastructure; measures to manage additional climate hazards; and case studies that apply resilience strategies from the toolkit to representative building types in the future flood zone. The Guidelines will also be used to administer a future Coastal Flood Resilience Zoning Overlay District.
The Fish and Wildlife Relevancy Roadmap is a practical guide that state and provincial fish and wildlife conservation agencies can use to overcome barriers to broader relevance, public engagement, and support. The roadmap is not prescriptive and provides multiple pathways to respond to the diverse social, economic, demographic, political, and environmental changes that states and provinces face. The Roadmap was developed by a team of over 60 leaders from state, federal, provincial, and private conservation organizations and others with an interest in conservation.
Alaska has recently experienced profound environmental change related to extreme weather events and deviations from the historical climate. Sustained warmth, sea ice loss, coastal flooding, river flooding, and major ecosystem changes have impacted the daily lives of Alaskans around the state. The International Arctic Research Center and the University of Alaska Fairbanks have documented these changes, and are providing individuals, Alaska businesses, communities, government, and others with the resources they need to better assess impacts and develop adaptation strategies.
This guide is designed to help transportation practitioners understand how and where nature-based and hybrid solutions can be used to improve the resilience of coastal roads and bridges. It summarizes the potential flood-reduction benefits and co-benefits of these strategies, then follows the steps in the project delivery process, providing guidance on considering nature-based solutions in the planning process, conducting site assessments, key engineering and ecological design considerations, permitting approaches, construction considerations, and monitoring and maintenance strategies. The guide also includes appendices with site characterization tools, decision support for selecting nature-based solutions, suggested performance metrics, and links to additional tools and resources.
Heatwaves are deadly and their impacts are on the rise globally due to climate change. People living in urban areas are amongst the hardest hit when a heatwave occurs because these are hotter than the surrounding countryside. It is crucial that cities incorporate heat-reduction tactics such as green spaces into their plans for growth or retrofit them in built areas; this emergency can only be avoided if city institutions, community groups, and planners contribute to reducing heat risk now and in the future. This guide is intended to help city staff take the first steps to understanding the heat risks they face, develop an early warning system, work with partners to consolidate heat action plans, and adapt urban planning practices.
This analysis shows the rapid, widespread increases in extreme heat that are projected to occur across the country due to climate change, including conditions so extreme that a heat index cannot be measured. The analysis also finds that the intensity of the coming heat depends heavily on how quickly we act now to reduce heat-trapping emissions. For this national analysis, extreme heat is measured according to the heat index, the combination of temperature and humidity that creates the “feels like” temperature, and includes four different heat index thresholds, each of which brings increasingly dangerous health risks: above 90°F, above 100°F, above 105°F, and "off the charts." The report features three time frames—historical, midcentury, and late century—and three different scenarios of climate action.
This report identifies eight distinct strategies cities are using to pay for large-scale climate resilience projects, mostly to address sea level rise and flooding. The analysis is based on a close look at how eight U.S. cities in seven states have been organizing the funding needed to implement their ambitious climate resilience plans. Each of these cities has had to find its own way to public and private financial resources, because there is no system in place for solving the problem of how to pay for climate resilience. Examining these cities’ pathways revealed common strategies that, while only reflecting the leading edge of urban climate resilience financing practices, quite likely foreshadow what other cities already or may do.
This report is the culmination of a workshop and webinars exploring activities, resources, capabilities, and challenges to the prediction of infectious diseases at sub-seasonal and seasonal time scales. The webinars and workshop were led by a steering committee that included members from the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Interagency Group on Integrated Modeling and Interagency Crosscutting Group on Climate Change and Human Health, as well as the National Science and Technology Council’s Pandemic Prediction and Forecasting Science and Technology Working group. The report highlights key gaps and provides a summary of needed interagency actions ranging from research to forecast production—some of which have already started.
The guidance provided by this report is designed to help all communities create disaster debris management plans. It assists communities in planning for natural disaster debris before disasters—such as hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanoes, floods, wildfires, and winter storms—occur by providing useful, relevant information intended to increase community preparedness and resiliency. The report includes recommended components of a debris management plan, suggested management options for various natural disaster debris streams, a collection of case studies that highlights how several communities prepared for and managed debris generated by recent natural disasters, resources to consult in planning for natural disasters, and the EPA’s recommended pre-incident planning process to help prepare communities for effective disaster debris management.
This report is the result of an extensive literature review and survey of 90 practitioners representing 15 Regional Climate Collaboratives (RCCs). The report details how RCCs operate, their impacts in a regional capacity, key successes thus far, as well as barriers and gaps in capacity. After careful analysis, the report also establishes a framework for classification of RCC activity.
This report is the first major product of the current Canadian national assessment, which launched in 2017 and intends to publish a series of authoritative reports between 2018 and 2021. This assessment focuses on answering the questions: how has Canada’s climate changed to date, why, and what changes are projected for the future? This initial report provides a climate science foundation for the other national assessment products. Its objectives are to assess current knowledge about how Canada’s climate is changing and why, and what changes are projected for the future, to help inform mitigation and adaptation decision making and to help raise public awareness and understanding of Canada’s changing climate. The CCCR is written for a broad range of professionals who are familiar with the topic of climate change but who may not have expertise in the physical sciences.
According to the Fourth National Climate Assessment, ecologically and economically valuable resources are being lost at an alarming rate due to climate change impacts. For conservation funders, these trends represent a growing threat to the natural systems where they have already made significant investments and, importantly, the durability of future conservation programs and outcomes as climate change accelerates. This report offers practical guidance to help funders prepare for changes that are imminent, intentionally consider climate change in their work, and thus work to ensure that conservation investments are more durable.
The Beloved Community is a vision for our future where all people share equally in the wealth and bounty of the earth, where we protect its abundance, diversity, and beauty for future generations. In this vision of liberation, racism, exploitation, and domination are replaced by democracy, cooperation, interdependence, and love. To get there, we pursue transformative, systems-change solutions. What do we mean by this? The root causes of the problems our communities face—like climate change, racism, and economic inequality—are all deeply connected. Since the problems are connected, so are the solutions. The purpose of this toolkit is to put us on the path toward achieving this vision. Through the context of building equity and resilience into climate adaptation planning, we introduce strategies to transform our communities and, by extension, society. Our ultimate goal is to create lasting and systemic change. At the same time, we recognize the urgency of the issues our communities face and the need to take action now. That is why we pursue change at every scale—from policy changes to community-based projects—to institute the transformative change we need to uphold our vision of the beloved community.
Regional adaptation fora (RAFs) are regional climate change adaptation conferences associated with the National Adaptation Forum. There are six RAFs: the California Adaptation Forum, the Carolinas Climate Resilience Conference, the Great Lakes Adaptation Forum, Local Solutions: Eastern Climate Preparedness Conference, the Southeast Florida Climate Change Compact Summit, and the Southwest Adaptation Forum. This report presents analysis and information drawn from the 2018 RAFs to gain insight about the state of the field, assess opportunities for the field to leverage the RAFs to accelerate dissemination and uptake of promoting promising adaptation practices across regions, and determine how the American Society of Adaptation Professionals can best support the RAFs going forward. The top finding is that RAFs are moving the needle for adaptation professionals and the field. The report serves as a testament to the need for, and value of, regional adaptation fora and encourages increased investment in these events and greater coordination between them.
The frequency and severity of disasters over the last few decades have presented unprecedented challenges for communities across the United States. This report summarizes the existing portfolio of relevant or related resilience measurement efforts and notes gaps and challenges associated with them. It describes how some communities build and measure resilience, and offers four key actions that communities could take to build and measure their resilience to address gaps identified in current community resilience measurement efforts. The report also provides recommendations to the Gulf Research Program to build and measure resilience in the Gulf of Mexico region.
This plan represents the efforts of the State of Minnesota in fulfilling the responsibility for hazard mitigation planning. The purpose of this plan is to identify the state’s major hazards, assess the vulnerability to those hazards, and take steps to reduce vulnerability using the technical and program resources of Minnesota agencies. The process has included consideration of current and expected future impacts from Minnesota’s already changing climate, as relevant to hazard mitigation planning. The plan identifies goals and recommends actions and initiatives for the state government to adapt to, reduce, and/or prevent injury and damage from hazardous events.
Flooding is the natural hazard with the greatest economic and social impact in the United States, and these impacts are becoming more severe over time. This report contributes to existing knowledge on urban flooding by examining real-world examples in specific metropolitan areas: Baltimore, Houston, Chicago, and Phoenix. The report identifies commonalities and variances among the case study metropolitan areas in terms of causes, adverse impacts, unexpected problems in recovery, or effective mitigation strategies, as well as key themes of urban flooding. It also relates, as appropriate, causes and actions of urban flooding to existing federal resources or policies.
