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.
To become climate resilient requires collective action. Our efforts must take a Whole-of-Government and Whole Community approach.
The Resilient Nation Partnership Network is working to address this through partnership. The result of our collective action is this Building Alliances for Climate Action resource. It is the work of many organizations and individuals, including federal representatives, faith leaders, community-based organizations, mayors and many more. At a time when many are searching for direction on how to address the climate crisis, this resource represents a unifying voice, helping guide the Whole Community forward
This is the FY22 edition of the U.S. Gllobal Change Research Program's annual report to Congress mandated by the the Global Change Research Act. The report provides an overview of the Program’s progress in delivering on its strategic goals as well as a summary of agency expenditures under USGCRP’s budget crosscut.
The Sea Level Rise Technical Report provides the most up-to-date sea level rise projections available for all U.S. states and territories; decision-makers will look to it for information.
This multi-agency effort, representing the first update since 2017, offers projections out to the year 2150 and information to help communities assess potential changes in average tide heights and height-specific threshold frequencies as they strive to adapt to sea level rise.
Executive Order 14008, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” calls for the development of two companion reports. This, the second of the two reports, discusses the potential development of a consolidated Federal geographic mapping service that can facilitate public access to climate-related information to assist Federal, State, local, and Tribal governments in their local, national, and international climate planning and resilience activities. This report uses the term “collaborative” mapping service instead of “consolidated” mapping service to better reflect the integrated roles and participation of Federal agencies and non-Federal constituents in providing climate-related and other geospatial data and services.
A Coastal Resilience Center research team, led by Dr. Cassandra R. Davis of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has released a report that explores the disproportionate impacts of federal mitigation assistance on socially marginalized groups and under-resourced neighborhoods. The purpose of the report is to improve mitigation efforts by addressing equity in emergency management, ultimately supporting the creation of national policy for federal agencies including FEMA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and others.
The central recommendation of this report, submitted to the National Climate Task Force, is that the pursuit of a decade-long national conservation effort be faithful to eight core principles. These principles—which include a commitment to collaboration, support for voluntary and locally led conservation, and honoring of Tribal sovereignty and private property rights—are essential ingredients to building and maintaining broad support, enthusiasm, and trust for this effort. These principles are also indispensable to achieving durable outcomes that meaningfully improve the lives of Americans.
Planning for a Changing Climate guides NPS planners and managers in developing robust climate change adaptation strategies to better protect park resources and assets today and for future generations. The guide derives from Climate-Smart Conservation, the product of an interagency and nongovernmental organization partnership led by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). Planning for a Changing Climate incorporates scenario planning concepts in the climate-smart framework to advance adaptation planning in the National Park Service
This Guide is written for practitioners already using or wanting to use future climate information in their work, but who are not familiar with the underlying assumptions and choices surrounding climate data. Here, we introduce the climate model scenarios that are used to “drive” climate models forward in time. These scenarios are a combination of socioeconomic and climate forcing pathways. We summarize differences between these scenarios for the Great Lakes region to show users how their choice of model scenario affects future temperature and precipitation projections.
This report provides step-by-step guidance and lessons learned on how to effectively engage with community members to understand climate impacts and to develop more equitable climate resilience strategies. Community-based organizations have repeatedly emphasized that to equitably and successfully carry out climate resilience solutions, it’s imperative to directly engage with community members to deeply understand how these threats directly impact them. Likewise, to formulate solutions that are equitable and truly work—and to get utilities and city officials to prioritize equitable investments in under-invested areas—organizations must directly engage with members of the community when identifying solutions. The toolkit provides real-world case studies, a project planning and facilitation guide, and extensive lists of references and resources.
This report's subtitle is Managing the Uncertainty of Future Sea Level Change and Extreme Water Levels for Department of Defence Coastal Sites Worldwide.
From the Executive Summary: Global change, including climate change, poses unique challenges to the Department of Defense (DoD). In particular, coastal military sites, and their associated natural and built infrastructure, operations, and readiness capabilities, are vulnerable to the impacts of rising global sea level and local extreme water level (EWL) events. This report and its accompanying scenario database provide regionalized sea level and EWL scenarios for three future time horizons (2035, 2065, and 2100) for 1,774 DoD sites worldwide. The global nature of DoD’s presence required a broad and comprehensive approach that to this point has been lacking in similar efforts.
This series of BAMS special reports presents assessments of how human-caused climate change may have affected the strength and likelihood of individual extreme events. The series has been published annually since 2011.
The ninth edition of the report, Explaining Extreme Events in 2019 from a Climate Perspective, presents 15 new peer-reviewed analyses of extreme weather across four continents and one sea during 2019. It features the research of 77 scientists from 7 countries looking at both historical observations and model simulations to determine whether and by how much climate change may have influenced particular extreme events.
This report highlights the equity implications of sea level rise in the first nationwide assessment of risk to the country’s affordable housing supply. As climate change causes sea levels to rise, the number of affordable housing units at risk of coastal flooding is projected to more than triple to nearly 25,000 nationwide over the next 30 years.
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.
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.
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.
As higher seas, stronger storms, and more frequent flooding collide with COVID-19, communities of every size across the United States must address new challenges emerging from overlapping disasters. This handbook is a comprehensive resource to help local officials and emergency managers address the dual disaster scenario of flooding during the COVID-19 pandemic. This handbook, the first of its kind, draws on case studies and best practices from emergency management professionals to equip officials with six actionable recommendations for planning a proactive response as communities face multiple threats this season.
In the third quarter of 2017, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria revealed some significant vulnerabilities in the national and regional supply chains of Texas, Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Drawing on lessons learned during the 2017 hurricanes, this report explores future strategies to improve supply chain management in disaster situations. It makes recommendations to strengthen the roles of continuity planning, partnerships between civic leaders with small businesses, and infrastructure investment to ensure that essential supply chains will remain operational in the next major disaster. Focusing on the supply chains food, fuel, water, pharmaceutical, and medical supplies, the recommendations of this report will assist FEMA as well as state and local officials, private sector decision makers, civic leaders, and others who can help ensure that supply chains remain robust and resilient in the face of natural disasters.
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.
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.
This Summary for Policymakers summarizes the findings of the AMAP Assessment 2018: Arctic Ocean Acidification report released in October 2018. It offers a review of the latest science relating to regional ocean acidification, the biological responses to it, an overview of case studies and their associated findings, and recommendations for the Arctic Council.
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.
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.
The Global Change Research Act of 1990 mandates that the U.S. Global Change Research Program deliver a report to Congress and the President no less than every four years that “1) integrates, evaluates, and interprets the findings of the Program…; 2) analyzes the effects of global change on the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, human social systems, and biological diversity; and 3) analyzes current trends in global change, both human-induced and natural, and projects major trends for the subsequent 25 to 100 years.” The Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) fulfills that mandate in two volumes. This report, Volume II, draws on the foundational science described in Volume I, the Climate Science Special Report. Volume II focuses on the human welfare, societal, and environmental elements of climate change and variability for 10 regions and 18 national topics, with particular attention paid to observed and projected risks, impacts, consideration of risk reduction, and implications under different mitigation pathways. Where possible, NCA4 Volume II provides examples of actions underway in communities across the United States to reduce the risks associated with climate change, increase resilience, and improve livelihoods. This assessment was written to help inform decision makers, utility and natural resource managers, public health officials, emergency planners, and other stakeholders by providing a thorough examination of the effects of climate change on the United States.
This analysis examines what's at risk for U.S. coastal real estate from sea level rise. Millions of Americans living in coastal communities will face more frequent and disruptive high-tide flooding; as this flooding increases, it will reach a threshold where normal routines become impossible and coastal residents, communities, and businesses are forced to make difficult, often costly choices. For this analysis, that threshold is defined as flooding that occurs 26 times per year (on average, once every other week) or more, a level of disruption referred to as chronic inundation. The results identify the number of residential and commercial properties at risk of chronic inundation—and the total current property value, estimated population, and property tax base affected—for the entire coastline of the lower 48 states.
This BAMS special report presents assessments of how human-caused climate change may have affected the strength and likelihood of individual extreme events. This sixth edition of explaining extreme events of the previous year (2016) from a climate perspective is the first of these reports to find that some extreme events were not possible in a pre-industrial climate.
As a key part of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) oversaw the production of this stand-alone report of the state of science relating to climate change and its physical impacts. The Climate Science Special Report (CSSR) is designed to be an authoritative assessment of the science of climate change, with a focus on the United States, to serve as the foundation for efforts to assess climate-related risks and inform decision making about responses.
As Volume 1 of NCA4, CSSR serves several purposes, including providing (1) an updated and detailed analysis of the findings of how climate change is affecting weather and climate across the United States; (2) an executive summary and 15 chapters that provide the basis for the discussion of climate science found in the second volume of NCA4; and (3) foundational information and projections for climate change, including extremes, to improve “end-to-end” consistency in sectoral, regional, and resilience analyses within the second volume. CSSR integrates and evaluates the findings on climate science and discusses the uncertainties associated with these findings. It analyzes current trends in climate change, both human-induced and natural, and projects major trends to the end of this century. As an assessment and analysis of the science, CSSR provides important input to the development of other parts of NCA4, and their primary focus on the human welfare, societal, economic and environmental elements of climate change. Much of the underlying report is written at a level more appropriate for a scientific audience, though the Executive Summary is intended to be accessible to a broader audience.
Coastal flooding in the United States is already occurring and the risk of flooding is expected to grow in most coastal regions, in part due to climate change. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed this booklet, aimed at the general public, that identifies steps people can take to prepare for the health risks associated with coastal flooding. The booklet answers some of the key questions about coastal flooding in a changing climate: why these events are on the rise; how it might affect health; and what people can do before, during, and after a coastal flooding event to stay safe. Scientific information used in the document is derived from peer-reviewed synthesis and assessment products, including those published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as other peer-reviewed sources and federal agency resources.
Sea level rise was a major topic of the annual meeting of the National Academy of Engineering held on October 9–10, 2016, and the second day featured a forum on sea level rise adaptation. This summary of the forum, which also incorporates material from Robert J. Nicholls’ plenary presentation, outlines a rich and challenging set of problems for engineers, scientists, and those who work with them.
The protocol developed and used in this report is unique in that it is an asset-level assessment of the vulnerability of infrastructure to multiple coastal hazards and climate change factors (e.g., erosion, flooding, storm surge, sea-level rise, and historical flooding) over a 35-year planning horizon (2050). The protocol was applied to all buildings and roads in Cape Lookout National Seashore; the results are summarized in the report.
New U.S. regional sea level scenarios developed by NOAA and its partners will give coastal communities better, more localized data to help them plan for and adapt to the risk of rising sea levels to their economies and infrastructure.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in collaboration with the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), has attempted to quantify the fiscal risks posed by climate change for the Federal Government. To date, this effort has yielded two primary conclusions: first, that our current understanding of the fiscal risks of climate change is nascent, limited in scope, and subject to significant uncertainty; and second, that the evidence available thus far indicates the fiscal risks to the Federal Government could be very significant over the course of this century without ambitious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and adapt our communities to a changing climate.
This report outlines the contours of fiscal risk through five program-specific assessments: crop insurance, health care, wildfire suppression, hurricane-related disaster relief, and Federal facility flood risk. These programs were assessed because they are directly influenced by climate change, they have strong links to the Federal Budget, and quantitative scientific and economic models regarding the likely magnitude of impacts were available. This report also considers potential impacts to Federal revenues.
This handbook summarizes the current state of National Park Service (NPS) climate adaptation and key approaches currently in practice or considered for climate change adaptation in coastal areas in order to guide adaptation planning in coastal parks. The chapters focus on policy, planning, cultural resources, natural resources, facility management, and communication/education. The handbook highlights processes, tools, and examples that are applicable to many types of NPS plans and decisions. One chapter includes a case study of Hurricane Sandy response and recovery strategies, including changes to infrastructure. Another chapter features practical coastal infrastructure information, including cost per unit length of constructed features (including seawalls, beach nourishment, and nature-based features). The level of detail varies by topic depending on the state of research and practice in that field.
This report describes key accomplishments and highlights opportunities for federal agencies and stakeholders to work together on a shared climate resilience agenda. The report builds on lessons learned and outlines three major areas where opportunities exist for innovation, economic growth, and collaboration: through application of science-based data and tools, support for community resilience initiatives, and integration of climate resilience into federal agency missions, operations, and culture.
This guide provides a step-by-step approach for incorporating climate change information into new or existing conservation plans in coastal environments. The guide’s six steps draw from existing strategic conservation planning frameworks, but focus on climate considerations and key resources specifically relevant to the coastal environment, including coastal watersheds.
This report features observed trend data on 37 climate indicators, including U.S and global temperatures, ocean acidity, sea level, river flooding, droughts, and wildfires. It documents rising temperatures, shifting patterns of snow and rainfall, and increasing numbers of extreme climate events, such as heavy rainstorms and record high temperatures. Many of these observed changes are linked to the rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, caused by human activities.
This document provides final guidance for federal agencies on how to consider the impacts of their actions on global climate change in their National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews, providing a framework for agencies to consider both the effects of a proposed action on climate change, as indicated by its estimated greenhouse gas emissions, and the effects of climate change on a proposed action. The memorandum applies to all types of proposed federal agency actions that are subject to NEPA analysis and guides agencies on how to address the greenhouse gas emissions from federal actions and the effects of climate change on their proposed actions within the existing NEPA regulatory framework.
