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.
There are multiple, feasible and effective options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to human-caused climate change, and they are available now, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
This Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.
In 2018, IPCC highlighted the unprecedented scale of the challenge required to keep warming to 1.5°C. Five years later, that challenge has become even greater due to a continued increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The pace and scale of what has been done so far, and current plans, are insufficient to tackle climate change.
More than a century of burning fossil fuels as well as unequal and unsustainable energy and land use has led to global warming of 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels. This has resulted in more frequent and more intense extreme weather events that have caused increasingly dangerous impacts on nature and people in every region of the world. Every increment of warming results in rapidly escalating hazards. More intense heatwaves, heavier rainfall and other weather extremes further increase risks for human health and ecosystems. In every region, people are dying from extreme heat. Climate-driven food and water insecurity is expected to increase with increased warming. When the risks combine with other adverse events, such as pandemics or conflicts, they become even more difficult to manage.
Published by the Puerto Rico Climate Change Council, this report presents the social and ecological vulnerabilities amid changing climate conditions in Puerto Rico from 2014-2021. Each of the four working groups provide an assessment of:
- Geophysical and Chemical Scientific Knowledge
- Ecology and Biodiversity
- Society and Economy
- Communications and Outreach
An international, peer-reviewed publication released each summer, the State of the Climate is the authoritative annual summary of the global climate published as a supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The report, compiled by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, is based on contributions from scientists from around the world. It provides a detailed update on global climate indicators, notable weather events, and other data collected by environmental monitoring stations and instruments located on land, water, ice, and in space.
The Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report assesses the impacts of climate change, looking at ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities at global and regional levels. It also reviews vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of the natural world and human societies to adapt to climate change.
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 State Climate Summaries provided here were initially produced to meet the demand for state-level climate information in the wake of the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment. This 2022 version provides new information and extends the historical climate record to 2020 for each state. The summaries cover assessment topics directly related to NOAA’s mission, specifically historical climate variations and trends, future climate model projections of climate conditions during the 21st century, and past and future conditions of sea level and coastal flooding. Additional background information and links are given below.
The Vermont Climate Action Plan aims to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, help protect Vermont communities and landscapes from the greatest risks of climate change, and create new clean energy industry and jobs. The Climate Action Plan includes strategies to:
- Reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation, building, regulated utility, industrial, commercial, and agricultural sectors;
- Encourage smart growth and related strategies;
- Achieve long-term sequestration and storage of carbon and promote best management practices to achieve climate mitigation, adaption, and resilience on natural working lands;
- Achieve net zero emissions by 2050 across all sectors;
- Reduce energy burdens for rural and marginalized communities;
- Limit the use of chemicals, substances, or products that contribute to climate change; and
- Build and encourage climate adaptation and resilience of Vermont communities and natural systems.
The Climate Action Plan serves as a guide for the Vermont Legislature in setting policy that supports climate change solutions for Vermonters and Vermont's landscape.
A range of resources documenting report preparation are available in the Climate Action Plan Appendices.
For the six states of the U.S. Southwest (Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah)i , January 2020 through August 2021 have been exceptional in the instrumental climate record since 1895, with the lowest total precipitation and the third-highest daily average temperatures recorded, which together imposed an unyielding, unprecedented, and costly drought. This exceptional drought punctuates a two-decade period of persistently warm and dry conditions throughout the region.
This collection of leading practices in climate adaptation covers a suite of climate adaptation actions and is intended to broadly promote collaborative learning. Each practice in the collection is explained and supported by concrete examples. These practices are drawn from WUCA work products and WUCA members' experiences, and, when possible, connected to relevant resources and related efforts. Most of these practices are appropriate for water utilities of any size, as well as other sectors interested in climate adaptation.
The current practices and where they are placed within the five essential climate adaptation action areas:
- Engage
- Understand
- Plan
- Implement
- Sustain
It is important to note that these action areas and leading practices are not prioritized. Instead, the most useful practices depend on the individual organization's needs and priorities.
Climate change is expected to disrupt many aspects of life in American Sāmoa. Those who are already vulnerable—including children, the elderly, low-income families, and individuals with disabilities—are at greater risk from extreme weather and climate events. This report provides guidance for decision makers seeking to better understand the implications of climate variability and change for American Sāmoa and its communities and identifies the additional information and research needed to support responses that enhance resilience and help American Sāmoa to withstand the changes to come. This is one of a series of PIRCA reports aimed at assessing the state of knowledge about climate change indicators, impacts, and adaptive capacity of the U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Islands and the Hawaiian archipelago. Authors from the University of Hawai‘i and the East-West Center—along with 25 technical contributors from local governments, NGOs, researchers, and community groups—collaboratively developed the American Sāmoa report.
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.
In 2020, New York City's Mayor’s Office of Resiliency initiated an engagement process, called the Climate Knowledge Exchange, to align research with climate resiliency and adaptation needs. This report is the first in an annual series that will maintain a public agenda for climate research in NYC. The report communicates NYC’s research needs to external partners, including academic scientists, federal researchers, philanthropic foundations, and community organizations. This in turn will catalyze new and creative partnerships to develop credible and actionable research products that address NYC’s most pressing climate challenges. The report includes the engagement methodology and survey text used with various agencies.
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 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.
Hotter weather, stronger typhoons, coral reef death, and physical and mental health risks are among the major challenges detailed in this report on climate change in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). Threatened resources include high-value coastal infrastructure and the millions of dollars that ocean ecosystems add to the CNMI economy annually. This report provides guidance for decision makers seeking to better understand the implications of climate variability and change for CNMI and its communities and identifies the additional information and research needed to support responses that enhance resilience and help CNMI to withstand the changes to come.
Safe and secure water supplies are a continuing fundamental pursuit for life in the West. This 2021 Report provides an assessment of climate change impacts to water uses in the West and adds a new set of West-wide information based in paleohydrology. This report describes our collaborative actions taken to increase the reliability of water and power deliveries since 2016, including: science and research, planning, infrastructure sustainability, efficient hydropower production, and on-the-ground actions to meet needs for irrigation, municipalities, power, Tribes, and the environment.
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.
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.
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.
The heavy precipitation and flooding of 2019 was one for the history books. This report looks back at the major climate events and impacts of 2019 in the Missouri River Basin.
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.
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.
The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska (Tlingit & Haida) is a federally recognized Indian Tribe that serves 20 villages and communities stretching over 43,000 square miles within the Alaska Panhandle. The Tlingit and Haida membership is among the largest, most isolated, and most geographically dispersed of Native or Tribal populations nationwide. The region encompasses a 525-mile strip of coastline and interior waterways, bordered by Canada on the north, south, and east, with the Gulf of Alaska on the west.
The Central Council recognizes that wild salmon, berries, clams, herring, halibut, yellow cedar and other species important for subsistence, cash and culture are at risk. In response, they have released a 53-page climate change adaptation plan. The document is a roadmap for prioritizing, monitoring, and responding to threats stemming from warming air and ocean temperatures, caused by increasing levels of greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere.
The 2017 drought was a rapid-onset event for northeast Montana, the Dakotas, and the Canadian Prairies during the spring and summer of 2017. It was the worst drought to impact the U.S. Northern Plains in decades, and it decimated crops across the region, resulting in $2.6 billion in agricultural losses in the U.S. alone. The unique circumstances of this drought created an opportunity to evaluate and improve the efficacy of drought-related coordination, communication, and management within the region in preparation for future droughts.
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 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 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 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.
Climate change is causing significant and far-reaching impacts on the Great Lakes and the Great Lakes region. This report, from 18 leading scientists and experts from Midwest and Canadian universities and research institutions, draws on the array of existing research to assess how the shifting global climate impacts the unique Great Lakes region.
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.
This drought assessment report spans a Northern Great Plains region that includes North Dakota, South Dakota, and eastern Montana. It begins with an examination of the observed hydroclimatic conditions that led to the 2017 spring and summertime drought and places those conditions into historical context of 1895–present. The role of anthropogenic climate change is assessed through its possible impact on 2017 precipitation, temperature, and soil moisture. Finally, the report examines whether the record-low summertime precipitation that led to the 2017 drought was predicted by modern initialized forecast systems used by drought forecasters.
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.
The Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR2) was led and developed by the Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group under the auspices of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Contributing to the Fourth National Climate Assessment, SOCCR2 is designed as a special interagency assessment focused on the advances in the science and the understanding of the carbon cycle across North America since the first SOCCR (2007). Specifically, SOCCR2 focuses on U.S. and North American carbon cycle processes, stocks, fluxes, and interactions with global-scale carbon budgets and climate change impacts in managed and unmanaged systems. The report includes an assessment of the carbon stocks and fluxes in soils, water (including near-coastal oceans), vegetation, aquatic-terrestrial interfaces (e.g., coasts, estuaries, wetlands), human settlements, agriculture, and forestry. It considers relevant carbon management science perspectives and science-based tools for supporting and informing decisions. The status of and emerging opportunities for improving measurements, observations, and projections of stocks and fluxes in the carbon cycle, including uncertainty identification, are part of the report.
This report offers the first national assessment of the scope and consequences of urban flooding in the United States. Researchers analyzed available data concerning urban flooding, surveyed municipal flood and stormwater managers, and met with professionals whose disciplines intersect with urban flooding at the local, state, and national level. The research team's findings affirm that urban flooding is a national and significant source of economic loss, social disruption, and housing inequality. This report presents the full results of the study, addresses governance issues that affect urban flood risk reduction, examines critical challenges, and offers recommendations for actions.
This special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change describes the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. The report also describes potential global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.