Introduction to the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment: overview of the process and context
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Introduction to the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment: overview of the process and context Melissa Widhalm 1
& Jeffrey S. Dukes
1,2,3
Received: 15 October 2020 / Accepted: 29 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
The Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment (IN CCIA) is a collaborative effort to provide professionals, decision makers, and the public with information about how climate change affects state and local interests throughout Indiana, USA. This assessment effort has three interrelated goals: (1) analyze and document the best available climate change impacts research, (2) develop and maintain a network of stakeholders and experts, and (3) start a dialog about climate change throughout Indiana. The project adopted a process that prioritized stakeholder engagement, re-envisioned traditional dissemination approaches, and that had limited state government involvement, setting the IN CCIA apart from most other state climate assessments (SCAs) in the USA. This overview describes the motivations, principles, and processes that guided the IN CCIA development, explores how Indiana’s approach compares with those of other SCAs, and briefly summarizes the papers presented in this special issue. As interest in SCAs grows in noncoastal and politically conservative locations, the IN CCIA serves as one example of how a bottom-up assessment with limited funding can deliver credible climate science to diverse stakeholder groups in the absence of state-level mandates or direction and attract public attention over an extended period of time. Keywords Engaged research . Extreme weather . Midwest . State climate assessment
This article is part of a Special Issue on “The Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment” edited by Jeffrey Dukes, Melissa Widhalm, Daniel Vimont, and Linda Prokopy Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi. org/10.1007/s10584-020-02928-7.
* Jeffrey S. Dukes [email protected]
1
Purdue Climate Change Research Center, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
2
Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
3
Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
Climatic Change
1 Introduction As human activities trap increasing amounts of heat in Earth’s oceans and atmosphere (USGCRP 2017; IPCC 2014), a growing number of global and national reports describe trends in past weather data, provide projections of future climate, and assess how these changes affect natural and human-built systems. These broad climate assessments provide valuable insights about the scope and scale of threats facing the world, but they lack the locally relevant information required to support state and community climate adaptation and mitigation actions (Kirchhoff et al. 2019). To fill this information gap for local decision makers and residents, 27 different US states had completed at least 50 state climate assessments (SCAs) by 2020, with three additional sta
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