National indicators of climate changes, impacts, and vulnerability
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National indicators of climate changes, impacts, and vulnerability Melissa A. Kenney 1
& Anthony C. Janetos
2
Received: 28 October 2020 / Accepted: 5 November 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
1 Introduction Climate assessment efforts in the USA are a legally required and important process to share the state of knowledge about status and projected trends of climate changes and impacts and are used to support risk management decisions and policies (Jacobs et al. 2016). One of the major gaps in our ability to effectively conduct assessments as a scientific community has been the challenge of systematically tracking climate impacts relative to a baseline, especially their magnitude and distribution for socio-environmental systems and sectors, and to assess the effectiveness of our climate actions (Janetos and Kenney 2015). Indicators have been proposed as a means to address this gap. Kenney et al. (2016) define indicators as “reference tools that can be used to regularly update status, rates of change, or trends of a phenomenon using measured data, modeled data, or an index to assess or advance scientific understanding, to communicate, to inform decision-making, or to denote progress in achieving management objectives. Indicators differ from data visualization tools in that they are systematically updated and comparative to a baseline of change.” Indicators have been highlighted as a foundational decision support product to consistently report changes relative to a baseline for phenomena of national importance and presenting them in a manner that is relevant to a broad range of decision-makers. Specifically, an important feature of the 3rd US National Climate Assessment (NCA), and the sustained assessment process that was initiated, was to develop climate-relevant information and products, such as indicators, for use by a wide variety of stakeholders in This article is part of a Special Issue on “National Indicators of Climate Changes, Impacts, and Vulnerability” edited by Anthony C. Janetos and Melissa A. Kenney
* Melissa A. Kenney [email protected]
1
Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota, 1954 Buford Ave., Suite 325, Saint Paul, MN 55108, USA
2
Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Boston University, 67 Bay State Road, 685 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Climatic Change
public and private sectors and in the scientific community (Buizer et al. 2013, 2016; Jacobs et al. 2016). The participatory process and use-based framing of the NCA, including the establishment of indicators, was further expanded as a recommendation by the sustained NCA Federal Advisory Committee, which was disbanded in 2017 (Moss et al. 2019). To meet the need for a system of NCA indicators, we (A.C. Janetos and M.A. Kenney) led an effort to develop recommendations to establish an indicator system for the NCA. The process, which is summarized in Kenney et al. (2016), was initiated through a series of workshops (U.S. Global Change Research Program 2010, 2011a, b). Subsequently, first, a s
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