Session Synthesis Essay

AGCI Workshop Discussions on Planning for the U. S. National Assessment of the Consequences of Climate Change

Michael C. MacCracken

William Easterling

Co Chairs

Overview

The U. S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has initiated a national assessment of the consequences of climate change and climate variability for the United States and the significance of these consequences for its people, its environment, and its economy. With the increasing certainty about human-induced effects on climate and with the recent evidence for increasing climate variability, it is particularly important that society be made more aware of what is happening, what the significance of the changes could be, and how to be better prepared to cope and adapt to the changes and variations.

The purpose of the meeting held at the Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) in August 1997 was to explore how to design a national assessment process that would examine the vulnerabilities of the U. S. - its ecological systems, its major economic sectors, and its social infrastructure - to climate variability and climate change. The AGCI meeting also provided an opportunity for participants, particularly for those who had participated in and were planning regional workshops, to present and synthesize information gained from past assessments and workshop findings and inter actions.

Background and Expectations

As background for the workshop, the USGCRP's National Assessment Working Group (NAWG) had developed draft plans and objectives for the proposed national assessment. In addition, the USGCRP agencies together with the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) had sponsored four regional workshops in the preceding three months and four more were planned for late 1997 and a dozen more for 1998. All of this provided a rich background for discussion at the AGCI meeting.

The AGCI participants were asked to contribute to the development of the national assessment by identifying several key criteria, by concluding that the process must: involve a broadly defined research and stakeholder community; consider the nation's vulnerabilities to climate variability and climate change in the context of other important environmental stresses and current concerns; and account for region to region differences as well as common themes reaching across regions. The set of questions used to initiate the Aspen discussions is included as an Appendix to this essay.

It is important that society be made more aware of what is happening, what the significance of the changes could be, and how to be better prepared to cope and adapt to the changes and variations.

Approach and Goal

Extensive discussions took place at the workshop about all aspects of the planned assessment. The AGCI participants made clear their support for the proposition that the assessment being organized by the Subcommittee on Global Change Research (SGCR) needs to be carried out as a public-private partnership and as an iterative and continuing process to provide a scientifically based evaluation and summary of current understanding. They also suggested that the assessment process needs to be designed to be comprehensive and integrative, to couple research by scientists with specific policy-relevant needs of stakeholders, to ensure scientific excellence and credibility, to be open and transparent, and to provide planners, managers, organizations, and the public with information needed to cope with and increase their resilience to natural climate fluctuations and projected climatic changes resulting from human activities.

Based on plans developed by the NAWG, a goal statement for a National Assessment had been developed. As proposed, the goal of the national assessment is to determine the local, regional, national, and international implications of climate change and climate variability within the U. S. in the context of other existing and potential environmental, economic, and social stresses. Of particular importance is understanding the regional mosaic of impacts that have been and will be occurring as a result of the global-scale changes that are underway and will continue over the coming decades.

Throughout the Aspen meeting there was considerable discussion about this goal statement and about the various components that it implied. As an outcome of these deliberations, an expanded conception of the goal statement was suggested, with two equally important aspects:

• to develop a more complete understanding by the scientific community, government, private industry, and the public of the local, regional, national, and international implications of global change in the context of other existing and potential environmental, economic and social stresses and opportunities;
• to establish and maintain a continuing, interactive dialogue among interested groups and individuals engaged in exploring the challenges and opportunities associated with global scale changes that are underway and will continue over the coming decades, thereby underpinning a sustainable future.

The most important aspect of this formulation was the recognition that the assessment must be a process through which the conduct of a traditional "scientific assessment" is coupled with a commitment to two-way communication between the providers and the users of scientific information/research/assessment results in a dialogue designed to facilitate the use of new scientific insights by decision makers at all levels in addressing practical problems.

The assessment needs to be an iterative and continuing process to provide a scientifically based evaluation and summary of current understanding.

The discussions clearly indicated that the national assessment process should be designed to establish and maintain a continuing, interactive dialogue among government officials, business and industry, planners and managers, non-profit organizations , the scientific research and education communities, and the public. A multi-pronged approach should be used to generate the needed information about the implications of climate change and variability for the U. S.:

Regional assessment activities should focus on the issues of most importance at the regional level across the U. S. Based on the distinctive regional characteristics and potential consequences of climate change, a rich array of regional workshops should take place, encompassing every state and territory (see Table 2.2 for listing as of April, 1998). In carrying out the regional assessments that are planned to be follow-ons to the regional workshops, it was recognized that some combining of workshop regions may be appropriate for strengthening analysis capabilities and that this could be done while retaining the richness and diversity created by the more detailed regional texture.

Sectoral assessment activities should focus on issues that are national in scope and of importance to the services and goods on which people, society and the economy depend. Ten high priority sectors relating closely to human needs were tentatively identified by the AGCI participants for consideration: food availability; water availability; human health; energy availability; forest products and services; ecosystem goods and services; housing and urban services; national and international economies; environmental quality; and natural disasters and extreme events. The first National Assessment will focus on five sectors: agriculture, water resources, coastal zone, and health.

National assessment activities should identify common themes and core issues concerning the implications of long-term climate change and variability for the U. S. These findings should be integrated and consolidated into a synthesis report that will serve as a national summary for decision makers.

In addition, to promote consistency and coherence across the regions and sectors, it was suggested that a series of baseline scenarios should be prepared that provide the best estimates of how the nation is expected to develop economically, demographically, and technologically over the next 50 years. A series of scenarios should also be developed that define the ranges of expected changes in climate, resource use, and ecosystem distribution for use in evaluating the potential consequences of long-term climate change for the U. S.

The assessment process must include a commitment to two-way communication between the providers and the users of scientific information to facilitate the use of new scientific insights by decision makers.

Discussions about the coupling of research and assessments concluded that a strengthened assessment-oriented research program, dedicated to supporting the development of useful information for decision makers, should be a high priority. The research efforts should be broadly based and aimed at improving fundamental understanding of the Earth system as well as the basis for achieving improved predictive understanding. These research and predictive efforts must be essential partners in order to ensure an effective national assessment process.

Organization and Responsibilities

There were extensive discussions about how the assessment process should be organized. The U. S. Global Change Research Program has a statutory mandate to undertake scientific assessments of the implications of climate change. Responsibility for conducting the assessments is legally given to the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) within the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Within the NSTC structure, the Subcommittee on Global Change Research (SGCR) of the NSTC's Committee on Environment and Natural Resources (CENR), which oversees the USGCRP, has been assigned responsibility. To carry through the assessment process, it is being proposed that responsibility for the analysis and for the preparation of the periodic assessment reports be vested in both the scientific community and in those who will be affected and can and must cope with the consequences of long-term environmental change.

Based on discussions at the AGCI workshop about implementing the concept of a public-private partnership, it was suggested that responsibility for the national as assessment process should be distributed among several entities, as illustrated in Figure 2.1.

Responsibility for the assessment will be vested in both the scientific community and in those who will be affected and can and must cope with the consequences of long-term environmental change.

• A National Assessments of Global Change Oversight Committee should be established to provide oversight for the national assessment process, to ensure its overall credibility and integrity, and to encourage timely progress. Members should be drawn from the regional, sectoral, and national communities and include representatives from public interest groups, business and industry, state and local governments, Congress, and the federal agencies. A National Assessment Technical Advisory Committee should also be established that includes leading scientists and technical experts in order to provide expert advice and review of the assessment process. (Note: In the official organization plan that was adopted March 12, 1998 and that established the National Assessment Synthesis Team (NAST), the NAST assumes the role of intellectual leadership for the assessment as well as preparation of the synthesis report. To ensure full stakeholder input, the synthesis report will draw heavily from the results of both regional and sectoral assessments and an open technical and public comment and review process is planned. The report will also be reviewed by agencies and agency-identified experts and groups.)
• A National Assessment Synthesis Team that includes leading scientists and experts should be established to provide intellectual leadership and integration for the national assessment process, serve as a strong bridge between regions and sectoral aspects of the national assessment, and prepare the integrating synthesis report.
• Regional, Sectoral, and Scenario Teams should be established to have direct responsibility for designing and developing baseline scenarios, and for assembling, analyzing, and considering the scientific findings and their implications for the regions and sectors. The assessment teams should be organized in a way that is open, inclusive and multidisciplinary.
• A National Assessment Coordination Office should be established by the SGCR, with staff coming from outside and within government. This office should have responsibility for coordination among the elements of the national assessment process. This office should be co-located and work in cooperation with the USGCRP's interagency coordination office and with the Working Group II Technical Support Unit of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for which the U. S. will be continuing to serve as the developed country co-chair.
• The Working Group on National Assessments, organized under the SGCR, should coordinate overall Federal Government participation in the national assessment, should assist in the initiation and oversight of regional and sectoral teams, and should help ensure a linking to emerging scientific information. In addition, this working group should coordinate plans for enhancing USGCRP and related research activities in areas underpinning the national assessment process.

Products of the National Assessment

In conducting the assessment, and in particular in starting the process with the regional workshops, four fundamental questions are being posed. In slightly expanded forms, these are:

(1) What are the current environmental stresses in the region or sectoral area and how would these be expected to play out in the future in the absence of climate change?

(2) How will projected changes in climate and climate variability exacerbate or ameliorate the effects of the existing regional or sectoral stresses, or introduce new stresses?

(3) What information is needed to provide better and more certain estimates of the consequences of climate change and variability?

(4) What strategies may help the region to cope with the anticipated consequences, especially in ways that also will help in coping with other stresses?

Addressing these questions was seen as vital if individuals and organizations are to better cope with the influences of climate change and variability over the next several decades.

The workshop participants urged the USGCRP to ensure that assessment results be provided through a continuing broad-scale, multi-sectoral assessment process. They suggested that a series of national-level summary reports should be prepared for each region and each sector; these should be based on more-detailed findings and documentation generated for and published by each regional or sectoral assessment team. The set of national-level summary reports for each region and sector should be accompanied by a synthesis report that provides an overview and integration that draws upon and generalizes from the information developed in the regional and sectoral reports.

How will projected changes in climate and climate variability exacerbate or ameliorate the effects of the existing regional or sectoral stresses, or introduce new stresses?

Schedule for the National Assessment

Regional workshops have already begun (see Table 2.2). The workshop discussions indicated that sectoral activities should be organized as soon as possible to provide a complimentary contribution to the assessment process. In continuing the series of regional workshops and initiating sectoral activities, lessons learned from the preceding workshops should be used to build an even more effective process for future activities.

In addition, the participants agreed with the NAWG proposal that broad input should be sought in the development of the assessment plan. It was recommended that the U. S. Climate Forum, to be held on November 12-13, 1997 at the Department of Commerce and National Academy of Sciences in Washington D. C., be used to bring together several hundred participants to expand and refine the set of questions that must be addressed in the national assessment for it to be most useful for stakeholders.

Building upon the U. S. Climate Forum, and assuming rapid implementation of the assessment plans by the USGCRP agencies, regional prioritization of issues and the initial results of regional and sectoral analyses and assessments should be available in draft form in 1998, with revision and review completed by later in 1999. The first national synthesis report should then be able to be completed by the end of 1999 as called for by OSTP. Legislation establishing the USGCRP calls for scientific assessments of global change to be conducted periodically, and it was agreed that future updates should appear periodically. It was suggested that the schedule in each region and sector would depend primarily on the development of new information and understanding.

Ensuring Scientific Credibility and Relevance

Discussions make clear that the credibility of national assessment reports needs to be ensured by requiring an open and inclusive process that encourages the participation of the most qualified scientific, technical, and socioeconomic experts in their preparation. Assessment reports should fairly represent the range of expert opinion about particular issues, with careful recognition of risks and uncertainties. Draft and final assessment reports should be subject to an open and wide-reaching review process, and accommodation should be made for well-documented and reviewed alternative interpretations. Relevance to the needs of policymakers should be ensured by the continuing and close involvement of stakeholders and decision makers. Internal and external evaluation processes should be developed in order that the continuing series of assessment activities and reports presents a clear and fair presentation of scientific understanding and stakeholder interests and needs.

Relevance to the needs of policymakers should be ensured by the continuing and close involvement of stakeholders and decision makers.

Outreach and Communication

Based on experience from past assessments, the value of the assessment process will depend on the broad communication of the findings and lessons emerging from the dialogue among the many and diverse stakeholder and the scientific communities. The regional workshops, which participants recommended should provide the core of the assessment activity along with similar sectoral workshops over the next year, were seen as the primary pathways for involvement and communication in the first phases of the assessment. It was suggested that national meetings such as the U. S. Climate Forum in November 1997 should also be used to encourage participation in the assessment process.

Participants indicated that assessment activities, workshop reports, and analytic findings should be broadly communicated through the media, the Web, and other channels and that reports should be made widely and inexpensively available. Outreach should also be strongly encouraged through programs that target both formal ( i. e., school-based) and informal (i. e. , museum, park and community-based) educational communities.

The "Spirit of Aspen"

The most important outcome from the AGCI meeting was a new spirit, an " esprit d'Aspen," a realization that the discussions had led to a vision for a new way of interacting, thinking about, working on, and communicating the importance and complexity of global change. This new vision is based on participation in the process of those at all levels and of all types of interests in a partnership that strongly embraces a bottoms-up, issue-driven approach to relating science and society. This will require new partnerships between the Federal and local-regional levels of government; between the public and private sectors; between the scientific community and policy makers; and among all of these important players.

This new vision also involves focusing on the global change issue in a way that is designed to help address the consequences of climate variability and change for real people in real places at the local and regional (as well as at the national and international ) levels. The vision calls for a mechanism that organizes and prioritizes the research effort based not only on scientific uncertainties, but also on needs identified (by stakeholders) in the context of a grassroots effort to engage stakeholders in both identifying the most important issues and developing appropriate response options. The active, continuing involvement of stakeholders in this new paradigm of collaboration/engagement with the scientific community at all stages was viewed as essential.

The value of the assessment process will depend on the broad communication of the findings and lessons emerging from the dialogue among the many and diverse stakeholder and the scientific communities.

Developing this partnership among all of the participants would create an integrated framework that would collectively pursue three primary objectives:

(1) the provision of information to support decision making (including but not limited to the production of periodic assessment reports);

(2) research/analyses to support the generation of new and useful information; and

(3) education/communication/outreach activities designed to: communicate the results of research from the scientific community (the providers of scientific information) to decision makers; communicate the concerns and information needs of decision makers (the users of scientific information) to the scientific community; and enhance public understanding of the implications of global change at the local, regional and national (and international) levels. "Communication " in the context of the national global change assessment must therefore be interactive (i. e., two-way) and continuing.

Epilogue

This new vision for bridging the recognized gap between science and society generated an enthusiasm among the AGCI participants that has carried on since Aspen, and energized a wide number of planning and outreach activities. Many commented following the workshop that they had been so actively engaged that they barely had time to start to explore the Aspen area - they had caught the "Aspen spirit" and they were grateful.

Acknowledgments

As organizers of the assessment component of the 1997 Aspen Global Change Institute summer session, we want to first acknowledge the enthusiastic participation of the many attendees, particularly the many contributions of those who have been leading the regional workshop efforts. We want to acknowledge the efforts of the USGCRP agencies and Executive Offices in assisting in the preparation for and sponsorship of the meeting, with particular recognition to Dr. Jerry Melillo, at the time Associate Director for Environment at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr. Robert Corell, Chair of the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, and Mr. Paul Dresler, Chair of the National Assessment Working Group.

We also express special thanks to the staff of the Aspen Global Change Institute, including Director John Katzenberger and Office Manager Jenifer Blomquist who together provided such gracious arrangements, and writer/editor Susan Hassol, who has transformed the sometimes disjointed discussions at the workshop into a coherent and important proceedings.

This new vision is based on participation in the process of those at all levels and of all types of interests in a partnership that strongly embraces a bottoms-up, issue-driven approach to relating science and society.

We are especially grateful for the efforts of Melissa Taylor of the National Assessment Coordination Office, who provided extensive support in organizing for and then in assembling summary materials from the workshop. We also very much appreciated the efforts of the various participants who helped to lead and summarize the discussions of the many breakout groups.

We also very much enjoyed and are grateful for the hospitality of the citizens of Aspen and the friends of AGCI who hosted special evening dinners.

The authors both acknowledge support from the Office of Environmental Sciences of the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation. For Michael MacCracken, this paper was prepared under the auspices of the Office of Health and Environmental Research of DOE by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract No. W-7405-Eng 4B.

This new vision for bridging the recognized gap between science and society generated an enthusiasm among the AGCI participants that has carried on since Aspen, and energized a wide number of planning and outreach activities.