Rick Piltz

Committee on Science, Space and Technology

Rick Piltz offered an overview of the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). He provided a brief comparison of the program under the Bush and the Clinton administrations. Though he praised the reforms of the latter, he identified persistent unmet needs in the overall research agenda. Calling for that agenda to feed ongoing policy, Piltz proposed a series of priorities for scientists as well as decisionmakers.

The Bush administration's unwillingness to commit to a CO₂ policy produced, in effect, a mandate to focus on long-term scientific uncertainties such as those that preoccupy Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Thus "policy-relevant" rhetoric (science before policy) heralded the need to postpone decisions pending a "comprehensive predictive understanding of the Earth system."

The Clinton administration's 50-point technocratic Climate Action Plan takes a proactive approach to the climate treaty. This proactive stance entails looking beyond the year 2000 in planning for the inevitable impacts attendant on future climate change as well as an acknowledgment of the need for linkages between assessment of global change and ongoing public policy. Thus the research agenda requires additional priorities that will meet a series of unmet needs.

In Piltz's view, the USGCRP agenda has not given enough attention to:

• research on impacts, both environmental and socioeconomic
• research on response strategies, such as mitigation and adaptation, and their implications
• integrated assessments