Communicating Climate Risk to Natural Resource Managers

English Abstract:

The Northeast Climate Science Center (NECSC) is one of eight centers funded by the Department of Interior through the USGS to work with regional stakeholders to evaluate the impacts of climate change on natural resource management. The NECSC in housed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is composed of a consortium of institutions including the University of Wisconsin Madison, University of Minnesota, University of Missouri, Columbia University, the College of Menominee Nation, and the Marine Biology Laboratory. The geographic extent of the Center ranges from Maine to Virginia to Missouri to Minnesota. The goal of the center is to provide scientific information, tools, and techniques that managers and other parties interested in land, water, wildlife and cultural resources can use to anticipate, monitor, and adapt to climate change in the Northeast region.

Essential to this goal is the delivery climate projections that allow resource managers to make decisions at local and regional levels that are well-informed relative to future climate conditions. This challenge is complicated by a variety of uncertainties including those associated with future greenhouse gas levels, the current limitations and biases of general circulation and regional climate models, the relationship of climate change to species and ecosystems of interest, and limitation on our ability to model complex biological systems.

This paper discusses how the NECSC has approached these challenges in our efforts to support regional nature resource management. A combination of regional climate projections, stakeholder engagement, and improved science communication has been applied to ensure that the results generated provide users with management relevant variables, that recent historic trends as well as climate projects inform our understanding, and that the uncertainties associated with all stages of impact analysis are clearly understood by stakeholders.