Climate Services in Support of Adaptation
Roger S. Pulwarty, (Drought in the Southwest) NOAA-CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center, Boulder, CO
Climate variability and change impact national and local goals, within and across sectors,
including, water, energy, health, agriculture, ecosystem management, and the coastal zone.
In recogniion of this long-standing observation, there is enabling legislation in the U.S.
Congress to establish a National Climate Service, led by NOAA, as part of the reauthorized
U.S. Global Change Research/Climate Change Science Program. Climate services have been
defined as the timely production and delivery of useful climate data, information and
knowledge to decision makers. In this paper we map the evolution of the idea of climate
services and describe the network and infrastructure existing and needed to develop and
coordinate such services.
Developing and communicating climate and climate impacts information necessary to inform
adaptation and mitigation under changing baselines and extremes, represent critical
emergent needs. While existing "service-type" activities can be identified in many settings
(e.g. federal, academic, private), we show that the problem is actually one of crafting
effective implementation strategies for improving decision quality (not just meeting "user
needs"), coordinating innovation mapping and diffusion, and most importantly highlighting
common interests among the different groups.
Onging implementation of the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS Act
2006; Public Law 109-430) is showing that the development of well-structured paths among
observations, projections, risk assessment and usable information requires knowledge
provision systems for early warning across temporal and spatial scales, and anticipatory
coordination between implementing agents and information providers. Integrated resources
management (e.g. water, coastal zone, high elevation ecosystems) provides an important
framework to achieve adaptation measures across socio-economic, environmental and
administrative systems. An effective climate service would facilitate integrated appraisals of
adaptation and mitigation options across multiple sectors and across an appropriate (user-
dependent) ensemble of near and longer-term future climates.
We assess how these integrated service perspectives (such as NIDIS) have been developed,
communicated and have value in improving decision-making processes for adaptation in a
changing climate, and how they have been influenced by the career of a certain Dr.
Redmond.
Recorded presentationSession 4, Kelly Redmond Session
Tuesday, 12 August 2008, 10:30 AM-12:00 PM, Harmony AB
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