Assessing a Portfolio of Approaches for Producing Climate Change Information to Support Adaptation Decisions


This workshop will help characterize the strengths, limitations, variability, and uncertainties of approaches for producing and using climate change information to inform US Federal water resources adaptation planning and operations. Decisions about climate change adaptation measures to enhance the resilience of the infrastructure, planning, and operation of water-related resources in the US require reliable information about the variability and uncertainty of probable climate change effects at the spatiotemporal scales where the decisions are taken. A large portfolio of possible approaches to produce and apply climate change information for water resource issues has been developed, and many of those approaches are in use now. Each method or analytical technique in this portfolio brings its set of uncertainties and particular deficiencies, some of which are large or only partly characterized and poorly quantified. However, agencies currently lack best practice guidelines for helping them assess and choose the most appropriate approaches and techniques for their particular sets of adaptation decisions.

For these reasons, Federal agencies with water resource missions must develop guidelines for producing and using climate change information appropriately to support their variously scaled adaptation decisions. These guidelines will not dictate the individual approaches to be taken. Rather, they will help agencies develop a set of best practices for assessing the strengths and limits of the various approaches to using climate information for their decision choice-points. In addition, the guidelines will be structured to be flexible enough to apply to current state-of-the-science information as well as to future climate science developments.