Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Global Change Research Program for Fiscal Year 2017

Our Changing Planet reports on the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP)'s recent research and education activities to inform climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, highlighting those that intersect with President Obama’s Climate Action Plan. The report discusses progress towards each of four goals from USGCRP’s 2012-2021 Strategic Plan: to advance science, inform decisions, conduct sustained assessments, and communicate and educate.  

USGCRP has advanced climate change science through measuring global oceanic changes, researching ocean-climate dynamics, studying nighttime thunderstorms, studying the effects of elevated temperatures and carbon dioxide on peatland, monitoring urban emissions hotspots, tracking the globe’s carbon dioxide and methane budgets, modeling ice sheets and sea-level rise, and improving climate predictions.  

USGCRP has informed adaptation decisions through research on reducing the health risks of extreme heat; building regional collaboration for drought resilience and providing drought information to farmers; short-term climate forecasting; protecting fish, wildlife, plants and ecosystems in a changing climate; conducting sustained assessments; improving indicators of climate change; developing scenarios of change; implementing global change data services for use in developing nations; and increasing representation of social science in global change research.

USGCRP conducts the quadrennial National Climate Assessment on impacts of climate change in the United States and, under the 2012-2021 Strategic Plan, has implemented a sustained assessment process to facilitate sustained participation of scientists and stakeholders and to provide timely information to decision makers on an ongoing basis. Special reports such as The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States enable new information and insights to be synthesized as they emerge.

The report also discusses work related to USGCRP’s three thematic priorities for FY 2017: 

  • Arctic Research and Resilience – focused on understanding the impacts of climate change in the Arctic and resulting societal vulnerabilities as well as how changes in the Arctic affect global climate;
  • Water-Cycle Extremes and their Impacts – focused on developing capabilities to better assess and predict impacts of water-cycle extremes in the context of climate change on key sectors such as energy, agriculture, infrastructure, and health;
  • Methane Cycling within the Carbon Cycle Framework – focused on better understanding methane emissions processes (in wetlands, the energy sector, agriculture and forestry, and oceans and permafrost) and incorporating new knowledge into climate models and projections.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program coordinates and integrates global-change research across 13 Federal agencies and, through interagency collaboration, advances climate science and improves understanding of global change impacts to society.  

 

Publication Date: November 2016

Related Organizations:

Sectors:

Resource Category:

Resource Types:

  • Climate science
  • Progress report

Impacts:

Go To Resource