Carbon Management on Public Lands
 An interdisciplinary approach to position CU Boulder as a leader in adaptive biogeochemical management of federal rangelands and forests. Working with the San Juan Public Lands Center, Jason Neff and others have developed a carbon research plan intended to make Southwest Colorado a demonstration site for potential federal carbon management policy. The project’s goal is to initiate a joint federal/CU effort to design protocols for, and evaluate the implications of, emerging carbon management plans.
Read more ...
|
| |
Governing Geo-Engineering Research: Why, When and How?
 Lisa Dilling is collaborating with graduate student Rachel Hauser on an effort to look at analogs from other areas of research to understand under what circumstances we might want to apply extra scrutiny to proposed geo-engineering research and for what reasons.
|
| |
Interactions of Drought and Climate Adaptation (IDCA) for Urban Water
 This new project, which was recently funded by the NOAA Sectoral Applications Research Program (SARP), will examine how drought policies interact with both short-term drought and long-term climate change. It will ask whether adjustment today or in the past lead to more resilient systems across climate time scales. The project researchers hypothesize that the more effective a policy becomes in terms of increasing water use efficiency, the more reliant the system becomes on accurate information. Read more ...
|
| |
Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre Internship Program
 This program seeks to improve climate change communication and adaptation decision-making in response to climate variability and change within the humanitarian sector. It connects humanitarian practitioners from the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre [RC/RC CC] an affiliate of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies [IFRC] with science-policy graduate student researchers at the University of Colorado. Read more ...
|
| |
Science Policy Assessment and Research on Climate
 Each day, in the face of deep uncertainty, millions of decisions are made that respond to and influence the behavior of climate. How does the nation's multi-billion dollar investment in climate research affect those decisions? How can the societal value ofthis scientific investment be enhanced? These are the core organizing questions for the NSF-funded project, Science Policy Assessment and Research on Climate (SPARC). Read more ...
|
| |
Toward a Framework for Assessing Stakeholder Needs for Climate Information
 In support of NOAA’s new Climate Service and moving toward a more ongoing national assessment function, the WWA was awarded additional funds to support the development of a database of stakeholder needs across the upper and lower Colorado Basin. Together with the Great Lakes and Carolinas RISAS, we will be developing this database from past and current stakeholder reports, meetings, and studies, coding the information for variables of interest. Read more ...
|
| |
Understanding Demand for Climate Adaptation Information Across Scales
 As part of the SPARC supplemental award, two new projects are being launched. These projects will focus on the demand function for climate information, as a complement to earlier work focusing on the supply and the reconciling functions. Christine Kirchhoff is a post-doc who will be examining how climate-related information is used in water management contexts across vertical scales, as well as in different contexts across comparable horizontal scales. Read more ...
|
Understanding the Drivers of Adaptation at the Municipal Level in CO, WY and UT
 Lisa Dilling is co-leading this WWA-funded project to investigate why some local decision makers choose to adapt to climate-related stress and risk while others do not. Our idea is to systematically investigate the conditions under which local decision-makers in cities and large towns in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming decide to adapt (or not) to increased climate-related risk and hazards.
Read more ...
|
This project is aimed at developing a comprehensive understanding of the use of information by stakeholders of the NOAA/NWS Colorado Basin River Forecast Center (CBRFC). Through surveys and interviews, the researchers will assess the climate information needs of CBRFC stakeholders and how they do or do not use quantitative streamflow forecasts. This will provide 1) a better understanding of how water managers and others who use CBRFC forecasts deal with variability and 2) a context through which to view and understand the potential utility of the results of the “Snowmelt Perturbations in the Upper Colorado River Basin” project.
