Climate Adaptation

Decision Models

The Farm Adapt Model simulates yield, costs, and outputs of a 2,000 acre dryland wheat farm on the U.S. Great Plains, with the goal of modeling the impacts of climate variation, especially extreme events and rapid climate change, and farmer adaptation. Climate change is input via off-sets to the mean of the yield distribution from which the farm draws each year in a 30 year simulation. Read more ...

Interactions of Drought and Climate Adaptation (IDCA) for Urban Water

Municipalities have responded in various ways to past droughts, enacting a variety of policies to cope with temporary shortages in water supply. These measures have been largely successful at reducing short-term demand during drought events, as well as constraining the long-term per capita consumption of water even as population grows. Now, though, water systems also face the likelihood of long-term climate change, raising a fundamental question: have previous responses to short-term drought events led to more resilient urban water systems across climate time scales?
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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 ...

Successful Adaptation to Climate Change: Linking Science and Policy in a Rapidly Changing World

What does successful adaptation look like? This is a question we are frequently asked by planners, policy makers and other professionals charged with the task of developing and implementing adaptation strategies. While adaptation is increasingly recognized as an important climate risk management strategy, and on-the-ground adaptation planning activity is becoming more common-place, there is no clear guidance as to what success would look like, what to aim for and how to judge progress. This edited volume (Susanne Moser and Maxwell Boykoff) makes significant progress toward unpacking the question of successful adaptation, offering both scientifically informed and practice-relevant answers from various sectors and regions of the world . 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.
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Decision Making, Uncertainty, and Information

Assessment of the use of quantitative streamflow forecast information by Colorado Basin River Forecast Center stakeholders

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.

Evaluating Informational Inputs in Rulemaking Processes: A Multi-State Regulatory Analysis

The rulemaking process has become central to policymaking over the past several decades, with a large portion of regulatory authority delegated to administrative agencies. This is increasingly so in a federal system defined by political gridlock, wherein much of the policymaking occurs at the state and regulatory levels. Regulation consists of “an array of public policies explicitly designed to govern economic activity and its consequences at the level of the industry, firm, or individual unit of activity”. State-level bureaucratic agencies are not elected, and as a result, states have developed processes to incorporate input from regulated communities and other parties potentially affected by proposed regulations. Read more ...

Narratives, Media, and Issue Framing in Environmental Policymaking

Addressing public policy problems in an increasingly complex world relies heavily on communication, interpretation, and use of information. Media are one primary source through which information is disseminated, consumed, and framed. Media are frequently referenced in the policy literature as important mechanisms for policy change, a tool through which stakeholders influence policy outcomes, or a measure of policy agendas. Read more ...

Risk Perceptions and Support for Management Regimes in Wildland-Urban Interface Zones: A Comparative Analysis of Wildfire Policy and Citizen Response in the Intermountain West

Wildfire has long existed as a natural component of an ecosystem. However, due to many years of fire suppression policy alongside increasingly dry conditions, the western United States is experiencing some of the biggest and most severe wildfires in history. In recent years, fires affecting populations along the wildland-urban interface (WUI) have grown in size and destruction, substantially impacting life and property across the West. Western states are experiencing significant population growth and development combined with prolonged drought conditions and predictions of climate change that indicate increasing drought in the West. 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

Together with the Great Lakes and Carolinas RISAS, this Western Water Assessment-funded project has developed a database of stakeholder needs across the Colorado River Basin from past and current stakeholder reports, meetings, and studies, coding the information for variables of interest and developing a comprehensive framework that can be accessed and tested by other RISAs and assessment groups. Read more ...

Understanding Demand for Climate Adaptation Information Across Scales

In this project post doc Christine Kirchhoff has examined how climate-related information is used in water management contexts across vertical scales, as well as in different contexts across comparable horizontal scales. She asked questions about how information is selected, what types of information is currently demanded, how information flows across scales, how trust factors into information use, and the like. Read more ...

Energy, Carbon and Technology

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.

Extreme Events and Disasters

Drought Vulnerability Indicators Project

This Western Water Assessment-funded project, “A Drought Impact and Vulnerability Indicator Suite” led by Center director Bill Travis with research assistant Kristin Gangwer, has spent the past year creating a set of indicators for assessing the impacts of drought across different sectors (urban, agricultural, water, recreation), with the goal of developing both research-quality time series that can be normalized and analyzed for trends, and applied indicators that can help managers assess impacts and changing vulnerabilities. Read more ...

Dryness and Desperate Measures: The Implications of Land Tenure on Rocky Mountain Ranchers' Drought Experiences and Behaviors

Ranchers in the Rocky Mountain West navigate a complex land-tenure system comprised of deeded, leased, and public grazing lands. Droughts create management challenges for ranchers across their land holdings and impose physical, social, and economic impacts on the ranching system. However, while some studies have explored western ranchers’ drought experiences and management strategies, none have looked specifically at the role land tenure plays in their drought responses, and most literature on the relationship between land tenure and drought has thus far focused outside the United States. Read more ...

Extreme Events: Agents of Adaptation

Graduate student Gene Longenecker and Bill Travis are studying the possibility that some responses to natural hazards increase losses in the long run. They are using the latest hazard loss simulation model to test ways in which this effect could be detected. Read more ...

Flood Damage in the United States: A Reanalysis of National Weather Service Estimates

Flood damage has increased in the United States, despite local efforts and federal encouragement to mitigate flood hazards and regulate development in flood-prone areas. To help researchers and policy makers assess national progress in reducing vulnerability to flood hazards, reasonably accurate assessments of flood damage are needed. Yet, accurate accounting for losses has historically received little attention, except in the case of insured property. The flood damage estimates presented in this website are compiled from NWS records and publications, supplemented by reports of other federal and state agencies. The accompanying report includes an evaluation of the accuracy of the estimates and recommendations for users of the data. Read more ...

Media, Ethics and Climate Change

Cultural Politics of Climate Change

Max Boykoff has examined the role of celebrity interventions at the interface with climate science, governance and the everyday (with Dr. Michael K. Goodman, Kings College London, and Dr. Jo Littler, University of Sussex). This examines how the (de)legitimisation of a particular set of “privileged” non nation-state actors influence unfolding considerations and actions to grapple with anthropogenic climate change. Read more ...

Dialing Down: Undoing the Climate Damage

Ben Hale’s research explores the ethics of climate change responses: Geoengineering, Ocean Fertilization, and the Problem of Permissible Pollution; Science, Technology and Human Values; Getting the Bad Out, The Environment; Non-Renewable Resources and the Inevitability of Outcomes; and Private Ownership and Moral Jurisdiction. Read more ...

Emissions from Estate 4.0: How Climate Change Coverage in New/Social Media Reshapes the Climate Science-Policy-Public Interactions in the 21st Century

Mass media stitch together formal science and policy with everyday activities in the public sphere. Many dynamic, contested and complex factors contribute to how media outlets portray various facets of climate change. This proposed project seeks to better understand how issues, events and information have often become portrayed in the media around the world, through new and social media. Read more ...

Ethics, Public Policy, and Environmental Science

This NSF-funded joint project between Northern Arizona University, the University of Montana, and the University of Colorado at Boulder aims to develop educational resources that will enable graduate students in the natural sciences to develop the fundamental skills needed to navigate the intersection of ethics, public policy, and environmental science. Read more ...

Inside the Greenhouse

Max Boykoff and Beth Osnes of the Theater Department at University of Colorado Boulder are working to deepen our understanding of how issues associated with climate change are/can be communicated, by creating artifacts through interactive theatre, film, fine art, performance art, television programming, and appraising as well as extracting effective methods for multimodal climate communication. Read more ...

Media Coverage of Climate Change/Global Warming

Monthly updated figure tracking newspaper coverage of climate change or global warming in 50 newspapers across 20 countries and 6 continents. Max Boykoff (University of Colorado) and Maria Mansfield (University of Exeter) continue to track newspaper coverage of climate change or global warming in 50 newspapers across 20 countries and 6 continents. They update this figure on a monthly basis as a resource for journalists, researchers, and others who may be interested in tracking these trends. Max Boykoff also has a book coming out with Cambridge University Press in September 2011 titled Who Speaks for Climate? Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate Change. Read more ...

Successful Climate Adaptation Strategies and Cultural Engagement in Mumbai, India

This proposed project endeavors to improve our textured understanding of multi-level climate governance in the new millennium. The research approaches this massive challenge by focusing on four critical, dynamic and intersecting features as they manifest in Mumbai, India. Read more ...