Virginia Burkett’s research while affiliated with United States Geological Survey and other places

The articles in this special issue examine the critical nexus of electricity, water, and climate, emphasizing connections among resources; the prospect of increasing vulnerabilities of water resources and electricity generation in a changing climate; and the opportunities for research to inform integrated energy and water policy and management measures aimed at reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience. Here, we characterize several major themes emerging from this research and highlight some of the uptake of this work in both scientific and public spheres. Underpinning much of this research is the recognition that water resources are expected to undergo substantial changes based on the global warming that results primarily from fossil energy-based carbon emissions. At the same time, the production of electricity from fossil fuels, nuclear power, and some renewable technologies (biomass, geothermal and concentrating solar power) can be highly water-intensive. Energy choices now and in the near future will have a major impact not just on the global climate, but also on water supplies and the resilience of energy systems that currently depend heavily on them.

Coastal degradation has been widely reported around the world's coasts. The observed degradation can be attributed to the intensification of a wide range of drivers of coastal change, especially an expanding global population and economy. While climate change and the resulting sea level rise will have important adverse effects, it is more difficult to observe such coastal changes relative to other drivers. The best examples are related to temperature rise at low and high latitudes, as seen by the impacts on coral reefs and polar coasts, respectively. This chapter also considers methods to better attribute the role of observed degradation to climate change and how this would support coastal management.

Several recent international assessments have concluded that climate change has the potential to reverse the modest economic gains achieved in many developing countries over the past decade. The phenomenon of climate change threatens to worsen poverty or burden populations with additional hardships, especially in poor societies with weak infrastructure and economic well-being. The importance of the perceptions, experiences, and knowledge of indigenous peoples has gained prominence in discussions of climate change and adaptation in developing countries and among international development organizations. Efforts to evaluate the role of indigenous knowledge in adaptation planning, however, have largely focused on rural people and their agricultural livelihoods. This paper presents the results of a study that examines perceptions, experiences, and indigenous knowledge relating to climate change and variability in three communities of metropolitan Accra, which is the capital of Ghana. The study design is based on a three-part conceptual framework and interview process involving risk mapping, mental models, and individual stressor cognition. Most of the residents interviewed in the three communities of urban Accra attributed climate change to the combination of deforestation and the burning of firewood and rubbish. None of the residents associated climate change with fossil fuel emissions from developed countries. Numerous potential adaptation strategies were suggested by the residents, many of which have been used effectively during past drought and flood events. Results suggest that ethnic residential clustering as well as strong community bonds in metropolitan Accra have allowed various groups and long-settled communities to engage in the sharing and transmission of knowledge of weather patterns and trends. Understanding and building upon indigenous knowledge may enhance the design, acceptance, and implementation of climate change adaptation strategies in Accra and urban regions of other developing nations.

In the late nineteenth century and twentieth century, there was considerable interest and activity to develop the United States for agricultural, mining, and many other purposes to improve the quality of human life standards and prosperity. Most of the work to support this development was focused along disciplinary lines with little attention focused on ecosystem service trade-offs or synergisms, especially those that transcended boundaries of scientific disciplines and specific interest groups. Concurrently, human population size has increased substantially and its use of ecosystem services has increased more than five-fold over just the past century. Consequently, the contemporary landscape has been highly modified for human use, leaving behind a fragmented landscape where basic ecosystem functions and processes have been broadly altered. Over this period, climate change also interacted with other anthropogenic effects, resulting in modern environmental problems having a complexity that is without historical precedent. The challenge before the scientific community is to develop new science paradigms that integrate relevant scientific disciplines to properly frame and evaluate modern environmental problems in a systems-type approach to better inform the decision-making process. Wetland science is a relatively new discipline that grew out of the conservation movement of the early twentieth century. In the United States, most of the conservation attention in the earlier days was on wildlife, but a growing human awareness of the importance of the environment led to the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969. Concurrently, there was a broadening interest in conservation science, and the scientific study of wetlands gradually gained acceptance as a scientific discipline. Pioneering wetland scientists became formally organized when they formed The Society of Wetland Scientists in 1980 and established a publication outlet to share wetland research findings. In comparison to older and more traditional scientific disciplines, the wetland sciences may be better equipped to tackle today's complex problems. Since its emergence as a scientific discipline, the study of wetlands has frequently required interdisciplinary and integrated approaches. This interdisciplinary/integrated approach is largely the result of the fact that wetlands cannot be studied in isolation of upland areas that contribute surface and subsurface water, solutes, sediments, and nutrients into wetland basins. However, challenges still remain in thoroughly integrating the wetland sciences with scientific disciplines involved in upland studies, especially those involved with agriculture, development, and other land-conversion activities that influence wetland hydrology, chemistry, and sedimentation. One way to facilitate this integration is to develop an understanding of how human activities affect wetland ecosystem services, especially the trade-offs and synergisms that occur when land-use changes are made. Used in this context, an understanding of the real costs of managing for a particular ecosystem service or groups of services can be determined and quantified in terms of reduced delivery of other services and in overall sustainability of the wetland and the landscapes that support them. In this chapter, we discuss some of the more salient aspects of a few common wetland types to give the reader some background on the diversity of functions that wetlands perform and the specific ecosystem services they provide to society. Wetlands are among the most complex ecosystems on the planet, and it is often difficult to communicate to a diverse public all of the positive services wetlands provide to mankind. Our goal is to help the reader develop an understanding that management options can be approached as societal choices where decisions can be made within a spatial and temporal context to identify trade-offs, synergies, and effects on long-term sustainability of wetland ecosystems. This will be especially relevant as we move into alternate climate futures where our portfolio of management options for mitigating damage to ecosystem function or detrimental cascading effects must be diverse and effective. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. All rights are reserved.

Coping is a behavioral capacity that can reduce the adverse impacts in a system that is exposed to an extreme event or a chronic natural hazard. The capacity for coping with a natural hazard is generally inversely related to vulnerability - The higher the coping capacity, the lower the vulnerability of a system, region, community, or individual. In some cases, however, even strong coping capacities do not necessarily reduce vulnerability. For example, transportation and sewage treatment facilities constructed in a geologic floodplain by a community with high institutional and financial resources may be as physically vulnerable to the impacts of flooding as facilities constructed by a community with low coping capacity. Coping behaviors that are based on a good understanding of both the hazard and its impacts can substantially increase the resilience of human settlements, infrastructure, and economies.

Impacts on coastal systems are among the most costly and most certain consequences of a warming climate (Nicholls et al., 2007). The warming atmosphere is expected to accelerate sea-level rise as a result of the decline of glaciers and ice sheets and the thermal expansion of sea water. As mean sea level rises, coastal shorelines will retreat and low-lying areas will tend to be inundated more frequently, if not permanently, by the advancing sea. As atmospheric temperature increases and rainfall patterns change, soil moisture and runoff to the coast are likely to be altered. An increase in the intensity of climatic extremes such as storms and heat spells, coupled with other impacts of climate change and the effects of human development, could affect the sustainability of many existing coastal communities and natural resources. This report examines the known effects and relationships of these and other climate change variables on coasts of the U.S. It also describes how several major sectors of the U.S. economy are likely to be affected as well as the diversity of adaptation options that are either being considered or already implemented in coastal regions.

Developed to inform the 2013 National Climate Assessment, and a landmark study in terms of its breadth and depth of coverage and conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, Coastal Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerabilities examines the known effects and relationships of climate change variables on the coasts of the U.S. This state of the art assessment comes from a broad range of experts in academia, private industry, state and local governments, NGOs, professional societies, and impacted communities. It includes case studies on topics such as adaptive capacity; climate change effects on. It highlights past climate trends, projected climate change and vulnerabilities, and impacts to specific sectors. Rich in science and case studies, it examines the latest climate change impacts, scenarios, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity for nine major coastal regions of the United States and provides essential guidance for decision-makers - as well as environmental academics, professionals, and advocates - who seek to better understand how climate variability and change impact the US coasts and its communities. © 2012 The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. All rights reserved.

The societal vulnerability of U.S. coasts to climate change is multifaceted, including vulnerabilities of economic sectors, cultural resources, and human well-being of a diverse concentration of people. In addition to the vulnerability and potential impacts of a changing climate on natural resources and threats to ecosystem services described in Chapter 3, homes and other human development in the coastal zone are also increasingly at risk. This expanded vulnerability has three dimensions: exposure, sensitivity, and resilience or adaptive capacity. The interactions of climate-related vulnerabilities with other stresses, such as economic downturn, environmental degradation, loss of ecosystem services, and continued pressures for development pose further analytical challenges. Current research on societal vulnerability in the coastal area does not yet fully consider or capture these multifaceted attributes of societal vulnerability.

Robert Nicholls is a Professor of coastal engineering in the School of Civil Engineering and the Environment at the University of Southampton, UK. His main technical areas of interest are long-term coastal engineering and management, especially the issues of coastal impacts and adaptation to climate change, with an emphasis on sea-level rise. Nationally, he leads the coastal research program of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and has contributed to a range of projects, including the RegIS Study, the national assessment of Flood Risk and Coastal Defence, and the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change. Within the European Union, he was a lead investigator on the DINAS-COAST Project, which led to the development of the DIVA tool for subnational to global vulnerability assessment, and he is involved in a number of projects which are utilizing this model. Internationally, he has conducted assessments for a number of international organizations, including the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank. He was lead author of chapters in four reports of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC): Second Assessment Report (1996); the Regional Assessment (1998); the Special Report on Technology Transfer (2000); and the Third Assessment Report (2001), and was convening lead author for the ‘Coastal systems and low-lying areas’ chapter in the IPCC 4th Assessment Report. In 2008, he was awarded the Roger Revelle Medal by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.