Highlights

Since 1989, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has submitted annual reports to Congress called Our Changing Planet. The reports describe the status of USGCRP research activities, provide progress updates, and document recent accomplishments.

In particular, Our Changing Planet highlights progress and accomplishments in interagency activities. These highlights represent the broad spectrum of USGCRP activities that extend from Earth system observations, modeling, and fundamental research through synthesis and assessment, decision support, education, and public engagement.

Tracking Earth's Carbon and Methane Budgets

Founded in 2001, the Global Carbon Project (GCP) is an international scientific collaboration investigating the biophysical and human components of the global carbon cycle, the interactions between them, and their response to a changing climate. The GCP tracks sources and sinks of carbon dioxide and methane, the two most important greenhouse gases directly emitted by human activities—providing annual updates on emissions trends, atmospheric concentrations, and sources of uncertainty, in a format accessible to policymakers....

Recent evidence has revealed that the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are not as static as once thought. Accelerated ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet, disintegrating ice shelves around Antarctica, and signs that several marine-terminating glaciers in Antarctica have begun an irreversible retreat all signal that changes are taking place faster than was thought possible. Ice sheets are projected to contribute significantly to global sea-level rise, which poses dramatic risks for coastal communities and island nations worldwide. In response to these rapid changes, several USGCRP...

As climate change increasingly impacts society and ecosystems, demand for reliable information about climate conditions now and in the future is growing. Climate research is conducted by two distinct communities, one working on climate forecasts for the near-term future and the other on climate-change projections over decades to centuries. Despite these different foci, the boundaries between these two communities increasingly overlap, and they share many common methods and challenges. Enhanced collaboration across modeling centers and communities can help create more valuable climate-...

Building Regional Collaboration for Drought Resilience

In 2015, drought impacts in the Western United States cost an estimated $4.5 billion. Impacts included the fallowing of hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland, excess groundwater pumping, and the exacerbation of wildfire conditions, which contributed to fires that caused the highest annual total of U.S. acreage burned since record-keeping began in 1960. As these impacts become more prevalent under a changing climate, preparedness, including an early-warning system for drought conditions, is increasingly important in many parts of the United States. The...

Successfully Predicting the Large 2015/2016 El Niño

The El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon is a periodic fluctuation of sea-surface temperatures and atmospheric pressure across the tropical Pacific Ocean. During the El Niño phase of the cycle, the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean warms substantially. This can cause significant short-term increases in global-average surface temperatures, and through atmospheric teleconnections, a strong El Niño event can affect weather patterns around the globe. A particularly strong El Niño emerged during the winter/spring season of...

Implementing Data Services for Development

SERVIR—meaning “to serve” in Spanish—combines NASA’s Earth-observations data and tools with USAID’s expertise in international development, supporting the use of geospatial technologies to help decision makers in developing countries respond to environmental change. Through the SERVIR network, experts at regional hubs in Eastern and Southern Africa, Hindu Kush-Himalaya, and the Mekong River Basin partner with local decision makers and U.S.-based scientists to create new datasets, maps, and decision-support tools related to climate...

Indicators are measurements or calculations that represent how a complex system is changing over time—for instance, the unemployment rate is an indicator of overall economic health. For the climate system, indicators offer a simple representation of how a highly complex system is changing, providing a benchmark for decision makers that can be used as a gateway into more complex and context-specific information. Indicators allow multiple audiences—including scientists, planners, policy makers, educators, and the public—to better understand and communicate the causes and effects of climate...

Scenarios are plausible alternative futures, each describing what might happen under a range of possible assumptions about policy decisions and the behavior of the Earth system. By illustrating possible future conditions, scenarios provide a basis for analyzing the potential impacts of and responses to global change. USGCRP is working to develop scenarios of change for the United States that can feed into the sustained-assessment process and support the needs of both scientists and stakeholders, focused on population, demographics, land-use change, sea-level rise and coastal flood risk,...

START (global change SysTem for Analysis, Research and Training) promotes research-driven capacity-building to advance knowledge on global environmental change in Africa and Asia-Pacific, through research grants and fellowships, knowledge assessments and syntheses, curricula development, advanced-training institutes, multi-stakeholder dialogues, and place-based strategic planning. In 2015, with support from USGCRP, START enhanced the ability of over 300 researchers selected as fellows and their partners to incorporate climate information...

Modeling Permafrost Response to Climate Change

Vast quantities of carbon—twice the size of the current amount in the atmosphere—are stored in frozen permafrost soils in Arctic regions. The Arctic climate is warming much more rapidly than the global average, leaving these carbon pools highly vulnerable to release into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane as soils thaw and decompose, leading to a feedback cycle of further warming and increasing carbon release. The potential for these carbon stocks to increase global-warming rates, and the rapid changes already observed in the permafrost region, have captured the attention of...

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Highlights

Tracking Earth’s Carbon and Methane Budgets

Modeling Ice Sheets and Sea-Level Rise

Improving Climate Predictability

Building Regional Collaboration for Drought Resilience

Successfully Predicting the Large 2015/2016 El Niño

Implementing Data Services for Development

Improving Indicators of Change

Developing Scenarios of Change

Advancing Knowledge on Global Environmental Change in Africa and Asia-Pacific

Modeling Permafrost Response to Climate Change