Emissions inventories that identify each country's sources and sinks of anthropogenic greenhouse gases are essential tools for addressing climate change. In accordance with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the U.S. Government develops an annual report that tracks U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and sinks by source, economic sector, and greenhouse gas, going back to 1990. Emissions from reservoirs used for water storage are included in these inventories, since reservoirs are human made; after lands are flooded through construction of a dam, decomposition of organic...

SERVIR is a joint initiative of NASA and USAID, collaborating with global partners to use satellite-based Earth observation data to support weather and climate resilience, agriculture and food security, water security, ecosystem and carbon management, and air quality and health. In 2022, in the Southeast Asia region , the Mekong River Commission (MRC) Secretariat adopted SERVIR drought and flood forecasting methodologies to improve the ability of the five Lower Mekong countries—Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam—to monitor and manage climate risks. SERVIR tools and services give...

Nature-based solutions are ecosystem-based approaches to achieve climate mitigation and adaptation goals and combat nature loss. A new study by USGS, NOAA, and academic researchers evaluates one such approach: natural infrastructure in dryland streams (NIDS) are beaver- or human-made structures of earth, debris, wood, or rock that, when installed in dryland streambeds, can have a range of benefits (Norman et al., 2022). Impacts of NIDS include storing water, sediment, and carbon; creating or restoring wetlands in degraded watersheds of arid landscapes; and sustaining processes and functions...

The Coastal Integrated Hydro-terrestrial Modeling (C-IHTM) workstream of USGCRP’s Coasts Interagency Group is engaging agency principal investigators in the development of a new framework for scenario discovery and model- and data-driven stress-testing. This framework is being developed primarily by principal investigators under the direction and guidance of the C-IHTM workstream, the IGIM, and the Interagency Integrated Water Cycle Group. The framework will be designed to allow for combining models at different spatial scales and purposes to address a wide range of topics. The status of the...

Continued sea-level rise from a changing climate is expected to result in the loss of many coastal mangrove trees, which will significantly impact human populations on remote Western Pacific Islands that rely on mangrove forests for food, building materials, and firewood. Mangroves also protect local communities from tsunamis and cyclones and are important for climate change mitigation because they remove and store large amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide in trees and sediments. Understanding how the elevation of the coast is changing at finer resolutions is a critical data gap in efforts...

Area burned by wildfire in the United States has grown since the 1980s, the result of decades of fire exclusion, increased fuel loads, and recent periods of severe drought influenced by climate change. In the last two decades, increasingly heavy smoke from wildfires has exposed millions of people to unhealthy pollution levels for extended periods, causing significant negative health impacts across the United States. Multiple scientific efforts are addressing the need for better wildland fire smoke information, and investments in smoke modeling, predictions, and forecasting have increased, both...

FEMA leads the Resilient Nation Partnership Network (RNPN), a peer-to-peer network of individuals and communities that are putting knowledge into practice to advance community resilience. In October 2021, FEMA and NASA co-hosted an RNPN forum on climate action. In 2022, the RNPN released a follow-on report, Building Alliances for Climate Action: Advancing Climate Action through Partnerships . The report outlines perspectives on climate resilience from federal leaders, Indigenous and community leaders, academics, and others. It includes ideas and perspectives on how science and information can...

Suitable habitats for forest trees may be shifting rapidly as the climate changes. These environmental alterations affect important processes in seed production and quality (called fecundity), seedling establishment, and seedling recruitment into larger-sized trees. Previous studies tracking the shift in suitable habitat for forests have been inconclusive, in part because seed production and the subsequent success of the seedlings may have different responses to changes in climate. A new analysis of these components at a continental scale using long-term seed production datasets and national...

Stratospheric aerosols are tiny particles high in the atmosphere that play a role in Earth’s climate by reflecting solar radiation, leading to a slight cooling. They also facilitate chemical reactions that reduce stratospheric ozone, which protects life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet solar radiation. Improved understanding of the processes that regulate the size, number, and distribution of stratospheric aerosols and their impacts on climate is essential to informing policy considerations around ozone-depleting substances, emissions into the stratosphere from rockets and aircraft, and...

EPA’s Framework for Evaluating Damages and Impacts (FrEDI) provides a fast and transparent framework for assessing the physical and economic impacts of climate change in the United States through the end of the 21 st century, under any future scenario. This open-source framework draws upon a broad range of peer-reviewed studies from across the climate science and economic literature, including modeling contributions from NOAA, CDC, and others, to allow users to quickly assess and better understand the detailed story of when, where, and to whom climate change impacts are projected to occur, as...