CIAO DATE: 07/2010
June 2010
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Slowly, painfully, we are developing a new policy framework that we hope will enable our society to cope with a changing climate. But currently we do not have in place the necessary “knowledge infrastructure” to make this new system work. As we develop new policies, we are confronted with critical questions of capacity and responsibility for this endeavor. The scientific community has done a great deal to study the nature and pace of global climate change and increase our understanding of these global phenomena—both in terms of what we know and what we do not know. Now, as policymakers, businesses, the international community, and households consider ways to reduce emissions in the hope of avoiding the most severe effects of a changing climate, build more resilient infrastructure and systems to withstand the unavoidable impacts of climate change, and plan for dealing with climate-related disasters, our ability to provide decisionmakers with the information that they need must grow and improve. Among many complex issues, we need to understand climate-related trends as they apply to state and local communities; we must decide how to monitor emissions and check results against agreed-upon reductions and expected outcomes; we must address how to better model the economic effects of emissions reductions plans and a changing natural environment in ways that will help us understand the impact of new climate policies. We need to establish methods of assessing the relative costs and benefits of more aggressive action that will allow us to prioritize actions to take for climate change, and, of course, we need to continuously improve on understanding how and why the Earth’s climate is changing so as to build greater certainty into policy efforts.
Resource link: Earth Observation for Climate Change [PDF] - 513K