USGCRP’s Coastal Focus: Improving the Nation’s Capacity to Understand and Respond to a Changing Coastline.

Abstract:

The U.S. Global Change Research Program has identified the Nation’s coastal regions as one of three strategic focus areas to drive scientific growth, leverage interagency collaboration, and serve the growing needs of stakeholders. In spring 2020, the Coastal Focus group was launched with three parallel workstreams: coastal inundation, coastal integrated hydro-terrestrial modeling, and coastal science and decision-making. The coastal inundation workstream strives to improve the connection between ongoing agency research and the unmet needs within federal agencies for authoritative information and assistance guiding mission and regulatory decisions. One of the first activities is refreshing the interagency report on sea-level rise (Parris et al. 2012, Sweet et al. 2017) to inform the upcoming 5^th National Climate Assessment and an effort to accelerate the transition to users of this updated sea-level rise information. The coastal integrated hydro-terrestrial modeling workstream is working to strengthen interagency collaborations in the development, analysis, and demonstration of a diverse range of modeling approaches and capabilities that combine physical, biogeochemical, and socioeconomic components. They also plan to improve connections across diverse communities-of-practice, creating a shared and linked portal. The workstream intends to pursue a “use-case” approach to engage agencies in regions/topics of shared interest and mission focus. The coastal science and decision-making workstream aims to address how science and decision-making processes converge in the face of rising sea levels, changing coastal ecologies, and unfolding human activities and their interactions. They are undertaking three types of exploratory activities: examining scenarios being used to guide coastal planning and policy making; coordinating across agencies activities; and building the federal capacity to design, translate, and diffuse federal coastal products into the public and private sector. All three workstreams are designed to support each other and improve resilience in the complex landscape of the coasts. The presentation will review the group’s activities and provide an updated look at upcoming activities.