Environmental News Network - Framework Helps Local Planners Prepare for Climate Pressures on Food, Energy & Water Systems

Details: By University of Chicago - Marine Biological Laboratory; 24.Mar

As the world faces increasingly extreme and frequent weather events brought on by climate change – such as droughts, floods, heatwaves, and wildfires – critical civic resources such as food, water, and energy will be impacted.

Cheryl Porter

As the world faces increasingly extreme and frequent weather events brought on by climate change – such as droughts, floods, heatwaves, and wildfires – critical civic resources such as food, water, and energy will be impacted. Local and regional planners need to anticipate those impacts and evaluate what measures can be taken to prepare.

Now, a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional team of researchers has built a detailed framework to provide guidance to these planners. After two years of in-depth consultation with stakeholders in various affected communities, the team prepared a set of analytical tools that can be used to forecast the kinds of strains on resources that may be coming in the next few decades – and how best to address them.

The “toolkit” they developed, called the C-FEWS framework (for Climate-induced extremes on Food, Energy and Water Systems) is being published in a series of papers in a special edition of Frontiers in Environmental Science. Charles Vörösmarty, professor of environmental sciences at the City University of New York, is lead author of the introductory paper describing this new framework, and Jerry Melillo, distinguished scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Mass., is second author. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Photo Credit: sulox32 via Pixabay

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Framework Helps Local Planners Prepare for Climate Pressures on Food, Energy & Water Systems