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At least 361 records · Page 20
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

A Framework Using Applied Process Analysis Methods to Assess Water Security in the Vu Gia–Thu Bon River Basin, Vietnam

The Vu Gia–Thu Bon (VG–TB) river basin is facing numerous challenges to water security, particularly in light of the increasing impacts of climate change. These challenges, including salinity intrusion, shifts in rainfall patterns, and reduced water supply in downstream areas, are of great concern. This study comprehensively assessed the current state of water security in the basin using robust statistical analysis methods such as the Process Analysis Method (PAM), SMART principle, and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). This resulted in the development of a comprehensive assessment framework for water security in the VG–TB river basin. This framework identified five key dimensions, with basin development activities (0.32), the ability to meet water needs (0.24), and natural disaster resilience (0.19) being the most crucial and water resource potential being the least crucial (0.11) according to the AHP methodology. The latter also highlighted 15 indicators, four of which are particularly influential, including waste resources (0.54), flood (0.53), water storage capacity (0.45), and basin governance (0.42). Furthermore, 28 variables with high weight factors were identified. This framework aligns with the UN-Water water security definition and addresses the global water sustainability criteria outlined in Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG6). It enables the computation of a comprehensive Water Security Index (WSI) for specific regions, providing a strong foundation for decision-making and policy formulation. It aims to enhance water security in the context of climate change and support sustainable basin development, thereby guiding future research and policy decisions in water resource management.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS2011

Climate Change Impacts and Responses: Societal Indicators for the National Climate Assessment

The Climate Change Impacts and Responses: Societal Indicators for the National Climate Assessment workshop, sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for the National Climate Assessment (NCA), was held on April 28-29, 2011 at The Madison Hotel in Washington, DC. A group of 56 experts (see list in Appendix B) convened to share their experiences. Participants brought to bear a wide range of disciplinary expertise in the social and natural sciences, sector experience, and knowledge about developing and implementing indicators for a range of purposes. Participants included representatives from federal and state government, non-governmental organizations, tribes, universities, and communities. The purpose of the workshop was to assist the NCA in developing a strategic framework for climate-related physical, ecological, and socioeconomic indicators that can be easily communicated with the U.S. population and that will support monitoring, assessment, prediction, evaluation, and decision-making. The NCA indicators are envisioned as a relatively small number of policy-relevant integrated indicators designed to provide a consistent, objective, and transparent overview of major variations in climate impacts, vulnerabilities, adaptation, and mitigation activities across sectors, regions, and timeframes. The workshop participants were asked to provide input on a number of topics, including: (1) categories of societal indicators for the NCA; (2) alternative approaches to constructing indicators and the better approaches for NCA to consider; (3) specific requirements and criteria for implementing the indicators; and (4) sources of data for and creators of such indicators. Socioeconomic indicators could include demographic, cultural, behavioral, economic, public health, and policy components relevant to impacts, vulnerabilities, and adaptation to climate change as well as both proactive and reactive responses to climate change. Participants provided inputs through in-depth discussion in breakout sessions, plenary sessions on break-out results, and several panels that provided key insights about indicators, lessons learned through experience with developing and implementing indicators, and thoughts on how the NCA could proceed to develop indicators for the NCA.

Kenney, Melissa A.↗
DOE OSTI2023

Local and utility-wide cost allocations for a more equitable wildfire-resilient distribution grid

Climate-induced extreme weather conditions make electricity infrastructure more vulnerable. They increase the risk of power-line-ignited wildfires which can, in turn, jeopardize electric power delivery. Here, leveraging machine learning, we show that lower-income communities in California not only have lower fractions of power distribution lines undergrounded, but overhead lines and poles in their neighbourhoods are also more vulnerable to wildfires. Should they bear the cost of undergrounding fire-prone lines themselves, they would have to pay a disproportionately higher cost per household. We propose a cost allocation scheme with an income threshold below which the cost is borne by utility-wide ratepayers and above which the cost is borne locally. This scheme can not only minimize the average of undergrounding costs per household as a share of income, but also homogenize such cost–income ratios across communities. Furthermore, our research demonstrates the opportunity to appropriately integrate existing policies to make electricity infrastructure affordable, equitable and reliable amidst climate change.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

Investigating Building Energy Consumption and CO2 Emission in Phoenix Using AutoBEM and Future Typical Meteorological Year (fTMY) Weather Data

This research investigates the energy performance and CO2 emissions of each building stock across the Phoenix metropolitan area using the Automatic Building Energy Modeling (AutoBEM) framework and Model America v2 (MAv2) dataset from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) and Future Typical Meteorological Year (fTMY) files were used for AutoBEM simulation. The simulation results from TMY and fTMY were compared. It was found that a projected 10.28% increase in total CO2 emissions and a 9.30% rise in total energy consumption by 2080–2099 relative to current typical conditions. The results highlight the disparities in emissions among different building stocks and the influence of climate change on future energy demand. The findings underscore the necessity of targeted policy interventions and retrofitting strategies (eg. advanced HVAC systems, improved insulation, reflective roofing) to mitigate emissions in high-energy-use and emission-intensed buildings, particularly as climate conditions evolve. This study contributes to the growing understanding of building-sector emissions and their long-term implications under future climate scenarios.

Li, Hang [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000306001920)↗
DOE OSTI2026

CMIP7 Data Request: atmosphere priorities and opportunities

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 7 (CMIP7) request for data unlocking key research avenues in atmospheric science and provides justification for the resources needed to produce this data. Topics within the CMIP7 Atmosphere Theme centre around processes and feedbacks in atmospheric science such as clouds, aerosols and atmospheric chemistry, atmospheric circulation, temperature variability and extremes, radiative forcings, and Earth system model evaluation. These topics are summarised in this paper as scientific “opportunities” which will be realised through CMIP7 experiments and Earth system model outputs. These opportunities were submitted by a thematic group of atmospheric science community representatives combined with an extended consultation process. The production of these variables will close key gaps and uncertainties identified during previous rounds of CMIP, and will be broadly used by scientific, policy, governmental, industry, and other communities that rely on climate model projections for research and decision making, including supporting the 7th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report (AR7). As an author group, we also reflect on the process used to collate this data request and make recommendations to future CMIP governance on implementing a consultation on this scale in the future.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS1991

The effects of global climate change on Southeast Asia: A survey of likely impacts and problems of adaptation

Study results indicate the likelihood of significant net damages from climate change, in particular damages from sea-level rise and higher temperatures that seem unlikely to be offset by favorable shifts in precipitation and carbon dioxide. Also indicated was the importance of better climate models, in particular models that can calculate climate change on a regional scale appropriate to policy-making. In spite of this potential for damage, there seems to be a low level of awareness and concern, probably caused by the higher priority given to economic growth and reinforced by the great uncertainty in the forecasts. The common property nature of global environment systems also leads to a feeling of helplessness on the part of country governments.

Njoto, Sukrisno↗
NASA NTRS2019

Taking Climate Model Evaluation to the Next Level

Earth system models are complex and represent a large number of processes, resulting in a persistent spread across climate projections for a given future scenario. Owing to different model performances against observations and the lack of independence among models, there is now evidence that giving equal weight to each available model projection is suboptimal. This Perspective discusses newly developed tools that facilitate a more rapid and comprehensive evaluation of model simulations with observations, process-based emergent constraints that are a promising way to focus evaluation on the observations most relevant to climate projections, and advanced methods for model weighting. These approaches are needed to distil the most credible information on regional climate changes, impacts, and risks for stakeholders and policy-makers.

Eyring, Veronika↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Comprehensive Analysis of Thirty Years of Land Change in Georgia: Forest Degradation, Land-Use Patterns, and Drivers

In this talk, we present results from a study, funded by the NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change program, of thirty years of environmental change in the country of Georgia. The country, a former Soviet Union Republic, has experienced more political, economic and social change in the last 30 years than most countries. But the environmental implications of these extreme events remain largely unknown – the region is understudied, no national forest inventory has been completed in 20 years, and previous research in the area conducted by the authors were not successful. The latter statement is because of forest degradation. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, much of the forestry infrastructure broke down and people resorted to chopping down individual trees. The result was in many parts of the country a reduction in forest biomass but not to the point of a change in land cover. This type of forest degradation, which was either gradual over decades or abrupt, could not be readily identified using the methods and data at our disposal at the time. In the recent study, we had full access to the Landsat archive in combination with computing power. By using monitoring methods that are based on time series analysis, we were able to capture and identify the gradual processes driven by small scale activities that are so characteristic of the post-Soviet Georgian landscape. We developed an approach (“CCDC-SMA”) that combines time series analysis and spectral mixture analysis running on Google Earth Engine for monitoring abrupt and gradual forest degradation. By using this approach, we found that forest degradation was significantly larger than the area estimate of deforestation; 3,541 ± 556 km2 (11% of the forest area in 1987) compared to 158 ± 98 km2 from 1987 to 2020. The prevailing narrative is that legal and illegal cutting of trees for fuelwood is primarily responsible for this process. Yet, since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the country has undergone rapid socioeconomic and institutional changes which have not been explored as drivers of forest change. To further our understanding of the underlying causes, we combined forest disturbance estimates, Georgian statistical data, and historical institutional change data to examine socioeconomic drivers of forest degradation. We found that higher winter temperature and drought were associated with higher degradation at the regional scale, while major institutional changes and drought were associated with higher forest degradation at the national level. Access to natural gas, the major energy alternative to fuelwood, had no significant association with degradation. Our results challenge the narrative that poverty and a lack of alternative energy infrastructure drive forest degradation and suggest that government policies banning household fuelwood cutting, including the new Forest Code of 2020, may not reduce forest degradation. Given these results, improved data on wood harvesting and more research on the commercial drivers of degradation and their links to economic and political reforms is needed to better inform forest policy in the region, especially given ongoing risks from climate change.

Pontus Olofsson↗
DOE OSTI2021

GHG policy impacts for Seattle’s buildings: targets, timing, and scope

Many US cities are addressing climate change by setting goals to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by a specified amount within a specified time period. In order to achieve these goals, reducing emissions from existing buildings is crucial. Many cities are passing legislation to target existing buildings through benchmarking, auditing, retuning, or energy or emissions performance standards. As cities design legislation, they must consider the timing of the policies, how to prioritize building types and sizes, and how these design decisions will impact the city’s emissions. This paper addresses these questions for one particular US city: Seattle, Washington. A model of Seattle’s building stock was created with benchmarking and tax assessor data. It was then used to predict GHG emissions reductions due to different policy implementations for existing commercial and multifamily buildings. Key findings are: (1) the proposed emissions policy is expected to reduce cumulative emissions from buildings by 19% between 2020 and 2050; (2) delaying the implementation of the policy by five years could limit savings to 12%; and (3) including smaller buildings in the policy could increase savings to 34%. The lessons learned and how this can be used by other cities are discussed.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
NASA NTRS2001

An Assessment of the Scientific Basis Behind Global Environmental Concerns in the 21st Century

The notion that human activities may endanger the earth's environment has emerged as a leading societal concern in the post industrial era. Under the ever increasing pressures of population growth and industrialization, the problems of local air pollution have now become matters of both local and global concern. Smog, toxic chemicals, acid rain, ozone depletion, and climate change have become household words and an intense public policy debate about the cost and benefits of environmental protection continues. There is a growing realization that the consequences of air pollution can be felt in unpredictable ways in near and far away places. Unpopulated regions of the world such as the arctic now suffer from arctic haze and ozone depletions are the largest in the Antarctic stratosphere. In the last4ol three decades many countries have instituted ambient air quality standards designed to mitigate problems of health and welfare associated with the release of chemicals. Global agreements to prevent the depletion of ozone layer and to slow down climatic warming are being actively debated and formulated. In parallel there has been an intense exploration of the science of air pollution all over the world. The scientific basis behind environmental concerns is imperfect and is central to this debate. I will review our current scientific understanding of some of the major environmental concerns. An assessment of the forthcoming efforts to put this science on a more solid footing will be provided.

Singh, Hanwant B.↗
DOE OSTI2021

Power sector investment implications of climate impacts on renewable resources in Latin America and the Caribbean

Climate change mitigation will require substantial investments in renewables. In addition, climate change will affect future renewable supply and hence, power sector investment requirements. We study the implications of climate impacts on renewables for power sector investments under deep decarbonization using a global integrated assessment model. We focus on Latin American and Caribbean, an under-studied region but of great interest due to its strong role in international climate mitigation and vulnerability to climate change. We find that accounting for climate impacts on renewables results in significant additional investments ($12–114 billion by 2100 across Latin American countries) for a region with weak financial infrastructure. We also demonstrate that accounting for climate impacts only on hydropower—a primary focus of previous studies—significantly underestimates cumulative investments, particularly in scenarios with high intermittent renewable deployment. Our study underscores the importance of comprehensive analyses of climate impacts on renewables for improved energy planning.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
NASA NTRS2014

Multisectoral Climate Impact Hotspots in a Warming World

The impacts of global climate change on different aspects of humanity's diverse life-support systems are complex and often difficult to predict. To facilitate policy decisions on mitigation and adaptation strategies, it is necessary to understand, quantify, and synthesize these climate-change impacts, taking into account their uncertainties. Crucial to these decisions is an understanding of how impacts in different sectors overlap, as overlapping impacts increase exposure, lead to interactions of impacts, and are likely to raise adaptation pressure. As a first step we develop herein a framework to study coinciding impacts and identify regional exposure hotspots. This framework can then be used as a starting point for regional case studies on vulnerability and multifaceted adaptation strategies. We consider impacts related to water, agriculture, ecosystems, and malaria at different levels of global warming. Multisectoral overlap starts to be seen robustly at a mean global warming of 3 degC above the 1980-2010 mean, with 11% of the world population subject to severe impacts in at least two of the four impact sectors at 4 degC. Despite these general conclusions, we find that uncertainty arising from the impact models is considerable, and larger than that from the climate models. In a low probability-high impact worst-case assessment, almost the whole inhabited world is at risk for multisectoral pressures. Hence, there is a pressing need for an increased research effort to develop a more comprehensive understanding of impacts, as well as for the development of policy measures under existing uncertainty.

policies↗
DOE OSTI2024

MSD CoP Webinar: Applied Science for Decision-Making at the Water-Energy Nexus

Context: This webinar was hosted by the MultiSector Dynamics Community of Practice (MSD CoP; https://multisectordynamics.org). Abstract: The energy transition is a game-changer across multiple sectors, requiring researchers and practitioners to re-evaluate the evolving connections between climate, water, and power systems, as well as the associated co-management of resources and decision-making. In anticipation of new technologies, policies, business models, and other solutions, applied science for decision-making at the climate-water-energy nexus is needed to support transitions with the expected climate resilience, maintained and enhanced energy security, thriving economies, and equity considerations. Through panelists' applied research and operational experience, the webinar will provide lesson-learnt in how to increase the readiness of water-energy research and become actionable in the context of energy transitions. A number of themes will be discussed, including the connection between growing computational resources and complexity of models, and the implications on the intended users, the actual actionable products, the availability of data for validation of the models, uncertainty characterization and decision-making under uncertainty, and the communication of the novelty to decision-makers and the public. Presenters : David McCollum (Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Co-Chair), and Gokul Iyer (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Co-Chair), Curt Jawdy (Tennessee Valley Authority), Nathalie Voisin (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), and Andrew D. Jones (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) Moderator: Pat M. Reed (MSD CoP Facilitation Team) This webinar was held on: April 30, 2024 from 1-2 PM ET

Energy↗
NASA NTRS1986

Atmospheric climate data: Problems and promises

The explosive growth in the quantity and diversity of weather and climate data, the growing handicap that the distinction between weather and climate in NOAA imposes on the efficient management and use of data is discussed. Also discussed is the uncertainty induced by the lack of clear commitment and consistent policies regarding federal roles and responsibilities in operating and maintaining the national weather and climate data system.

Source record↗
DOE OSTI2024

Technical Assistance Opportunities for Tribes

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) offers many forms of technical assistance for Tribes to support local clean energy priorities and challenges. With broad support from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and local partners, NREL provides technical expertise to enable data-driven, informed clean energy decision making. Technical assistance may address energy strategy, project financing, policy design and development, data analysis, economic development, infrastructure planning, energy justice, climate change, resilience, or other energy priorities. NREL has a long history of partnering with Tribes and Tribal organizations, including in Alaska Native Villages where the extreme Arctic climate poses unique energy challenges. NREL works directly with Tribes to find solutions that address their self-defined energy priorities, challenges, and goals.

Alaska native village↗
DOE OSTI2021

Global Biodiversity Implications of Alternative Electrification Strategies Under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways

Addressing climate mitigation while meeting global electrification goals will require major transitions from fossil-fuel dependence to large-scale renewable energy deployment. However, renewables require significant land assets per unit energy and could come at high cost to ecosystems, creating potential conflicts between global climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation. Here, we explore the potential biodiversity implications of alternative future global electrification pathways as depicted under the Shared Socioeconomic Scenarios (SSPs), i.e., alternative trends in societal development. We examined the intersection of high-resolution estimates of global energy densities for ten renewable and conventional technologies with global richness data to estimate technology-specific biodiversity footprints (species per GWh), whereas a Cumulative Biodiversity Impact (CBI) score was used to assess land and biodiversity outcomes of alternative scenarios. Downscaled electricity generation scenarios (2020-2100) were also constrained by alternative land conservation and energy development policies. Unexpectedly, variation among SSPs did not exhibit a clear tradeoff between global climate mitigation and CBI. Rather, CBIs were an outcome of total infrastructure development to meet electricity demand (from population growth and GDP) and the total magnitude of renewable energy development and storage technologies. Renewables assembled along a spectrum from land sharing to sparing. At the land sharing end, biomass-powered electricity from dedicated crops contributed the most to biodiversity impacts due to low energy density, whereas land-sparing technologies (solar) caused more-intense land degradation, but in smaller areas. Our results suggest that local land conservation practices and strategies promoting energy diversification could have greater implications for future biodiversity conflicts than global socioeconomic drivers.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
NASA NTRS1995

Remote Sensing and Holocene Vegetation: History of Global Change

Predictions of the future evolution of the earth's atmospheric chemistry and its impact on global circulation patterns are based on Global Climate Models (GCM's) that integrate the complex interactions of the biosphere, atmosphere and the oceans. Most of the available records of climate and environment are shortterm records (from decades to a few hundred years) with convolved information of real trends and short-term fluctuations. GCM's must be tested beyond the short-term record of climate and environment to insure that predictions are based on trends and therefore are appropriate to support long term policy making. An appropriate timeframe should extend over the Holocene period (the last 10,000 years) when most contemporary climate and environmental processes began. Since its inception in 1916, pollen analysis has successfully reconstructed the paleoecology of the last 10,000 years for many sites around the world, thus providing a powerful time-link between short- and long-term processes in the biosphere. However, pollen analytic results cannot be used in physiological models driven by remotely sensed data. Further, modern ecology and climate data are necessary to calibrate pollen analytical models. These are available for extensive regions in the northern hemisphere, particularly for eastern United States and Canada, and western Europe. In other parts of the world, weather stations are scattered, records extend over a period of only few years, and there are no systematic climate records for large portions of the globe. This is the case of Patagonia in Argentina where a few weather stations are located close to the Atlantic seaports, fewer stations are in towns located near the eastern Andean foothill, and fewer still are scattered on the extensive Patagonian plateau. This problem became evident after completion of the Argentine-German Program of Palynology (PROPAL), a cooperative effort of National University of Mar del Plata (Argentina) and University Bamberg (Germany) to produce a modern pollen database for the Pampa and Patagonia regions.

DAntoni, Hector↗
DOE OSTI2022

Fast climate responses to emission reductions in aerosol and ozone precursors in China during 2013-2017

China has been implementing a sequence of policies for clean air since the year 2013, and the aerosol pollution has been substantially improved, but ozone (O 3 )-related issues arose. Here, fast climate responses to emission reductions in aerosol and O 3 precursors over China during 2013–2017 are investigated using the Community Earth System Model version 2 (CESM2). The overall decreases in aerosols produced an anomalous warming of 0.09 ± 0.10°C in eastern China (22–40° N, 110–122.5° E), which is further intensified by the increase in O 3 in the lower troposphere, resulting in an enhanced warming of 0.16 ± 0.15° C in eastern China. Reductions in industrial emissions contributed the most to the aerosol-induced warming, while emission reductions from residential sector induced a cooling effect due to a substantial decrease in light-absorbing black carbon aerosols. This implies that switching the residential sector to cleaner energy is more effective to achieve climate and health benefits in China.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗