Announcement: For Public Comment: Draft 5th National Climate Assessment
Climate change is increasingly threatening Americans’ families, communities, and livelihoods. People who make risk management decisions—including federal, state, and local government officials, city planners, utility managers, healthcare providers, adaptation specialists, educators, farmers, and small business owners—need to have the best science at their fingertips to help them plan for the future. The National Climate Assessment is an important resource that connects people to the latest climate science and helps these decisionmakers access, understand, and put critical climate information to practical use.
Today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) announce the release of the draft Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) for public comment. Public review of the draft assessment is an essential step in the development of the assessment. Comments can help strengthen the science, provide important feedback, and ensure the authors are clearly communicating the report’s findings.
The National Climate Assessment is the preeminent source of climate information for the United States, used by hundreds of thousands of people across the country and around the world. This report assesses the science of climate change, its impacts, and our options for reducing present and future risk. It evaluates climate impacts across a wide range of interests, including water, forests and ecosystems, coasts and oceans, agriculture and rural communities, the built environment, energy and transportation, health and air quality, and economic and social systems. The assessment covers the entire geography of the United States, including all 50 states, U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. National Climate Assessments do not prescribe or recommend specific policy interventions; rather they evaluate and synthesize the state of the science, reporting where advances in scientific or technical knowledge have been made and where uncertainties remain. Thus, the National Climate Assessment is a risk management tool that can inform actions or policy.
The NCA5 public comment period will run through January 27, 2023, and is free and open to anyone. And, for the first time, a Spanish translation of the draft chapter on the U.S. Caribbean covering climate impacts on Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands is available for review and comment.
To review the draft report and submit comments, reviewers will need to register with the USGCRP Review and Comment system at https://review.globalchange.gov. The short video below provides information on how to log in and submit a comment. Further details and instructions can be found in the Open Notice.
Two public webinars will provide more context and background about the development of the report and demonstrate how to submit public comments.
11/29 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. ET
https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/wtqggbzd
Phone: Dial +1 (415) 466-7000 (US)
Enter the participant PIN: 3022421 followed by # to confirm.
12/1 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. ET
https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/aaxbpfdj
Phone; Dial +1 (415) 466-7000 (US)
Enter the participant PIN: 8533482 followed by # to confirm.
The final assessment is expected to be released in late 2023. We invite you to take advantage of this opportunity to add your voice to the report development and help make sure NCA5 meets the needs of you and your communities.
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