Developing a Strategy to Evaluate the National Climate Assessment (2024)
Chapter: Appendix E: Derivative Products
Appendix E
Derivative Products
It is important to bear in mind that climate information traceable to the NCA and its associated products sometimes appears in derivative products. Most of the entities and populations likely to use the NCA are reached only indirectly, many getting information via products and services prepared outside the NCA process but making use of its information.
Subnational governments, including state, local, tribal, and territorial governments, use the information gathered in the NCA to make planning decisions. Numerous federal programs, grants, service programs, and partnership programs support these entities by providing observations of weather and climate, as well as downscaled extreme weather and climate model data, much of which draws directly upon the data used to support the NCA. An example of a planning decision is the effort of the City of Miami Beach, Florida, to increase resilience to rising sea levels through road elevation and other actions.1
Nongovernmental organizations and businesses use the NCA and underlying data to provide information and make decisions. Most of these audiences will combine climate data with other information in the decision-making process. For example, the Water Utility Climate Alliance serves as a clearinghouse for information that can assist water utilities to plan for climate change. They provide guidance, educational programs, and advocacy that draws on information from the NCA and its underlying data.
Educators rely primarily on derivative products—textbooks, podcasts, and literary works—to bring knowledge of climate change impacts, adaptation, and mitigation to the classroom. As part of their educational mission, some federal agencies provide materials that closely align with existing state or other standards to educators. For example, the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab has created K–12 climate change lessons and activities aligned to Next Generation Science and Common Core Math Standards.2 Similarly, the National Park Service is a source of informal science and climate education to over 325 million visitors each year (Campbell et al., 2020).
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1 See https://www.miamidade.gov/global/economy/resilience/sea-level-rise-flooding.page.
2 See https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/tag/search/Climate+Change.
The news media, including weather reports for television news, draw upon such organizations as Covering Climate Now,3 World Weather Attribution,4 and Climate Central.5 These communications entities synthesize climate change information for a nontechnical audience and draw upon the NCA and associated products.
In these and other cases, information from the NCA can be used to create derivative products and services. As the evaluation explores pathways highlighted in the logic model, the evaluation design should take into account the way that derivative products provide decision support by distributing selected information from the NCA.
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3 See https://coveringclimatenow.org/.
