Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief

Convened October 9, 2024

Leveraging the National Climate Assessment to Empower Communities
Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief

On October 9, 2024, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies) hosted a workshop on Leveraging the National Climate Assessment to Empower Communities, at the National Academies of Sciences Building in Washington, DC.¹ The workshop concept was initiated by members of the New Voices program² of the National Academies and funded by Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and individual donor support. It was not initiated or sponsored by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). As planning committee chair Rachel Gallery of the University of Arizona explained, the goal of the workshop was “to contribute towards the ongoing efforts to broaden the reach of the NCA [National Climate Assessment], with a focus on community engagement to enhance the impact and application of the report findings at local and regional levels.” This Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief summarizes the presentations and discussions that occurred at the October 2024 workshop.³

KEYNOTE AND FIRESIDE CHAT

Laura Petes, chief of staff for climate and environment and assistant director for climate resilience at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, set the stage for the workshop by speaking about how communities can be empowered by providing them with climate information. She began by telling some personal stories about her own experiences in providing such assistance.

When she was working as a postdoctoral associate in the Florida panhandle from 2007 to 2009, an extreme drought affected much of the Southeastern United States. The watershed she was working in was the Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint River Basin, which contains three rivers that merge and empty into the Apalachicola Bay on the Gulf Coast. The bay was home to a vibrant oyster fishery, which at the time provided 10 percent of the oysters consumed in the entire United States. Because of the drought, however, fresh water flowing into the bay decreased, increasing the bay’s salinity and leading to much greater oyster mortality.

Petes, who had worked to understand the ecological impacts of the drought on oysters, was interested in having her science be relevant and useful to upstream water management decisions. She began working with the local fishery, trying to get a better sense of how she could be

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useful, which she said was very helpful, as it informed the research questions that she asked.

Ultimately, she realized that she wanted to learn more about informing management and policy, so she moved to Washington, DC, to pursue a policy fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), working with the Climate Program Office at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Drought returned to the watershed where she had previously worked; 2012–2014 was the driest 2 years on record for the middle of the watershed. She provided data and analyses that informed a declaration of disaster, which meant that the oyster harvesters and their families were eligible for financial assistance. Over the past several years, after the drought, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and Hurricane Michael, the area has had a moratorium on harvesting oysters from Apalachicola Bay, with the goal of allowing the oyster fishery to recover. The bottom line, she said, is “we all have opportunities to build these relationships and to try to be useful and use the science that we know to inform decision making.”

Switching gears, Petes offered some background information about the National Climate Assessment (NCA). The Global Change Research Act of 1990 mandated these assessments to be prepared and submitted to the President and Congress, with periodic updates (at least every four years). The preparation of these assessments has been led by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). Five have been completed to date, with the latest—NCA5—released in 2023. These reports assess the impacts of climate change on key U.S. economic sectors as well as U.S. regions. They are intended to serve as a go-to source of credible information on the effects of climate change and, in particular, to provide communities with a way to begin to understand the risks, impacts, and potential solutions for their geographies or sectors. Looking at the NCA is often the first step in a decision-making process—but only the first step, as the assessment is policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive. It does not tell people what to do.

The assessment is developed with input from experts and contributors, including scientists and practitioners from across the United States with diverse areas of expertise. The public is given many chances to weigh in throughout the development process, and after NCA5 was released, there were more than 40 public events to share its findings. Among the new features of NCA5 were chapters on social systems and justice, an atlas that can provide climate information tailored to an individual’s interests, and a full translation into Spanish.

Petes closed by describing efforts underway to advance climate science and solutions, including through providing Americans with accessible, usable climate-science information that meets their needs.

FIRESIDE CHAT

After Petes’ formal presentation, she and workshop planning committee member Julian Reyes, Bureau of Land Management, held a fireside chat, where she answered questions posed by Reyes and by audience members. Reyes asked her which stakeholders, in addition to oyster harvesters, she worked with in discussing drought impacts in the Apalachicola region. She answered that in her NOAA capacity, she worked with state, local, federal, and non-governmental partners to advance a regional drought early warning system through the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) for the watershed. As part of this process, she led a workshop in Apalachicola that included people upstream from the bay, who learned at the workshop how downstream ecosystems were being impacted because of upstream water usage. Any opportunities to build coalitions, create a community, and get people talking and sharing information with each other are very important, she said.

In response to a question from Reyes about how federal-level reports, such as the NCA, can be evaluated for their value to local communities and how program administrators can work with evaluators to ensure that these high-level reports reach their intended audiences, Petes identified one challenge as the fact that these reports are generally communicated through networks of networks rather than going directly to individual users, with various players helping to translate the report and connect it to people where they live. While it is easy enough, for instance, to count how many downloads a report receives, it is harder to gauge the quality of how people are interacting with the report.

Next, Petes offered some anecdotes from her work in developing NCA3 and in helping with the rollout of NCA5.

As an example of how community members can engage with the NCA, she told a story about how a mayor read the NCA3 “cover to cover,” Petes said, and approached the President’s science adviser with many questions related to how her city could be made more resilient to storms and other challenges in the future. “People get hooked, and they get hungry for information,” Petes said, and the NCA offers “a great way to start your journey.”

In response to an audience question about building trust with communities in order for the NCA to be taken seriously, Petes said that instead of the federal government “swooping in” and offering the information, it is best to work through local trusted messengers as access points. Actively listening to community leaders is also important.

Researchers can also benefit from listening to community members, Petes said, as learning about local concerns can help make the researchers’ studies more useful.

Another audience question concerned efforts to make the NCA more useful for non-experts. Petes said that efforts are being made in various areas, such as easier searching and navigation of the information and providing different ways to access the information in the NCA.

Concerning how to successfully communicate the often-complex effects of climate change to leaders and policy makers, Petes said it is important to understand the concerns of these people and use them as a starting point. It is also important to give them a sense of agency and describe possible solutions. Finally, she recommended having report authors, contributors, and users of information talking to communities about why the report is useful and how they are going to use it.

PANEL I: STRATEGIZING THE USE OF NCA FOR STAKEHOLDERS

In September 2024 the National Academies released a consensus study, Developing a Strategy to Evaluate the National Climate Assessment.⁴ That study was the subject of the workshop’s first panel, which had three presenters who had been part of the committee that produced the report.

Kai Lee, Owl of Minerva, LLC, began by offering some background on the report. Even though the NCA had expanded its intended uses and its target audience since the release of NCA1 in 2000, Lee said, there has never been a formal evaluation of its uses or of its users. “We do not have a solid sense of how the assessment has been used, which audiences have been reached, and, perhaps more important, which audiences are being missed or how the NCA has informed decision making,” he said.

The study committee was asked to develop a strategy for designing an evaluation of the NCA—not to evaluate the NCA or even to propose how to do an evaluation, but rather to help the federal government to design such an evaluation. To that end the committee included experts in the theory and practice of evaluation, experts in communications and stakeholder engagement, and experts with experience in the use of climate assessments and familiarity with the history of the NCA. “The process we recommend,” Lee said, “would build a feedback loop that would both improve the NCA and become part of the climate assessment process in the future.”

Next, Glynis Lough of the Aspen Global Change Institute spoke about the need for and the aims of the National Academies study. Concerning the need for the study, she said that while the NCA’s quality and process have both been evaluated, its impact has not. Furthermore, the NCA has broadened the scope of the audiences it is trying to reach, but without knowing much about the needs or responses of those audiences. “The users of the NCA are no longer only national policy makers,” Lough commented, “but also a wide range of communities, individuals, and others seeking climate solutions.” Furthermore, there are marginalized audiences who may not currently be well served by the NCA and who may not even have been identified.

The issue is complicated by the fact that the NCA is far from the only source of climate information that people can access. Where does the NCA fit in? Interest in global climate change may provide an opportunity to “better define and rethink the more specific goals and purpose of the NCA,” she said.

Finally, Lough said, evaluating the impact of the NCA could support continuous improvement of the assessment’s process and product.

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Turning to the aims of the National Academies study, she said that the committee’s task was to frame a strategy for developing an evaluation that addressed the uses of the NCA and its usefulness in informing decisions. The first step in creating such a strategy, the committee recommended, should be to develop a logic model, which Lough described as “a systematic way to approach a theory of change.” Logic models are useful in understanding how activities are linked to outcomes, she said. The committee developed an example of a logic model to illustrate what one might look like and also developed an illustrative list of the sorts of questions that might be asked in an evaluation. That list of questions highlighted one very important thing, Lough said: namely, the importance of identifying priority audiences in order to focus evaluation efforts. This in turn led the committee to focus on the importance of networks in spreading information from and about the NCA to various audiences.

Scott Kalafatis, the deputy university director of the Northwest Climate Adaption Science Center at the University of Washington, then spoke about what a network perspective is and how it can help inform evaluation of the NCA. Understanding networks is important to this evaluation, he said, because tracing the impacts of the NCA involves understanding not just its immediate use but also how its influence ripples outwards through connections and networks. Much of people’s engagement with the NCA is actually indirect, he continued, as the contents of reports are passed through intermediaries such as academic institutions, government agencies, media outlets, and nongovernmental organizations.

Studying these dispersal networks can show how the influence of the NCA propagates and evolves. It can also help us identify places where there are barriers to this flow—and thus opportunities to potentially circumvent those barriers. Furthermore, Kalafatis said, network analysis can help answer the questions described in the logic model. He sketched out how one might apply network analysis to understand the transmission of information from the NCA throughout various communities across the country.

The committee recommended that in developing a strategy to evaluate the users and uses of the NCA, Lough added, the federal government should follow a process that allows it to learn as it goes with manageable, sequenced steps. “We believe it’s important to start on the evaluation journey with initial steps that will be focused on gaining actionable insights,” she said, such as by focusing on a subject area such as water and energy and how the NCA information is used in those areas or by developing case studies about specific uses. These initial steps would provide insights into how the NCA is used and how to evaluate other components of the NCA, and these insights could be incorporated into the NCA evaluation process.

Discussion

Jim Yoon of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a workshop planning committee member and the panel’s moderator, opened the discussion session by asking what challenges the federal government is likely to face in following the recommendations in the report. Lee answered that the logic model can be intimidating because of its complexity, which can make it challenging to work with. This complexity is why the committee suggested starting with using the logic model to analyze some relatively simple situations and thus develop some comfort in working with the model. A second challenge, Lee continued, is political will. “An evaluation doesn’t do any good if it isn’t used,” he said. Kalafatis said that maintaining outreach with communities while implementing the evaluation will also be challenging and added that federal government should take advantage of existing relationships to address this challenge.

Yoon then asked the panelists for surprising insights or key lessons they came across during their work preparing the report. Lough said that it will be difficult for the federal government to carry out a full evaluation by itself, so it should look for trusted partners who can assist in that endeavor. That raises the question, however, of which parts of the evaluation do not need to be done centrally but could be shared by partners. Kalafatis agreed and emphasized the importance of the federal government working with partners, such as regional agencies and nongovernmental organizations, in carrying out the evaluation.

In response to an audience question about the extent to which the committee’s work on communicating about the NCA might support improved communication of

climate science more broadly, Lough said the committee’s recommendations about setting out a logic model and determining one’s intended audience, actions, and goals could apply more broadly and be effective for any group working to communicate effectively about climate science.

On the topic of how educators could use the NCA in high school or college classrooms to engage the next generation in discussions of climate change, Kalafatis said that the logic model could be used to think through the best ways of teaching about climate science. Lough suggested that teachers could use the NCA in various ways to get students engaged with climate science, such as providing input to the assessment or using the NCA as a case study of a large federal project.

PANEL II: BROADENING COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DURING NCA DEVELOPMENT

The workshop’s second panel was moderated by planning committee member Lynée Turek-Hankins, postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College’s Neukom Institute for Computational Science and Thayer School of Engineering. The panelists offered three different perspectives on broadening community engagement in climate-related actions.

Community Engagement During NCA5

Kripa Akila Jagannathan, research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spoke about her experiences with community engagement as one of the authors of Chapter 18 of NCA5. She began by describing four ways in which community perspectives were integrated into that chapter.

First, she said, in writing the chapter the various authors included the perspectives of the communities that they engaged with on a day-to-day basis. The authors represented a broad range of backgrounds, including people working on environmental justice, the economic impacts of climate change, and the co-production of actionable knowledge. The authors also engaged with different types of communities, including urban planners, environmental justice agencies, federal policy and regulatory agencies, climate adaptation practitioners, and local residents and communities. Second, in order to speak to the different types of communities that would read the report, the chapter’s authors included content both on understanding the problem and on devising solutions. The first two sections were focused on how to better model and understand the problem and on how to understand who will be vulnerable to climate impacts, while the third and fourth sections were solution-oriented, looking at the processes people can use to devise solutions and the types of innovative governance practices that might be tried. Third, the chapter included case studies to describe lived experiences related to climate change and potential actions to adapt to climate challenges. The chapter also discussed different types of knowledge and how collaboration across groups could support adaptation. Finally, the chapter’s authors included what Jagannathan called “offshoot content” which was tailored to specific types of communities, including scientific communities and communities of practice, in order to broaden engagement with the report.

Jagannathan concluded her presentation by offering four ideas for expanding community engagement in future assessments. First, she suggested intentionally choosing authors who can represent the perspectives of a broad range of communities. Second, NCA authors should prioritize including real-world examples, such as through case studies, lived experiences, and stories. Third, a more nuanced understanding is needed of who is using the report, how it is being used, and what impacts the report is having on different types of users. Fourth, she recommended instituting chapter-specific advisory groups who would provide iterative and rich engagement with the chapter authors.

Engaging Local Communities

Kathie Dello, director of the North Carolina State Climate Office, opened by explaining that “there are so many stories that need to be told that the national media aren’t necessarily picking up” from places like small, rural, poor Appalachian communities as well as places in Florida affected by Hurricane Milton.

She then spoke about the approach for choosing NCA chapter authors, such as people who are already involved in climate assessment work while considering demographic and institutional diversity and federal versus non-federal experts. In addition, she will be looking for people to talk about their lived experiences related to climate.

People who may not have the time to serve as authors on the report can still make valuable contributions. She spoke about academics who contribute key messages to the report chapters, stakeholders who develop communication pitches based on the NCA for various scenarios, graduate students who innovate new ways to communicate messages on climate, and organizations such as science museums that use the NCA to create educational content.

Local Preparation for Climate Change

Galen Treuer, the climate technology and economic innovation manager for Miami-Dade County in Florida, described how Miami-Dade is responding to the challenges of climate change. He works for Daniella Levine Cava, the mayor of Miami-Dade County, who has given his group the opportunity to work on climate issues and to use the National Climate Assessment in that work. “It is really important to acknowledge the role that elected officials and local leaders have in making this possible—or not making it possible,” he said.

Treuer began by talking about the challenges that local communities face from disasters that have been made worse by climate change, such as the recent Hurricane Milton and the 2023 Maui wildfire. This situation has deteriorated in just the past decade and a half, he said, and such disasters are now doing hundreds of billions of dollars of damage in a typical year. This has posed challenges for states such as Florida that have heightened risk for climate-related disasters, including challenges related to disaster preparation, emergency response, and managing insurance risks and costs.

Miami-Dade County has several connected strategies for dealing with climate change. Resilient 305 provides a roadmap for collaboration among governments and communities, while there are specific strategies for dealing with sea level rise, climate, and extreme heat. The county also works with academics who study ways to resist, avoid, accommodate, or retreat from climate challenges such as rising seas. Retreating is not a particularly viable option for Miami-Dade, Treuer said, since it would involve abandoning extremely valuable property.

As an example of the sorts of strategies Miami-Dade has developed, Treuer offered some details on its strategy for dealing with sea level rise. It has five complementary approaches: build on fill, which has been the standard way of avoiding being flooded; build on stilts, like in the Florida Keys; build on high ground around transit corridors, which was done when Florida was going through its early growth spurt in the late 1800s and early 1900s; create green and blue neighborhoods; and create greenways and blueways, with the last two referring to a “green and blue infrastructure.” That strategy, which was developed with a great deal of community input, was released in 2021.

One specific example of the strategy in action is the Little River adaptation action area, much of which is low enough that it is predicted to be under sea level and flooded by 2100, Treuer said. Reliance on septic systems, which can release their sewage when flooded, was identified as a major problem in the community. The county, through planning, was able to secure tens of millions of dollars to help the community replace their septic systems, though it will take many years to complete.

Treuer also spoke about working on the South Florida ClimateReady Tech Hub,⁵ in the context of how the community is responding to climate solutions. This ClimateReady Tech Hub is a regional center for commercializing technology to deal with climate change funded by the CHIPS and Science Act.⁶ The center’s goal is to commercialize climate-related innovations being developed in the area and get them to market—things like clean cement, advanced HVAC, and micro grids. He also told a story about how Miami-Dade worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to develop a plan for dealing with climate challenges like flooding that was consistent with community desires and knowledge rather than a plan that was imposed from above.

In closing, Treuer offered several takeaways. Local governments are doing a lot of planning and engagement, and they make decisions in the context of funding, regulation, and community needs. The stakes are high. It is important to proactively engage in local communities and the experts who are there, including climate justice organizations and business leaders dedicated to the work. Finally, it is vital that federal agencies should use the NCA to guide investments and regulations.

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Discussion

Turek-Hankins, a member of the workshop planning committee, asked the panelists what sorts of impact to expect from engagement efforts and how community engagement might affect those efforts. Jagannathan answered that one of the biggest gaps in the field is that the practitioners do not have a theory of change for how information affects what people do. It is something that requires much more research, she said. Anecdotally, she continued, the practitioners who used the NCA5 were trying to understand the state of the science—what is known and what is not—and were looking for areas where they could push their particular sectors or communities to invest or take action in. It does seem clear, she added, that when community perspectives are included in a report, it becomes more actionable.

Dello said that the chapter on the Southeast in NCA5 was much different from the corresponding one in NCA4. After engaging with various communities the team of authors had come to realize that they needed to put issued related to equity front and center “because it was exacerbating all the climate risks in the Southeast, and we had heard this loud and clear from communities.” As an example, she spoke of how the team had focused on Princeville, North Carolina, a community of formerly enslaved people to whom the land had particular cultural and historical significance. The fact that the land had flooded significantly, particularly in hurricanes Floyd and Matthew, led a team of academics, decision makers, and community members to come up with a plan for preserving Princeville’s heritage. For many people, she concluded, the NCA is a starting point to a bigger conversation.

Treuer said that co-production is very valuable, and, as an example, “engaging with the science museums makes a ton of sense” He provided examples of museums which are part of the ClimateReady Tech Hub. He also shared his thoughts on misinformation as a climate professional. Furthermore, he suggested that the content in the report should be “contextually relevant” so that individuals can leverage information from the report in various local events, such as political events or public meetings.

In response to a question from Karen Florini of Climate Central about whether the developers of the NCA make an effort to engage the broader business community, Dello said they try but lack the resources to sufficiently act. “We need the business community on board, and would love to do more with them,” she said. Treuer agreed and offered some examples of current efforts to engage the business community. He named local chambers of commerce as a particularly useful point of contact. It can also be useful, he added, to publicize local companies that are making money in the climate economy and point out that this is a growth industry.

One of the workshop planning committee members, Jamaji Nwanaji-Enwerem from University of Pennsylvania, asked the speakers, “what does the NCA’s print media, social media rollout look like?” and how has it evolved over time? Jagannathan answered that it is understood and kept “front and center” during the NCA development that many people are accessing the information over their phones, so the key takeaways of each chapter are written to be easily accessible. Dello added that “there is a media rollout and all the authors get media training” and spoke about the overall communication efforts from the authors’ perspective.

SHORT DIALOGUE: COMMUNICATING ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy and Horn Distinguished Professor and Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Public Law at Texas Tech University, provided a detailed approach for getting individuals to care about and act on climate change. A brief question-and-answer session followed her presentation.

Hayhoe described her approach as an “equation” on communicating climate change, albeit an equation with no mathematical terms in it. “It’s an equation on how to unlock not just our heads but our hearts and our hands to power climate action through effective communication,” she said.

The typical approach to getting people to care about and act on climate change begins, she said, with the assumption that most people are not worried about climate change. Working from that assumption, communicators will then generally marshal a large number of alarming facts about climate change to scare people into worrying about it and therefore act. “This is what I see happening in much of our communication today,” she said, but no amount of frightening data seems to do the trick.

Part of the problem, she said, is that the human brain is wired such that fear and anxiety cause people to freeze or withdraw—to give up rather than take action. Furthermore, the general assumption that people are not worried about climate change is, in fact, wrong. According to public opinion data, two-thirds of people in the United States are worried about climate change, but only about 8 percent take any sort of action to combat it.

One problem, Hayhoe said, is that most people do not have a sense of how climate change affects them personally. This creates what is known as “psychological distance”—people see the issue as distant from them in time or space, abstract rather than concrete, and something that environmentalists and scientists worry about, but not something the average person can change.

For people to move from simply being worried about climate change to a point where they will take actions to do something about it, she said, they “need to understand climate is changing now and here, and it’s affecting us in ways that matter.” And this, she continued, is exactly what the current National Climate Assessment does—indeed, it is specifically designed to address psychological distance.

Even when people are worried about climate change and would like to do something about it, she said, they are unlikely to act without a sense of efficacy—without believing that their actions will make a difference. Unfortunately, polls show that most people in the United States do not believe they can do anything to help, making them feel helpless and hopeless. And doom-filled headlines such as those about record sea surface temperatures and other extreme climate events of the past year feed into this sense of hopelessness.

The equation for activating people on climate change is to take their already-existing concerns (head), show them how climate change affects them personally (heart), and then offer them a clear way to help (hands). “If we talk about how [climate change] is affecting our health, our water, our food, our communities and more,” Hayhoe said, “and if we bring in positive, constructive solutions, people feel empowered, and that’s when change results.” And this is precisely what the NCA5 does, she concluded.

Hayhoe finished her presentation by urging audience members to help others in their communities make this head-to-heart-to-hands connection by talking to them and letting them know the ways in which climate change affects them personally and by sharing details about what others are doing to combat it—and what they could do, too. As an example, she mentioned Science Moms, a group she founded of scientists who are also moms working to help others understand climate change, its dangers, and what can be done to protect their children’s futures.

Discussion

The question-and-answer session was moderated by workshop planning committee chair Rachel Gallery. She began by asking Hayhoe how the NCA’s approach to making the head–heart–hand connection had evolved over time. Hayhoe responded that one of the key changes is that the NCA now addresses psychological distance head on. What were once very short chapters are now much longer and more readable, with more details on various topics and an emphasis on what people need to know from the science in order to make decisions. Generally, there has been a focus on increasing the effectiveness and relevance of the NCA over time.

Hayhoe recommended that, because details about the climate are changing so fast, the NCA be transformed into a live document whose text, graphs, and figures are updated on an annual basis. A new version could still be produced every 4 years, as required by law, but people would not have to wait for the next edition to get important updates.

Hayhoe also said that each time a new disaster strikes, such as Hurricane Helene, there is an opportunity to talk about the connection between climate change and the likelihood and risks of such events. It now takes only a matter of days for scientists to calculate the contribution of climate change to a given disaster—for example, that climate change contributed to making a hurricane of Helene’s power at least 20 times more likely and increased rainfall by more than 50 percent in some areas.

Finally, she said, when talking about the danger and urgency of climate change, it is also vital to talk about solutions. “We have to share what is already being done to build resilience, to cut our emissions, to invest in nature, to help make that drain bigger, to take all

that carbon out of the atmosphere . . . because the bias towards sharing doom and gloom means that people don’t think solutions are viable and our efficacy is extremely low.”

PANEL III: MAXIMIZING OPPORTUNITIES FOR COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AFTER NCA RELEASE

Workshop committee member Jamaji Nwanaji-Enwerem, Health Equity Presidential Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, moderated the third panel. He introduced the panel by sharing how he observes climate change effects in his work as a medical professional, such as critical medical devices not working due to extreme weather disasters like flooding.

Climate-Related Efforts in the City of Baltimore

Ava Richardson, director of sustainability in the City of Baltimore’s Department of Planning, described what Baltimore is doing to prepare for climate change. The city created both an Office of Sustainability and a Commission on Sustainability in 2007, she said, and the office’s role is to develop and advocate for programs, policies, and actions by government, citizens, and businesses that will lead to a more sustainable community.

She described the structure of the office and said that its work is organized into three functions: climate and community resilience, environmental protection and regulation, and program management and policy implementation. In carrying out those goals the office seeks to catalyze climate action citywide; educate, engage, and collaborate to promote behavior change; and track and report on its progress. The people in the office put much thought into what behavior changes they wish to see occur in people across the city and what they can do to encourage those changes, Richardson said.

Baltimore’s 21-member Commission on Sustainability oversees the implementation of the city’s sustainability plan and related plans, she said, and it also serves as a key public engagement opportunity for sustainability work across the city. As part of its engagement work, it hosts an annual sustainability open house.

The city also has a sustainability and resiliency subcabinet whose goals include coming up with creative problem-solving approaches, exploring trade-offs in decision-making, and improving climate, environmental, and sustainability competencies in the staff of city agencies. The subcabinet has 6 working groups on building and energy, extreme heat mitigation, flooding and infrastructure, waste, people and nature, and sustainable transportation.

Richardson next described the city’s 2019 sustainability plan, which was developed with engagement with thousands of residents across the city. It has 5 sections focused on community, human-made systems, climate and resilience, nature in the city, and economy. At the core of the plan are its guidelines for equitable implementation, she said. These guidelines are intended both to diversify the field of environmental sustainability and climate mitigation and adaptation as well as to avoid perpetuating past inequities. It contains 70 strategies and 244 actions, with progress on each measured on a 5-point scale that ranges from not started to completed and ongoing.

Richardson then offered details on the city’s disaster preparedness plan, which included risk assessments for such things as extreme temperatures, storm surges, and even soil movement. It also has an assessment of the City of Baltimore’s adaptive capacity as a city and a number of mitigation strategies.

Baltimore’s community resiliency hub is unique, Richardson said. It was started in 2015 to enhance community capacity and resilience in low-income communities. Various community-based organizations have asked how they can implement a similar approach to climate resilience, she added.

She quickly touched on the city’s floodplain management program, its critical area management program for areas within 1,000 feet of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, its forest conservation regulations, and its environmental offset grants.

Community engagement efforts include a monthly newsletter and also monthly meetings of the Commission on Sustainability, which are open to the public. There are also programs aimed at connecting children with nature.

A Perspective from the Farming and Agricultural Sector

Stefanie Smallhouse, the president of the Arizona Farm Bureau spoke about the NCA from the perspective of someone in the farming and agriculture sector. She began with some context about U.S. farming communities who

provide food for people not just in the United States but around the world.

“It’s rural communities that are largely stewarding the land and water resources of the country,” she said. However, farming is facing many challenges. For instance, the cost of production is far above pre-pandemic levels because of such factors as inflation and increased borrowing costs, and small farmers are being threatened by farm consolidation. Thanks to steadily increasing productivity, farmers have been able to grow increasingly more food on less land, while at the same time addressing environmental issues, she said. Adjusted for productivity, agricultural emissions decreased by 17 percent between 1990 and 2019; however, since farms have been producing more food to keep up with population growth, the total agricultural emissions grew by 6 percent during that time, and sometimes that increase is all that people see—leading them to conclude that agriculture is a big part of the climate problem.

In addition to growing more food with fewer emissions, farmers and ranchers have also enrolled 140 million acres in conservation programs, Smallhouse said, while others not enrolled in such programs are still doing conservation work on their farms and ranches. Furthermore, as more research is done on ways to use agriculture to replace nonrenewable resources—such as bioethanol to replace gasoline—farmers will do more with regenerative agriculture.

Switching to the role that the National Climate Assessment has to play in agriculture, Smallhouse said that the farm community itself does not use the NCA, but other components of the entire agriculture “team”—such as people involved in research and development, technology and innovation, food science and safety, education and outreach, policy and advocacy—can get useful information from the report. Farmers cannot get much of value to them from the NCA, she explained, because they are already very much aware of the scientific issues discussed in the report that affect them directly. “Most of the things that we’re thinking about that are in the NCA, we already know,” she said. However, by explaining the challenges that individual farmers have, the report can empower the broader agricultural team so that, for instance, those involved in policy making can based their policy on a better understanding of what will help farmers.

Smallhouse pointed to several ways the NCA could be made more useful for the agriculture sector. It could, for instance, delve more into regional differences, such as when discussing tillage practices and cover crops to provide reference to studies on why some of those practices work better in certain regions. This would help government agencies and policy makers determine which practices make sense in their areas. She continued that the NCA could examine how the transition to renewable energy is likely to affect agriculture. How will farmers be affected by the move to take over more land for solar farms, for instance, or how will farmers get the tractor power provided by diesel when the vehicle industry transitions to electric power? Finally, even though land-grant universities are critical to the development and communication of agricultural practices, the NCA does not say much about the research in these universities.

Smallhouse concluded that the NCA certainly has the potential to empower the agriculture community, “but we’re not going to listen to you if you just tell us we are the problem.” Instead, she called for the NCA to address “the big questions that agriculture is actually asking” so that the agriculture community can continue feeding the country while also limiting its climate impacts.

Use of NCA for Educators

Margaret Wang, co-founder and chief operating officer of SubjectToClimate, devoted her presentation to ways that teachers are using and can use the NCA in the classroom and engage students and teach them about climate change. She began with the observation that research has shown that children can change parents’ minds, so teaching children about climate change not only affects the children’s behavior but can also affect that of their parents.

SubjectToClimate is a nonprofit organization which provides resources for educators to integrate climate change into what they already teach. The organization does this in a couple of ways, Wang said—by aggregating resources for classroom teaching and by offering professional development for educators. It offers state hubs, with climate resources about that particular area and aligned with state standards, and one of the teaching

resources it offers is the NCA, along with a synopsis of the report, teaching tips, and what standards it covers to make it easier for teachers to use.

By interviewing teachers, the organization was able to discover how some of them use the NCA in their classrooms. One teacher in Oregon, for instance, used an online recap of the NCA specific to that region to provide her students with an accessible way of understanding what was happening to the climate in that region. Another used a section called Art × Climate Gallery to illustrate climate problems and solutions in a visual that might be more accessible and compelling to some students than verbal descriptions.

Educators have described several ways that the NCA could be made more accessible to educators, Wang said. First, while the state summaries can be extremely helpful, many teachers do not know they are available, so SubjectToClimate is making that information part of their professional development so that teachers realize the information is there and start to think about how they could use the summaries in their classes. Second, the CLEAN (Committed to Climate and Energy Education) Network has created an NCA teachers guide that can help educators learn how to use the NCA effectively in their teaching. SubjectToClimate has also created several guides that pull information from the NCA and other places and summarize it in ways that allow teachers to access and understand the information quickly.

Some teachers have found the glossary to be extremely helpful, Wang said, because they use vocabulary to build comprehension, and they trust the NCA more than an online dictionary to provide an accurate meaning for a word. Finally, the NCA describes various climate action projects that show how it is possible to make a difference relative to climate change. Many students feel climate-related anxiety, she said, and inspirational stories of what can be done are important to keep students from feeling helpless in the face of what they are learning about climate change.

Discussion

Nwanaji-Enwerem opened the discussion by asking why there seems to be more reluctance when it comes to addressing climate change than other societal issues. Richardson suggested that climate anxiety and people feeling overwhelmed may play a role, along with how the issue is communicated. “The way that we communicate about climate issues can be so disconnected from the day-to-day lived experiences of communities,” she said. Smallhouse said that the farming community tends to be very pragmatic and focused on the problems directly in front of them; many of them have been working on environmental issues for some time, and it can be disconcerting to hear that they have been doing it wrong and need to take a new approach. Wang added that teachers have many other competing concerns, such as student performance, but if they can be shown that using the NCA can help them get students’ interest in the classroom, they would be more likely to get involved. As for students, she said, many are worried about climate change but do not know enough about it to feel that they are able to get involved.

Nwanaji-Enwerem asked the panel if they felt that any stakeholders were being left out of the NCA process. Smallhouse emphasized the importance of involving cooperative extension programs at land grant universities. Richardson pointed to people with disabilities and creative sorts such as artists or musicians. She also emphasized the importance of getting bipartisan engagement with the NCA.

In response to a question about the “secret sauce” in the City of Baltimore’s success in developing programs to address climate change, Richardson said that much of it can be attributed to the efforts of Beth Stroman, who started the city’s Office of Sustainability and was an effective champion and leader who had vision, passion, and technical understanding. Also, Baltimore has built up climate competencies in its workforce and has benefited from being in an area with a well-educated and motivated talent pool.

One final question concerned who would benefit from Hayhoe’s suggestion of a regularly updated NCA. Wang said that teachers would benefit because they are always worried about providing out-of-date information to their students. Richardson said that regular updates of the NCA would not be as valuable to her as making the content more accessible or providing more opportunities to con-

tribute to how it’s framed. She also suggested that the NCA should identify the most critical pieces of data that are providing new insights. Smallhouse said that instead of a regularly updated NCA, she would appreciate some way of accessing the resources that the NCA refers to, since many of them lie behind paywalls.

CONCLUSION

In the brief concluding session, committee members Turek-Hankins and Yoon offered some final reflections. Turek-Hankins mentioned that workshop discussions highlighted the NCA as a gateway or entry point to climate change solutions Another valuable concept, she added, was connections and how they can be leveraged by the NCA to improve engagement.

Yoon pointed to the idea that networks of networks are vital in encouraging engagement and in maximizing communication about the NCA. The existing vast network of climate actors is both an opportunity and a challenge, he said. He closed by mentioning the New Voices program at the National Academies, which is itself a network of networks that hopefully can bring new voices to the table by accelerating the engagement of diverse and emerging leaders on scientific and policy solutions to national and global challenges.

DISCLAIMER This Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief was prepared by Robert Pool and Komal Syed as a factual summary of what occurred at the workshop. The statements made are those of the rapporteurs or individual workshop participants and do not necessarily represent the views of all workshop participants; the planning committee; or the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

PLANNING COMMITTEE Rachel Gallery (Chair), University of Arizona; Jamaji C. Nwanaji-Enwerem, University of Pennsylvania; Julian Reyes, Bureau of Land Management; Lynée Turek-Hankins, Dartmouth College; and Jim Yoon, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; the National Academies’ planning committees are solely responsible for organizing the workshop, identifying topics, and choosing speakers. Responsibility for the final content rests entirely with the rapporteurs and the National Academies.

REVIEWERS To ensure that it meets institutional standards for quality and objectivity, this Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief was reviewed by Robert Kopp, Rutgers University, and Hussam Nabil Mahmoud, Colorado State University. Marilyn Baker, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, served as the review coordinator.

SPONSORS This workshop was supported by a grant from Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and individual donor support. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization or agency that provided support for the project.

STAFF Alison Boland-Reeves, Senior Program Officer; Komal Syed, Program Officer; Arianne Gandy, Senior Program Assistant.

SUGGESTED CITATION National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. Leveraging the National Climate Assessment to Empower Communities: Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. doi.org/10.17226/29122.

For additional information regarding the workshop, visit https://www.nationalacademies.org/event/43588_10-2024_leveraging-the-national-climate-assessment-to-empower-communities-a-workshop

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