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Results for “climate change adaptation policy”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 109 records · Page 6
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Plan evaluation for heat resilience: complementary methods to comprehensively assess heat planning in Tempe and Tucson, Arizona

Abstract Escalating impacts from climate change and urban heat are increasing the urgency for communities to equitably plan for heat resilience. Cities in the desert Southwest are among the hottest and fastest warming in the U.S., placing them on the front lines of heat planning. Urban heat resilience requires an integrated planning approach that coordinates strategies across the network of plans that shape the built environment and risk patterns. To date, few studies have assessed cities’ progress on heat planning. This research is the first to combine two emerging plan evaluation approaches to examine how networks of plans shape urban heat resilience through case studies of Tempe and Tucson, Arizona. The first methodology, Plan Quality Evaluation for Heat Resilience, adapts existing plan quality assessment approaches to heat. We assess whether plans meet 56 criteria across seven principles of high-quality planning and the types of heat strategies included in the plans. The second methodology, the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ (PIRS™) for Heat, focuses on plan policies that could influence urban heat hazards. We categorize policies by policy tool and heat mitigation strategy and score them based on their heat impact. Scored policies are then mapped to evaluate their spatial distribution and the net effect of the plan network. The resulting PIRS™ for Heat scorecard is compared with heat vulnerability indicators to assess policy alignment with risks. We find that both cities are proactively planning for heat resilience using similar plan and strategy types, however, there are clear and consistent opportunities for improvement. Combining these complementary plan evaluation methods provides a more comprehensive understanding of how plans address heat and a generalizable approach that communities everywhere could use to identify opportunities for improved heat resilience planning.

Environmental Sciences & Ecology↗
DOE OSTI2025

Climate Adaptation Approaches for Water and Electric Utilities: A compendium of existing strategies in a changing climate

Report analyzes plans developed by water and electric utilities to address the impacts of changes in the climate within their service territories. The analysis identifies the main types of changes that utilities address, such as sea level rise, extreme heat, and compound events such as freezing rain/show and extreme wind events. It then identifies adaptation approaches utilities have proposed or adopted to address the changes that are anticipated in their service territories. The report also identifies the mechanisms utilities (and in some cases the governments which the utilities are part of) use to ensure that energy or environmental equity is increased as a result of the resilience program. In summary, the report provides a compendium of adaptation strategies that can be used by others as they review their own need to increase climate resilience.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Urban Energy and Climate: Prospects for a Sustainable Transition

With the continuous migration of people towards metropolitan areas in search of employment, the demands for core services and energy, coupled with an increasing awareness of the impact of climate change, have placed the management and planning of global urban energy under a lot of pressure. Trends toward urban energy service transformations that offer greater affordability, reliability, efficiency and adaptability provide hope for a global sustainable future. At the same time, there are also limits to these transitions, as well as risks involved. For example, on one end of the spectrum, our urban energy future includes land use sprawl, high fossil fuel use, pollution, and unhealthy urban conditions. On the other side of this transition spectrum is more energy choices, and healthier, more livable cities, along with less energy use and fewer greenhouse gas emissions. What the future might hold for transforming the world's cities depends upon an understanding of the risks of current trajectories and the opportunities for and limitations to developing sustainable urban energy systems. This edited volume brings together leading experts on the prospects and challenges of urban energy innovation and on related-economic, social and environmental sustainability transitions. The focus of the volume is on multidisciplinary reviews, research informing technologies and policies for sustainability, and analytical insights addressing rapid urbanization and changes across a diverse typology of global cities. The volume will include an overview of the current state of urban energy systems. It will also document and evaluate urban energy prospects for a sustainable, resilient future.

drivers of change↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Effective Engagement for Community Action with NASA’s Indigenous Peoples Initiative

NASA’s Indigenous Peoples Initiative (IPI) seeks to support and cultivate efforts within Indigenous communities and NASA to increase the use of Earth Observations (EO) to inform decisions, policies, and actions. IPI is dedicated to building lasting relationships with Indigenous communities by creating a trusted, reliable, and Indigenous-centric geospatial community with a focus on environmental justice and climate issues on Indigenous lands and territories. Indigenous communities through conservation, restoration, and adaptation have the opportunity to further empower their landscape work through the potential use of EO and other NASA data and tools. We will outline our guiding principles, multiple approaches, and lessons learned for working alongside Indigenous communities in a respectful and reciprocal manner. These include the recognition of multiple ways of knowing, co-development of trainings, acknowledgement of all sovereignty, maintaining healthy relationships with tribal natural resource managers and building bridges for their engagement with NASA researchers and other federal agency partners, and making space for reflection and adaptation of our practices as we grow. Future activities, such as dialogue sessions with Indigenous communities around EO needs, aim to enhance these practices and ultimately benefit the ability for Indigenous communities to maintain and protect their lands, people, and practices in the face of environmental injustices and climate change.

Effective↗
DOE OSTI2024

Advancing Energy Justice in Alaska

NREL works with remote and rural communities across Alaska and the world to develop energy and building technologies that enhance culture, strengthen economies, and improve resilience in a changing environment. Alaska and Arctic communities not only face one of the harshest climates on earth; they also pay some of the highest energy and housing costs in the nation. NREL's Alaska Campus collaborates with communities and tribes to develop affordable, culturally appropriate homes and buildings that combine traditional knowledge and twenty-first century technology. Demonstration homes deployed all over Alaska prove out new technologies in energy efficiency, foundations, indoor air quality, and clean energy. Local workforce development is incorporated into every project: new homes are built by local workers, often including the home's future occupant. With the Arctic warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, coastal erosion and thawing permafrost are wreaking havoc on roads, buildings, and infrastructure across Alaska. With an inclusive approach to R&D, NREL is helping communities adapt to a changing environment and advancing energy justice in the world's extremes.

Alaska housing prototypes↗
DOE OSTI2025

Hydrological connectivity: a review and emerging strategies for integrating measurement, modeling, and management

This review synthesizes methods for measuring, modeling, and managing hydrologic connectivity, offering pathways to improve practices and address environmental challenges (e.g., climate change) and sustainability. As a key driver of water movement and nutrient cycling, hydrologic connectivity influences flood mitigation, water quality regulation, and biodiversity conservation. However, traditional field-based methods (e.g., dye tracing), indirect measurements (e.g., runoff analysis), and remote sensing techniques (e.g., InSAR) often struggle to capture the complexity of catchment-scale interactions. Similarly, modeling approaches—including process-based and percolation theory-based models, graph theory, and entropy-based metrics—face limitations in fully representing these interconnected processes. Both modeling and measurement techniques are constrained by inadequate spatial and temporal coverage, high data demands, computational complexity, and difficulties in representing subsurface connectivity. Subsequently, we critique current management practices that prioritize isolated variables (e.g., streamflow, sediment transport) over system-wide strategies and emphasize the need for adaptive, connectivity-based approaches in water resource planning and restoration. Moving forward, we highlight the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, technological innovations (e.g., AI-driven modeling, real-time monitoring), and integrated frameworks to improve connectivity measurement, modeling, and adaptive management to restore fragmented hydrologic networks. This integrated approach sets the stage for transformative water resource management, fostering proactive policy development and stakeholder engagement.

Dwivedi, Dipankar↗
DOE OSTI2024

Inequalities in global residential cooling energy use to 2050

Intersecting socio-demographic transformations and warming climates portend increasing worldwide heat exposures and health sequelae. Cooling adaptation via air conditioning (AC) is effective, but energy-intensive and constrained by household-level differences in income and adaptive capacity. Using statistical models trained on a large multi-country household survey dataset (n = 673,215), we project AC adoption and energy use to mid-century at fine spatial resolution worldwide. Globally, the share of households with residential AC could grow from 27% to 41% (range of scenarios assessed: 33-48%), implying up to a doubling of residential cooling electricity consumption, from 1220 to 1940 (scenarios range: 1590-2377) terawatt-hours yr. –1 , emitting between 590 and 1,365 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO 2 e). AC access and utilization will remain highly unequal within and across countries and income groups, with significant regressive impacts. Up to 4 billion people may lack air-conditioning in 2050. Our global gridded projections facilitate incorporation of AC’s vulnerability, health, and decarbonization effects into integrated assessments of climate change.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Stress Testing California's Hydroclimatic Whiplash: Potential Challenges, Trade‐Offs and Adaptations in Water Management and Hydropower Generation

Abstract Inter‐annual precipitation in California is highly variable, and future projections indicate an increase in the intensity and frequency of hydroclimatic “whiplash.” Understanding the implications of these shocks on California's water system and its degree of resiliency is critical from a planning perspective. Therefore, we quantify the resilience of reservoir services provided by water and hydropower systems in four basins in the western Sierra Nevada. Using downscaled runoff from 10 climate model outputs, we generated 200 synthetic hydrologic whiplash sequences of alternating dry and wet years to represent a wide range of extremes and transitional conditions used as inputs to a water system simulation model. Sequences were derived from upper (wet) and lower (dry) quintiles of future streamflow projections (2030–2060). Results show that carryover storage was negatively affected in all basins, particularly in those with lower storage capacity. All basins experienced negative impacts on hydropower generation, with losses ranging from 5% to nearly 90%. Reservoir sizes and inflexible operating rules are a particular challenge for flood control, as in extremely wet years spillage averaged nearly the annual basins' total discharge. The reliability of environmental flows and agricultural deliveries varied depending on the basin, intensity, and duration of whiplash sequences. Overall, wet years temporarily rebound negative drought effects, and greater storage capacity results in higher reliability and resiliency, and lesser volatility in services. We highlight potential policy changes to improve flexibility, increase resilience, and better equip managers to face challenges posed by whiplash while meeting human and environmental needs.

Environmental Sciences & Ecology↗
DOE OSTI2022

Modeling land use and land cover change: using a hindcast to estimate economic parameters in gcamland v2.0

Abstract. Future changes in land use and cover have important implications for agriculture, energy, water use, and climate. Estimates of future land use and land cover differ significantly across economic models as a result of differences in drivers, model structure, and model parameters; however, these models often rely on heuristics to determine model parameters. In this study, we demonstrate a more systematic and empirically based approach to estimating a few key parameters for an economic model of land use and land cover change, gcamland. Specifically, we generate a large set of model parameter perturbations for the selected parameters and run gcamland simulations with these parameter sets over the historical period in the United States to quantify land use and land cover, determine how well the model reproduces observations, and identify parameter combinations that best replicate observations, assuming other model parameters are fixed. We also test alternate methods for forming expectations about uncertain crop yields and prices, including adaptive, perfect, linear, and hybrid approaches. In particular, we estimate parameters for six parameters used in the formation of expectations and three of seven logit exponents for the USA only. We find that an adaptive expectation approach minimizes the error between simulated outputs and observations, with parameters that suggest that for most crops, landowners put a significant weight on previous information. Interestingly, for corn, where ethanol policies have led to a rapid growth in demand, the resulting parameters show that a larger weight is placed on more recent information. We examine the change in model parameters as the metric of model error changes, finding that the measure of model fitness affects the choice of parameter sets. Finally, we discuss how the methodology and results used in this study could be used for other regions or economic models to improve projections of future land use and land cover change.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Urban agrivoltaics enhance crop resilience and food-energy synergies in a changing climate

Urban agrivoltaics, the synergistic integration of solar photovoltaics with urban agriculture, offers a transformative solution to food and energy insecurity, which are major barriers to sustainable urban development, especially in low-income urban areas facing intensified heat and water stress due to climate change. With 70% of the global population projected to live in cities by 2050, maximizing underutilized urban spaces is critical. Our study presents the first evaluation of ground-based agrivoltaics in an urban context, demonstrating that, while early-season yields may decline due to light reduction in temperate climates, productivity rebounds during periods of extreme heat, extending harvest windows and enhancing crop resilience. As cities seek climate-adaptive infrastructure, converting just a fraction of vacant land and rooftops to urban agrivoltaics can yield significant co-benefits such as generating renewable energy for thousands of households while supplying fresh produce to help alleviate food deserts.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

The impact of interventions in the global land and agri-food sectors on Nature’s Contributions to People and the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Interlocked challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation require transformative interventions in the land management and food production sectors to reduce carbon emissions, strengthen adaptive capacity, and maintain or increase food production to 2050. However, deciding which interventions to pursue and understanding their relative synergies with and trade-offs against different social and environmental goals has been difficult without direct comparisons across a range of possible actions. This study examined a series of 40 different options, implemented through land, value chain or risk management, for their relative impacts across 18 Nature’s Contributions to People (also known as ecosystem services) and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. We find that a relatively small number of interventions show significant positive synergies with both SDGs and NCPs; these include improved cropland management, improved grazing land management, improved livestock management, agroforestry, agricultural diversification, increased soil organic carbon content, reduced soil erosion, salinization and compaction, fire management, reduced landslides and hazards, reduced pollution, management of invasive species, sustainable source, and reduced post-harvest losses. Several interventions show strong negative impacts on either SDGs, NCPs or in some cases, both; these include bioenergy and BECCS, afforestation, and some risk sharing measures, like commercial crop insurance. Our results demonstrate that a better understanding of benefits and trade-offs of comparative policy approaches can help decision-makers choose the most effective, or at the very minimum, benign interventions for implementation in specific contexts.

Mcelwee, Pam↗
DOE OSTI2024

Accelerating Residential Building Decarbonization: Market Guidance to Scale Zero-Carbon-Aligned Buildings

The US buildings sector faces a confluence of challenges, including a clear necessity to decarbonize the built environment to mitigate climate change, a need for greater resilience in the face of more frequent extreme weather events, a dearth of affordable housing, and flat or declining construction productivity that hinders the sector’s ability to adapt. Better data and guidance on new and existing residential buildings can outline paths forward for the market. These can help clarify stakeholder priorities and highlight applications for new (or newly relevant) technologies and approaches that have the potential to break traditional barriers, bridge technical gaps, reduce costs, create added value, and enable decarbonization of the national residential building stock. Decarbonizing the national building stock before 2050 will require massive increases in zero-carbon retrofits and new construction in this decade. By 2030, whole-home retrofit activity must increase several fold, and virtually all new construction will need to be zero carbon. It is difficult to imagine achieving this transformation without substantial changes in how buildings are constructed and retrofitted.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2021

Designing resilient decentralized energy systems: The importance of modeling extreme events and long-duration power outages

Mitigating and adapting to climate change requires decarbonizing electricity while ensuring resilience of supply, since a warming planet will lead to greater extremes in weather and, plausibly, in power outages. Although it is well known that long-duration outages severely impact economies, such outages are usually not well characterized or modeled in grid infrastructure planning tools. Here, we bring together data and modeling techniques and show how they can be used to characterize and model long-duration outages. We illustrate how to integrate outages in planning tools for one promising mode of resilient energy supply—microgrids. Failing to treat these extremes in models can lead to microgrid designs (1) that do not realize their full value of resilience, since models do not see the benefits of protecting against extremes, and (2) that appear reliable on paper yet do not actually protect against extremes. Although utilities record power interruptions, lack of access to that data is hindering research on resilience; making datasets available publicly would substantially aid efforts to improve grid planning tools.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Halfway to Zero: Progress towards a Carbon-Free Power Sector

Sharply reducing carbon emissions is imperative to prevent the worst effects of climate change. Yet even in the power sector—often viewed as the lynchpin to economy-wide decarbonization, and where low-carbon solutions are increasingly plentiful and cost-effective—the pace and scale of the required transformation can be daunting. A review of historical trends, however, shows the progress the power sector has already made in reducing emissions. Fifteen years ago, many business-as-usual projections anticipated that annual carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions from power supply in the United States would reach 3,000 million metric tons (MMT) in 2020. In fact, direct power-sector CO 2 emissions in 2020 were 1,450 MMT—roughly 50% below the earlier projections. By this metric, in only 15 years the country’s power sector has gone halfway to zero emissions. Other metrics also evolved differently than projected: total consumer electricity costs (i.e., bills) were 18% lower; costs to human health and the climate were 92% and 52% lower, respectively; and the number of jobs in electricity generation was 29% higher. Economic, technical, and policy factors contributed to this success, including sectoral changes, energy efficiency, wind and solar, continued operations of the nuclear fleet, and coal-to-gas fuel switching. This historical record demonstrates the ability of technological and policy changes to set the power sector on a dramatically different emissions trajectory. Past success, however, does not trivialize the challenges that remain for further decarbonization in the power sector and beyond. Nor does it offer a specific roadmap for how best to achieve additional power-sector emissions reductions. Numerous challenges confront a zero-emissions pathway, and future strategies will likely differ from those of the past. Many recent studies have assessed how to make further progress in decarbonizing the power sector on the pathway to decarbonizing the economy as a whole. We summarize the core results of those studies, but the primary goal of this report is to highlight the progress that has already been made in reducing power-sector emissions. As the country maps out a plan for further decarbonization, experience from the past 15 years offers two central lessons. First, policy and technology advancement are imperative to achieving significant emissions reductions. Second, our ability to predict the future is limited, and so it will be crucial to adapt as we gain policy experience and as technologies advance in unexpected ways.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Projected income data under different shared socioeconomic pathways for Washington state

Abstract High-resolution income projections under different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are essential for the climate change research communities to devise climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. To generate income projections for Washington state, we obtain state-level GDP per capita projections and convert them into projected annual household income. The resulting state-level income projections are subsequently downscaled to the census block-level based on the Longitudinal Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) dataset. For accuracy assessment, we downscale historical income data from state- level to block- and block group-level and compare the downscaled results against the actual income data from LODES. County-level accuracy assessment is also conducted based on American Community Survey. The results demonstrate a good agreement (Average R 2 of 0.67, 0.8, and 0.99 for block-, block group-, and county-level, respectively) between the downscaled income data and the reference data, thereby validating the methodology employed. Our approach is applicable to other states for income projections, which can be utilized by a broader audience, including those involved in demographic analysis, economic research, and urban planning.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
NASA NTRS2022

Scientist-Stakeholder Relationships Drive Carbon Data Product Transfer Effectiveness within NASA Program

Carbon cycle science is at the heart of research on global climate change and its long-term impacts, as it examines the exchange of carbon between the atmosphere, oceans, land, and the impact of fossil fuel emissions on this cycling. Given the urgency of the climate challenge, NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) requires all funded investigators to identify and work with stakeholder organizations at project inception to accelerate the transfer of the products developed by funded research into decision making systems. In this study, we contribute to the literature through the implementation of a quantitative analysis of 908 unique survey responses from funded investigators to explore the maturity of the scientist-stakeholder engagement. The paper employs multiple correspondence analysis to provide evidence to support policy options to increase stakeholder integration into research programs. Despite limitations of the dataset used, we demonstrated that multiple funding rounds, long-standing relationships between the stakeholder and scientist, and the scientific productivity of the PI, including the ability to produce datasets and research papers on these datasets, all contribute to carbon products moving from research to operational use. The maturity of relationships between scientists and stakeholders was shown to result improved stakeholder engagement. The use of carbon products should be identified in every stage of the program, and that capacity building is needed to support both existing and newly identified stakeholders better understand and use CMS products. As Federal, State, and local policy on climate adaptation and mitigation matures, the need for information on carbon will expand. Building of stakeholder-scientist relationships in CMS results in an effective generation and use of datasets to support this need and prototype ways that improved information needed for decision making can be created.

Monitoring↗
NASA NTRS2022

Scientist-Stakeholder Relationships Drive Carbon Data Product Transfer Effectiveness within NASA Program

Carbon cycle science is at the heart of research on global climate change and its long-term impacts, as it examines the exchange of carbon between the atmosphere, oceans, land, and the impact of fossil fuel emissions on this cycling. Given the urgency of the climate challenge, NASA's Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) requires all funded investigators to identify and work with stakeholder organizations at project inception to accelerate the transfer of the products developed by funded research into decision making systems. In this study, we contribute to the literature through the implementation of a quantitative analysis of 908 unique survey responses from funded investigators to explore the maturity of the scientist-stakeholder engagement. The paper employs multiple correspondence analysis to provide evidence to support policy options to increase stakeholder integration into research programs. Despite limitations of the dataset used, we demonstrated that multiple funding rounds, long-standing relationships between the stakeholder and scientist, and the scientific productivity of the Principal Investigator, including the ability to produce datasets and research papers on these datasets, all contribute to carbon products moving from research to operational use. The maturity of relationships between scientists and stakeholders was shown to result improved stakeholder engagement. The use of carbon products should be identified in every stage of the program, and that capacity building is needed to support both existing and newly identified stakeholders better understand and use CMS products. As federal, state, and local policy on climate adaptation and mitigation matures, the need for information on carbon will expand. Building of stakeholder-scientist relationships in CMS results in an effective generation and use of datasets to support this need and prototype ways that improved information needed for decision making can be created.

Molly E Brown↗
DOE OSTI2025

Simulating regional workforce impacts of decarbonizing integrated steelmaking

Global efforts to mitigate climate change are increasing pressure on heavy manufacturing industries to decarbonize production. The iron and steel industry is responsible for 7% of CO 2 emissions globally (2% in the United States) and is often a major employer in the regions where iron and steel is produced. Understanding the future prospects for workers in regions with high CO 2 emitting industries—including impacts of phasing out or evolving such industries—will be critical for informing regional economic and clean energy strategies. We simulate the impact of an “in-place” transition that replaces today’s integrated production with direct reduced iron (DRI) used in electric arc furnaces (EAFs), using Southwest Pennsylvania as an application of our generalizable approach. Our results suggest that the integrated steelmaking workforce today has the skills, knowledge, and abilities (SKAs) to fill over 95% of all jobs required by DRI/EAF facilities, but the number of jobs is only 25% of those at integrated plants. We also find that some occupational groups have greater general transferability into the broader job market, while other groups, such as production workers, are ill-equipped today based on current SKAs to transition out of the iron and steel industry. Our methodology further suggests factors that limit transitions: Around 85% of occupations are more limited by missing skills, while 15% are more limited by insufficient wages. These results may help to improve the design of social policy and the targeting of retraining programs, while the simulation approach can be readily adapted for other regions and industries.

decarbonization↗