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IN CCIA Nov/Dec 2020 Newsletter
Climate Change Priorities for the Incoming Administration
From rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement to halting oil drilling in national parks, the Biden administration will usher in new approaches for dealing with current and future climate change threats. President-elect Joe Biden has already outlined 10 executive actions he'll implement on his first day in office to address the challenge and reduce emissions, and he has even proposed a plan to end carbon emissions from power plants by 2035. Biden's complete plan for a clean energy revolution and environmental justice is available from his campaign website, but the extent to which he can implement these initiatives with such a divided Senate is unknown. 




 
 
Just last week Biden announced that John Kerry will serve as the special envoy for climate, a new Cabinet-level position that will sit on the National Security Council. This announcement signals that the Biden administration views climate change as a key foreign policy concern as well as a domestic threat. 

Back on the home front, a transition memo for the U.S. Department of Agriculture outlined numerous recommendations to enable the agriculture and forestry sectors to better mitigate and adapt to climate change. Central to this plan is an investment in natural climate solutions by establishing a Carbon Bank to finance large-scale climate smart land management and conservation practices.

As PCCRC Director Jeff Dukes said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune last week, "we’re all in for a little climate whiplash within the next few months.” This is definitely a fast-moving space, and an important one to watch!
American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting Goes Virtual
As Covid-19 rages on, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting is going virtual for 2020, with over 1,000 hours of scientific content available on-demand to scientists, educators, and students worldwide. In fact, this might be the most accessible AGU meeting ever, as students and K-12 educators can attend for FREE with an AGU membership

What is the AGU Fall Meeting?
Fall Meeting is the premier gathering for climate scientists in the US and around the world. In a typical year more than 20,000 people will attend this annual event. While this meeting largely draws in researchers, there are special talks and session for students, K-12 educators, and general science enthusiasts. 

NEW FOR 2020 - to accommodate virtual participants in all time zones around the world, Fall Meeting has been extend to cover more than 2 weeks (December 1-17). 
You can browse the AGU public program to explore interesting and cutting edge topics in STEM education, atmospheric sciences, geohealth, global environmental change, and more. Listed below are just a few sessions in the area of Education as an example of the content available this year: Interested in finding Purdue research at the AGU Fall Meeting? Check out our dedicated Purdue at AGU webpage for our daily schedule, featured presentations, and more!
 
Find Purdue at AGU
Overview of the Process and Context of the IN CCIA
The Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment (IN CCIA) consists of several sector-based reports that provide a localized look at the climate trends and impacts affecting Hoosiers. How did this project get started? Who was involved? How does it compare to other state climate assessments in the USA? We took a deep dive into these questions, and more, in an article recently published in the journal Climatic Change.  

Read Full Article
Above: Status of state climate assessments in the USA as of 2020.
Abstract:
The Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment (IN CCIA) is a collaborative effort to provide professionals, decision makers, and the public with information about how climate change affects state and local interests throughout Indiana, USA. This assessment effort has three interrelated goals: (1) analyze and document the best available climate change impacts research, (2) develop and maintain a network of stakeholders and experts, and (3) start a dialog about climate change throughout Indiana. The project adopted a process that prioritized stakeholder engagement, re-envisioned traditional dissemination approaches, and that had limited state government involvement, setting the IN CCIA apart from most other state climate assessments (SCAs) in the USA. This overview describes the motivations, principles, and processes that guided the IN CCIA development, explores how Indiana’s approach compares with those of other SCAs, and briefly summarizes the papers presented in this special issue. As interest in SCAs grows in non-coastal and politically conservative locations, the IN CCIA serves as one example of how a bottom-up assessment with limited funding can deliver credible climate science to diverse stakeholder groups in the absence of state-level mandates or direction and attract public attention over an extended period of time.

Read Full Article
View Supplemental Materials
Putting the IN CCIA Into Action
Have a story to share? Let us know! Email IN CCIA coordinator, Melissa Widhalm
Upcoming Events
As we pause travel to help stop the spread of Covid-19, events are being rescheduled, postponed, canceled, or moved online. We're updating our Events page regularly to keep you informed.

If you're interested in hosting a virtual climate change meeting in your community, please be in touch by email.

 

Climate Facts

 
Did you know?
Perennial plants are particularly vulnerable to shifting seasons, especially as it relates to their chilling hour requirements, or the amount of time they need to spend with temperatures between 35°F and 50°F, which prepares them to break their winter dormancy and blossom. If you get too few chilling hours, certain varieties of apples, peaches and grapes simply won’t bud. If you accumulate the required chilling hours too early in the year, like what happened in 2012, some fruits may bud before the risk of frost damage has ended. And if you have winter and spring temperatures that fluctuate too much, that can lead to resets in chilling hours required to end dormancy, resulting in erratic blooms, yield loss and reduced fruit quality.

So here in Indiana, where we’re already sitting on the boundary of suitability for many fruit varieties, it is expected to become more difficult to produce reliable crops in the future, and farmers may need to shift the varieties being used. And with perennial crops, that’s especially challenging since it can take many years to establish a crop and you expect to produce from those plants for many years or decades. 

The IN CCIA Agriculture Report's section on Specialty Crops provides chilling hour projections for Indiana by mid-century along with information about coping with these changes.

Read the IN CCIA Agriculture Report
About Us:
 
Led by the Purdue Climate Change Research Center, the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment (IN CCIA) is a statewide effort that brings the best available climate change research together into a series of reports designed to help Hoosiers better understand climate change-related risks so they can prepare for challenges and capitalize on opportunities.
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Copyright © 2020 Purdue Climate Change Research Center, All rights reserved.

Contact Us:
Melissa Widhalm, IN CCIA Coordinator






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