STAC Continues to Address Climate Resiliency Science Needs

 

The Chesapeake Bay Program’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) is administered by the CRC and funded through a cooperative agreement with the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) Partnership – currently spanning the period 2016-2022. The CRC has had a long-standing role of administering all activities of STAC, an active committee with 38 members from academic and scientific institutions around the watershed.

In the last quarter, STAC staff have been busy (as usual!) coordinating two different STAC workshops and the March Quarterly Meeting.  A continued area of focus for STAC is to advise the Chesapeake Bay Program regarding measures to implement current climate science into both the modeling system of tools and overall decision-making, now and into the future.

In support of the 2017 Mid-Point Assessment, STAC sponsored several activities in pursuit of advising the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) on climate-related issues. As a result, Bay jurisdictions are discussing how best to integrate climate change into their Phase III Watershed Implementation Plans (WIPs). To support these management decisions, the CBP has sought STAC input on a variety of climate related topics, and STAC in turn has brought to bear the expertise of scientists nationwide.

More recently, the CBP’s Climate Resiliency Workgroup (CRWG) conducted an internal survey of their membership on climate research needs, and asked STAC to weigh in. The survey generated a list of 9 categories that were ranked in order of relative importance:

  1. Design and function of BMPs under new climate reality
  2. Better understanding of precipitation changes with regards to intensity, annual amounts, seasonal impacts, storm events and stormwater management
  3. Social Science- human behavior- implications of the human response to climate change, flooding, sea level rise, as well as motivation and needs of communities to adapt
  4. Better understanding of sea level rise and subsidence impacts in changing climatic conditions
  5. Green infrastructure performance including increased sediment due to climate change
  6. Changing climate conditions and their impacts on wetlands
  7. Climate impacts to key aquatic fish species abundance, life cycle and habitat
  8. Changing climate conditions and their impacts on SAV
  9. Changing climate conditions and their impacts on invasive species

From STAC’s perspective, it’s integral to note that science gaps and needs are addressed in way that results in information relevant to management and decision-makers. To that end, over the past several months, STAC has also been working on a parallel effort with the CBP’s Goal Implementation Teams (GITs), and the Scientific, Technical, Assessment and Reporting (STAR) group to develop an approach that will identify, and help prioritize, both short- and longer-term science needs. The approach will result in a “Strategic Science and Research Framework” that will be an on-going, repeatable process that supports the SRS (strategy review system) decision framework. The SRS is the adaptive management-based review process by which the Partnership seeks to meet the commitments outlined in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement. The results of the Strategic Science and Research Framework will be used to help focus existing science resources, and leverage the research enterprise, to more effectively provide science to advance Chesapeake restoration and conservation efforts and decision-making.

Throughout these discussions, STAC has highlighted the importance of decision-making under uncertainty, specifically, the degree of uncertainty surrounding climate science and research, including the consequences and costs of uncertainty, how to adapt to variable outcomes, and how to communicate this uncertainty to managers and stakeholders. Uncertainty is not just the unknown, but rather a range of accepted variability that should be accounted for to manage risks.

To that end, STAC and the CRC are now accepting proposals to support a STAC-sponsored science synthesis project related to how climate change may impact on-going efforts to restore and protect the Chesapeake Bay. Appropriate topics are those where a thoughtful analysis and synthesis of available data and/or previously published results would identify, characterize, and suggest means of addressing important knowledge gaps, inform additional research, and place scientific information into a management-relevant context. Proposers are specifically encouraged to identify key, relevant climate change-related uncertainties that may affect the CBP’s capacity to predict system responses and achieve desired outcomes, and how the implications of such uncertainties can best be communicated to the CBP Partnership. The RFP is accessible here. All proposals are DUE by Friday, May 10, 2019.