Assessing Community Vulnerability to Extreme Events in the Presence of Contaminated Sites and Waste Management Facilities: An Indicator Approach.

Communities across the world are facing extreme events, such as excessive heat, droughts, floods, and wildfires. In the presence of contaminated sites and waste management facilities, communities must consider the impacts of potential releases from these sites due to such events. Impacts of extreme events on sites and consequently on surrounding, often disadvantaged communities result from complex interactions between natural, physical, and social factors.

Building resilience to extreme weather events in Phoenix: Considering contaminated sites and disadvantaged communities.

The interplay of contaminated sites, climate change, and disadvantaged communities are a growing concern worldwide. Worsening extreme events may result in accidental contaminant releases from sites and waste facilities that may impact nearby communities. If such communities are already suffering from environmental, economic, health, or social burdens, they may face disproportionate impacts.

Centering equity in the development of a community resilience planning resource.

Building community resilience requires centering equity in resilience planning processes. Tools and resources for strengthening community resilience need to address equity in both their content and the process for using them. This is especially so for communities living in proximity to contaminated lands that face compounding hazards (i.

A review of climate change effects on practices for mitigating water quality impacts.

Water quality practices are commonly implemented to reduce human impacts on land and water resources. In series or parallel in a landscape, systems of practices can reduce local and downstream pollution delivery. Many practices function via physical, chemical, and biological processes that are dependent on weather and climate.

Forest riparian buffers reduce timber harvesting effects on stream temperature, but additional climate adaptation strategies are likely needed under future conditions.

Stream water temperature imposes metabolic constraints on the health of cold-water fish like salmonids. Timber harvesting can reduce stream shading leading to higher water temperatures, while also altering stream hydrology. In the Pacific Northwest, riparian buffer requirements are designed to mitigate these impacts; however, anticipated future changes in air temperature and precipitation could reduce the efficacy of these practices in protecting aquatic ecosystems.

Assessing and managing design storm variability and projection uncertainty in a changing coastal environment.

Coastal urban infrastructure and water management programs are vulnerable to the impacts of long-term hydroclimatic changes and to the flooding and physical destruction of disruptive hurricanes and storm surge. Water resilience or, inversely, vulnerability depends on design specifications of the storm and inundation, against which water infrastructure and environmental assets are planned and operated. These design attributes are commonly derived from statistical modeling of historical measurements.

Adapting urban best management practices for resilience to long-term environmental changes.

Stormwater best management practices (BMPs) help mitigate the adverse effects of urban development on stream hydrology and water quality, and are widely specified in development requirements and watershed management plans. However, design of stormwater BMPs largely relies on experience with historic climate, which may not be a reliable guide to the future. To inform BMP design that is robust to future conditions, it is important to examine how potential changes in precipitation, temperature, and potential evapotranspiration will affect the performance of BMPs.

Adaptation Design Tool for Climate-Smart Management of Coral Reefs and Other Natural Resources.

Scientists and managers of natural resources have recognized an urgent need for improved methods and tools to enable effective adaptation of management measures in the face of climate change. This paper presents an Adaptation Design Tool that uses a structured approach to break down an otherwise overwhelming and complex process into tractable steps. The tool contains worksheets that guide users through a series of design considerations for adapting their planned management actions to be more climate-smart given changing environmental stressors.

Climate-Smart Design for Ecosystem Management: A Test Application for Coral Reefs.

The interactive and cumulative impacts of climate change on natural resources such as coral reefs present numerous challenges for conservation planning and management. Climate change adaptation is complex due to climate-stressor interactions across multiple spatial and temporal scales. This leaves decision makers worldwide faced with local, regional, and global-scale threats to ecosystem processes and services, occurring over time frames that require both near-term and long-term planning.

U.S. natural resources and climate change: concepts and approaches for management adaptation.

Public lands and waters in the United States traditionally have been managed using frameworks and objectives that were established under an implicit assumption of stable climatic conditions. However, projected climatic changes render this assumption invalid. Here, we summarize general principles for management adaptations that have emerged from a major literature review.