If you follow national climate news, you have probably seen a lot of splashy information on the 5th National Climate Assessment, which was released Tuesday morning to a lot of acclaim and a huge roll-out of information about the changing climate in the United States. I was one of the authors of the Southeast chapter, and I will post a separate story on this later today. I also wanted to mention a second report that was released today, the National Climate Change Roadmap, funded by USDA-NIFA . This report focuses on what research is needed by Extension to help farmers and other agricultural producers to help them navigate the new knowledge about how our climate is changing and how those changes are impacting agriculture. There are a lot of opportunities for producers to get involved in reducing future climate change as well as adapting to the changes in temperature, precipitation, growing season, and other agriculturally important climate parameters that we are already observing. You can read this report at National-Climate-Change-Roadmap_November-2023.pdf (colostate.edu). I was on the working group for this horizon scan (for those of you who don’t know, a horizon scan is a systematic process of scanning the environment for emerging trends, threats, and opportunities–it is considered an essential tool for organizations that want to be proactive and successful in the future).
