US EPA

As part of the Climate Ready Estuaries (CRE) program, the Global Change Research Program (GCRP) in the National Center for Environmental Assessment, Office of Research and Development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has prepared a report exploring a new methodology for climate change vulnerability assessments using Massachusetts Bays’ salt marsh ecosystem as a demonstration.

Estuarine ecosystems are highly vulnerable to climate-related changes in precipitation, hydrology, and sea level rise. As part of the CRE pilot program, GCRP collaborated with the Massachusetts Bays Program (MBP) and the San Francisco Estuary Partnership (SFEP) on ecological vulnerability assessments based on an expert elicitation exercise in a workshop setting. The results will be published as a series, with Volume II presenting the results for MBP and Volume I presenting the results for SFEP. For this project, an exercise was designed to elicit judgments from experts regarding climate change effects on two ecosystem processes for each pilot assessment: sediment retention and community interactions. The exercise is based on a novel application of expert elicitation (a process for obtaining the judgments of groups of experts to characterize their collective knowledge about ecological questions of interest). It was implemented during a two-day workshop using groups of seven expert participants for each ecosystem process examined.

During the workshop, the experts developed ecosystem models and used a coding scheme to characterize (1) relationships among key physical and ecological variables that regulate ecosystem processes, (2) relative sensitivities of these relationships under current and future climate change scenarios, (3) degree of confidence about these relationships, and (4) implications for management. This report shows how climate-sensitive pathways can be identified and linked to management options for adaptation to climate change. Adaptation refers to the ways in which management actions can be modified to reduce the negative impacts of climate change. The results of this study are designed to support MBP’s adaptation planning efforts as well as those of other estuary managers.

The aim is to synthesize place-based information on the potential implications of climate change for key ecosystem processes in each estuary, in a form that will enable managers to undertake management adaptation planning.

Following this review, this report will be revised and the final vulnerability assessment will be published on the Global Adaptation web site. Publication is expected in late 2011/early 2012.

Volume I for the San Francisco Estuary Partnership will be reviewed, revised and published concurrently.

A third volume, Lessons Learned, will be developed subsequent to publication of the first two volumes. This Volume III will compare the results of the two parallel assessments, explore synthetic conclusions, analyze the utility of the methodology for future use, and discuss potential improvements.

U.S. EPA. Vulnerability Assessments in Support of the Climate Ready Estuaries Program: A Novel Approach Using Expert Judgement, Volume II: Results for the Massachusetts Bays Program (External Review Draft). U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-11/058B, 2011.

Comments on the assessment may be submitted and reviewed using the e-Government Regulations.gov Web site. From the site, select Environmental Protection Agency and the key word EPA- HQ-ORD-2011-0485 (for the docket ID).