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Impact/Purpose:

The Office of Research and Development (ORD) has initiated a multi-year planning effort to plan the direction of our research program in selected topic areas over five or more years. This approach promotes ORD's focus on the highest priority issues and provides coordination for achieving our long-term research goals. The focus of this effort is the development of Multi-Year Plans (MYPs).

The purpose of the MYPs is to provide a framework that integrates research across ORD's laboratories and centers and Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) goals in support of the Agency's mission to protect human health and the environment. The MYPs identify long-term goals, and present annual performance goals (APGs) and associated annual performance measures (APMs) for a planning window of approximately 5-10 years. By helping to identify the impact of potential annual planning decisions, MYPs aid in the evaluation of research options. MYPs also foster the integration of strategic risk-based environmental protection and anticipation of future environmental issues by communicating our research approach and timing for responding to environmental issues. MYPs are intended to be living documents and are updated as needed to reflect the current state of the science, resource availability, and Agency priorities.

MYPs include two major components: (1) a narrative description of the plan, and (2) a matrix of goals and measures. The narrative provides an introduction and background to the topic of the plan, describes the long-term goals, provides the logic/thinking used to array performance goals to achieve long-term goals, and describes the integration between goals and organizations. The matrix is used to indicate annual goals and measures needed to meet the long-term goals identified in the plan. These goals and measures are arrayed across time (i.e., fiscal years) and laboratories/centers and are based on total annual resource levels for the MYP topic area that will not exceed the resource level proposed in the most recent President's Budget.

Description:

The Global Change Research Act of 1990 establishes the U.S. Global Change Research Program to coordinate a comprehensive research program on global change. This is an inter-Agency effort, with EPA bearing responsibility to assess the consequences of global change on human health, ecosystems, and social well-being. Research examines future global change scenarios and the influence of climate, land use, and other factors on issues that are important to the public. Additional assessments will focus on air quality, water quality, ecosystem health, and human health. EPA's research plan for global climate change lays out five long-term goals. Within this MYP, EPA will: 1. Determine the regional and national implications of climate change and variability for the people, the environment, and the economy of the United States in the context of other, non-climate (environmental, economic, and social) stresses. 2. Provide the approaches, methods and models to quantitatively assess the effects of global change (climate change, land use change and UV radiation changes) on regional air quality, identify technology advancements and adaptive responses and quantify their effect on, and feedback from, emissions and air quality, and develop and apply tools to integrate global change effects across environmental media. 3. Build the capacity to assess and respond to global change impacts on fresh water and coastal ecosystems. 4. Determine the possible impacts of global change on water quantity and quality and the consequences for aquatic ecosystems and drinking water and wastewater systems. Develop adaptation strategies to increase the resilience of those systems. 5. Build capacity to assess and respond to global change impacts on human health in the United States, and conduct initial assessments.

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