View SCCWRP’s full thematic Research Plan for Climate Resiliency (PDF)
2024-2025 Executive Summary
Climate resiliency refers to the capacity of aquatic systems and aquatic resources to maintain their structure and functioning in the face of climate change. As global climate change shifts environmental baselines and expectations around the world, California’s aquatic systems will experience pervasive, gradually intensifying combinations of environmental stressors that will fundamentally alter ecological condition and functioning; these stressors include rising water temperatures, declining dissolved oxygen levels, reduced bioavailability of dissolved minerals, rising sea levels and storm surge, and increasing hydromodification and flooding risks. Notably, these stressors transcend jurisdictional boundaries and are projected to intensify for generations to come. While the root causes of climate change need to be managed at a global scale, the aquatic ecosystem effects of climate change are manifesting at regional and local scales. Not only are there a range of different ways that these effects are manifesting, but these effects also are combining with one another and with other local environmental stressors to exert synergistic effects. Because the effects of climate change both manifest locally and need to be managed locally, the actions that local managers take have an outsized influence in shaping the long-term resiliency of Southern California’s aquatic systems in the face of climate change.
SCCWRP’s research is focused around three main areas: (1) Evaluating trajectories of response in physical and chemical stressors, the risk to habitats and biological communities associated with these projected changes, and tools to relate risk to management targets; (2) evaluating design properties and relative efficacy of a variety of traditional and nature-based strategies to inform more detailed, location-specific project designs and implementation approaches; and (3) assessing ecological, economic, and social benefits and potential undesirable consequences, as well as conducting tradeoff analysis and developing metrics to evaluate performance and inform adaptive management,
SCCWRP’s focus for 2024-2025 will be on:
- Assessing effects of climate change on aquatic habitats: To develop effective solutions that promote climate resiliency, scientists first need a firm understanding of the trajectory of physical and chemical parameters in response to climate change, and how these drivers may affect biological communities. SCCWRP is focused on improving understanding of these complex interactions and on developing a framework, indicators, and tools for assessing the risk/vulnerability of biological communities and habitats to climate change. SCCWRP will model climate change effects on species and habitats of management concern, and then using the results of modeling analyses to develop assessment tools and indices and assess the effects of climate change and the efficacy of solutions.
- Tools to facilitate solution development: Evaluating the efficacy of potential solution scenarios from development to implementation and over time requires models and evaluation tools that explore how combinations of solutions may perform under a variety of different situations and in a range of different settings. Regional-scale approaches provide an opportunity to take advantage of regional data sets to parameterize, calibrate, and validate models and leverage opportunities for model testing and refinement. SCCWRP will develop observational and modeling tools that allow technology developers and managers to evaluate emerging solutions in terms of their long-term efficacy, ecosystem benefits and potential for adverse unintended effects.
- Building capacity to evaluate the efficacy of climate solutions: Performance assessment is critical to ensuring that management actions achieve their desired outcomes, improving future actions by incorporating lessons learned from experience, and providing data to support future modeling and assessment tools. Achieving these goals is particularly challenging for climate change solutions given the extended timeframes necessary to assess performance, the need to account for multiple types of benefits and costs (e.g., ecologic, social, economic), and the fact that targets may need to evolve to account for climate trajectories, which are both changing and uncertain. SCCWRP will conduct performance assessments of proposed solutions and combinations of solutions that consider multiple types of benefits and costs, as well as that help managers evaluate appropriate management targets and associated indicators and thresholds.