Integrating the regional context of climate change impacts on public health into the National Climate Assessment

The 3rd US National Climate Assessment (NCA) is currently being conducted under the auspices of the Global Change Research Act of 1990 which requires a report to the President and the Congress every four years that integrates, evaluates, and interprets the findings of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP); analyzes the effects of climate change on the natural and social systems, including public health, and analyzes current trends in climate change and projects major trends for the subsequent 25 to 100 years. The NCA acts as a status reports about climate change science and impacts; it is based on observations made across the country and compares these observations to predictions from climate system models. Because of its broad coverage of climate impacts, vulnerabilities, and adaptation/mitigation options across a wide array of sectors and regions, the NCA is an important resource for understanding and communicating climate change science and impacts in the U.S. While the NCAstrives to generate a national-level picture of climate change impacts it is well recognized that the health impacts will vary significantly by US climate region. This presentation will discuss the current evidence for spatial heterogeneity of climate impacts in the US and describe efforts to derive a regional-scale assessment of climate impacts on health by comparing analysis of health projections in two US climate regions: Pacific Northwest and the Southeast. Towards this goal, we will present the findings of two regional scans of ongoing climate and health funded research and the outcomes of two regional workshops.