The Executive Summary states that climate change is a major security issue for our country and the world and a defining element for the 21st century. It impacts human and ecosystem health, the economy, causes geopolitical stress, and increases the likelihood of storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and other extreme events. The Climate Change Institute has a legacy of transformational contributions to the understanding of the physical, chemical, biological and social complexity of climate change and the application of these findings at local to international scales.
One of the several transformational contributions made by the Climate Change Institute is the understanding that the wind systems that deliver moisture, heat and pollutants and that impact surface ocean currents and sea surface temperature throughout the planet can shift in a matter of a few months to years with dramatic and sustained changes in water availability, storms and health at local to regional scales. The Institute uses this perspective to understand and aid in prediction of future hemispheric scale weather impacts, notably extreme events, with the most recent being abrupt warming of the Arctic with consequences for Northern Hemisphere climate and the strengthening and poleward migration of winds around Antarctica resulting in massive changes in water availability and sea surface temperatures throughout the Southern Hemisphere.
To address the likelihood of continued abrupt changes and extreme events in climate the Institute continues to conduct field research, laboratory analyses, and to develop software to aid in the understanding of non-linear climate responses for use in climate adaptation and sustainability planning. In 2014 the Institute launched a framework for developing climate change adaptation and sustainability planning that includes continually enhanced, publicly available software to understand past, present and future changes in climate and vulnerability to climate change through the formulation of plausible scenarios for the prediction of annual to multi-decadal scale climate change.
This framework now forms a primary initiative for CCI entitled Climate Futures ( http://www.climatefutures.net/ ) (see Appendix i). Within Climate Futures CCI is undertaking plausible scenario climate planning for: West Africa, the Southern Hemisphere continents, Central Asia and Maine. In addition, CCI is in the process of developing an Arctic Futures Institute with the UM Law School and the World Ocean Observatory as an offshoot of the Arctic Council meetings in Portland last Fall. This activity is intended to provide a mechanism for a Maine-wide focus on physical, chemical, biological and social science, business,
policy and law in the Arctic.
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