A sense of the uniqueness of the region:

The New England region (including upstate New York) is dominated by weather and physical climate, and New Englanders have come to expect to be able to "work around" their weather. They also expect their weather forecasts to be reasonably accurate, and their weather predictable. Recent weather-related events have raised public concern that the "typical" New England weather may be changing, as evidenced by recent mild winters and the occurrences of extreme weather events such as the ice storms of January, 1998, and the heavy rains, the flooding of October, 1996 and June, 1998, and the odd fall, 1998, across the New England region.

Less obvious factors of weather and climate in the New England region include variations in air quality (chemical climate change) during summer months, resulting in human health hazards, impacts on agricultural and forest productivity, and adverse visibility which affect tourism. Air pollution issues in the region include exposure to ozone and other photochemical products, acid precipitation and fine particulate matter, among others. Human health concerns include the potential impacts of poor air quality, extreme temperatures, wet springs leading to the over-population of insects and other disease-bearing vectors, as well as heavy pollen-counts in extreme dry periods. Agricultural production, including forest productivity, is also adversely impacted by poor air quality across the region. Poor visibility due to sulfate aerosol haze, mediocre foliar color displays due to warm fall weather, and inability to maintain adequate snow pack due to increases in minimum night-time winter temperatures, are examples of physical and chemical climate changes that could have negative impacts on regional tourism.

When people think of New England, their mental images probably include some aspect of our unique natural environment: brilliant fall colors, maple sugaring, skiing through forested glades, distant mountain vistas, quaint "New England" villages, all either covered by or surrounded by forests. A key component of living in New England is one of "quality of life." Maine’s state motto is "The way life should be," a statement essentially describing the entire region.

The key issues seen by each region

The New England Regional Climate Change Impacts workshop (NECCI), convened September 3-5, 1997, to initiate a dialogue with stakeholders, regional and national experts, and governmental agencies on regional climate change issues and the potential impacts on the New England region, identified 12 significant findings or key issues regarding climate change issues and concerns of importance to the region. Of these, the first three key issues were:

1. Relevant and understandable materials on regional climate change issues are not readily available and are essential for informed sectoral discussion of these issues;

2. A regional integrated socioeconomic assessment of climate change and climate variability impacts to New England is needed in order to provide stakeholders with relevant examples and realistic scenarios; and

3. Regionally-specific examples of anticipated climate change impacts are needed to make the concept of climate change more relevant to the general public.

The New England Regional Assessment (NERA) will address each of these key issues, providing meaningful and relevant information via various NERA activities to the regional stakeholders. Three sectors have been identified by the Regional Assessment Team as regionally-important: Forestry, Human Health, and Water. Each sector will be represented on either the NERA Steering Committee or the New England Regional Assessment Team and those team members will be the domain experts for their sector. They will be responsible for assisting in the development of the one-day sessions with members of their stakeholder group. The sectoral leaders will be assisted by the NE Regional Assessment Team to work out the logistics, communication and reporting of the sector-based working groups developed at one-day workshops.

Examples of key vulnerabilities and opportunities

Vulnerabilities:

Three key vulnerabilities or broad impact areas of potential climate change impact have been identified. Specific illustrative case studies will be developed by participants attending the three, one-day workshops to be held March 30th (Forestry), 31st (Water Resources), and April 8th (Human Health), 1999. The Regional Assessment Team identified these three impact areas as being of greatest general concern to the New England region under a changing climate. The NERA will focus on the three sectors (Forestry, Water, Human Health), developing sector-specific case studies to illustrate the potential of regional climate impacts in each area of vulnerability.

The details regarding specific impacts on each of the three sectors will be provided by the stakeholders attending the sector-specific one-day workshops. The broad impact areas and likely case studies are:

a) Atmospheric Chemistry – examples of case studies:

b) Extreme Events – examples of case studies:

c) Seasonal Dynamics – examples of case studies:

Specific case studies are currently under development for presentation at each workshop. These case studies include: 1) the Ice Storm, 1998, damage to upstate New York, northern Vermont, central and coastal New Hampshire, and central and coastal Maine; 2) the potential economic impacts, by state, of loss of fall foliage tourism due to changing seasonal dynamics and/or species migration; and 3) the regional impacts of the drought of the mid-1960s.

Opportunities:

Anticipated opportunities include the development of an on-going stakeholder-participation program which will engage participants in a true "end-to-end" partnership, focused on how research methods and regional climate and socioeconomic models are being applied to address user-defined concerns and problems. These concerns, and the resulting products and findings will be included in the Regional Assessment. This Regional Assessment Report, written for and by stakeholders, will promote further stakeholder participation in the New England region.

In addition, we will develop a series of socioeconomic modeling activities to address the sectoral impacts under selected case studies noted above. Products of these modeling activities will provide stakeholders with local, relevant examples designed to enable the public to better understand both the economic risks and the economic impacts of climate change to the region.