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- The Climate Change Science Program integrates federal research on climate and
global change, as sponsored by thirteen federal agencies and overseen by the
Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Council on Environmental Quality,
the National Economic Council and the Office of Management and Budget.
During the past thirteen years the United States, through the U.S. Global
Change Research Program (USGCRP), has made the world's largest scientific
investment in the areas of climate change and global change research -- a total
investment of almost $20 billion. The USGCRP, in collaboration with several
other national and international science programs, has documented and
characterized several important aspects of the sources, abundances and
lifetimes of greenhouse gases; has mounted extensive space-based monitoring
systems for global-wide monitoring of climate and ecosystem parameters; has
begun to address the complex issues of various aerosol species that may
significantly influence climate parameters; has advanced our understanding of
the global water and carbon cycles (but with major remaining uncertainties);
and has developed several approaches to computer modeling of the global
climate.
Because of the scientific accomplishments achieved by USGCRP and other research
programs during a productive "period of discovery and characterization" since
1990, we are now ready to move into a new "period of differentiation and
strategy investigation", which is the theme of the President's Climate Change
Research Initiative (CCRI). In announcing the CCRI, the President directed the
reestablishment of priorities for climate change research, including a focus on
identifying the scientific information that can be developed within 2 to 5
years to assist the nation's evaluation of optimal strategies to address global
change risks. The President also called for improved coordination among
federal agencies, to assure that research results are made available to all
stakeholders, from national policy leaders to local resource managers.
The President's direction for CCRI, focusing on the development of near-term
decision-support information, requires close integration with the many existing
programs managed under the U.S. Global Change Research Program. This will
ensure internal consistency of the CCRI research with the full body of global
change information developed under the USGCRP.
To accomplish this integration of USGCRP and CCRI activities, the Interagency
Climate Change Science Program has assumed oversight of both programs, with a
single interagency committee responsible for the entire range of science
projects sponsored by both programs. The Interagency Climate Change Science
Program retains the responsibility for compliance with the requirements of the
Global Change Research Act of 1990, including its provisions for annual
reporting of findings and short-term plans, scientific reviews by the National
Academy of Sciences/National Research Council, and periodic publication of a
ten-year strategic plan for the program.
http://www.climatescience.gov/about/
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