Georgia Climate Research Roadmap Identifies Georgia’s Top 40 Climate Research Questions

A multi-disciplinary team of experts from across Georgia, including TNC Georgia’s Coastal Resilience Manager Ashby Worley, has developed the “Georgia Climate Research Roadmap,” a first-of-its-kind list of 40 key research questions that can help policymakers and practitioners better understand and address climate change in Georgia. The Roadmap, published in the journal Environmental Management, is an initiative of the Georgia Climate Project, a state-wide consortium founded by Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Georgia to improve understanding of climate impacts and solutions in Georgia.

The Roadmap’s 40 questions focus on how climate change will impact Georgia and options for dealing with those impacts across themes such as water, the coast, agriculture, health, and energy. Several questions address issues related to equity and at-risk communities. The Roadmap is a non-partisan initiative. An interactive version can be accessed at http://roadmap.GeorgiaClimateProject.org.

“By bringing these questions together in one place, we are trying to make it easier to identify high- impact research opportunities that will benefit decision-makers,” said Emory University’s Daniel Rochberg, a co-author of the paper. “The group that came together to produce the Roadmap is a great indicator of the expertise we have across the state on these issues.”

To develop the Roadmap, a team of 41 co-authors from academia, government, non-governmental organizations, and industry worked through a list of 180 candidate questions submitted by experts across the state through an online solicitation process. “To our knowledge, we are the first to use this novel research prioritization methodology on such a complex cross-cutting issue at the state level,” said co-author Marilyn Brown of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

We see this as a really important first step. Now that we have outlined these questions, we hope to see researchers across the state digging into these in much more detail.

Co-author Patricia Yager, University of Georgia

“This type of information is going to be really important for policymakers” said co-author David D’Onofrio of the Atlanta Regional Commission. “On our side, we’re already making plans to do more work on one of the big infrastructure questions by identifying vulnerabilities in our transportation system to climate change and extreme weather.”

The Roadmap will also serve as the basis for a climate information portal that can provide easy access to information on climate impacts and solutions in Georgia. Jennifer Kline, a co-author from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, said “a tool like this Roadmap can really broaden our engagement on these questions around the state.”

“This was a great effort by a diverse group of experts from across the state. Only by digging into these important questions can we begin to understand what actions will need to be taken to ensure our coast is resilient in the face of a changing climate.” stated Ashby Worley, TNC Georgia’s Coastal Resilience Manager. Hear more…