New climate tool helps predict local effects of a global change

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

We are living in a new climate reality. The fingerprints of climate change are everywhere — from our forests and farmlands to our riverways and recreation patterns. As human-caused climate change continues to alter the place we call home, how can we reduce the risks we face now while planning for the decades to come?

This is the question I grapple with every day as a climate scientist and Extension specialist at the University of Minnesota. We know that while we seek to prevent climate change from getting worse, we must also prepare for our climate-changed future. When it comes to the practical steps necessary to prepare for the impacts of a warming world, many communities still lack the information, capacity and resources to proactively respond to their changing climate risks.

As our state gets warmer and wetter, for example, how can we best design or upgrade our stormwater systems unless we consider the range of plausible future precipitation patterns the state may experience in the 2060s and 2080s? A substantial and long-lived public investment like this could be rendered quickly obsolete if future climate conditions aren’t considered. How can we conserve and support resilient landscapes that are treasured across our state — including our forests, grasslands, lakes and rivers — if we aren’t actively managing lands in ways that build diversity and resilience to the climate risks they will face in coming decades?

That’s why my team at the University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership, in collaboration with the Minnesota Department of Commerce, has developed highly localized future climate projections for Minnesota and a public online tool to access the data. The tool, called MN CliMAT, provides detailed information about future climate conditions — including temperature, precipitation, ice cover and other variables — down to the 2.5-mile scale. That means Minnesotans can visualize how even specific towns may be affected.

MN CliMAT has been years in development, and throughout its creation we consulted community members, farmers, foresters, architects and more. Consider:

• For farmers and the agricultural industry, the tool can show changes in soil moisture — allowing for proactive planning and investments now in irrigation and other resilience strategies.

• For anglers and the tourism industry, the tool shows projected changes in average lake water temperature and ice cover duration, helping understand how ecosystems and recreation patterns may shift.

• For engineers and planners, projections of future heat and precipitation patterns can help stress-test building design and system sizing, informing how to design and where to build critical infrastructure that’s meant to last for generations.

All this information is available, free of charge, on our website. However, the data alone are insufficient. Raw numbers don’t problem-solve for us or tell us what solutions might work best in a given community or context. That’s why, through our University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership’s Weather Ready Extension program, we are committed to helping the public and professionals across a range of communities and industries learn how to use these data in adaptation planning and decision-making.

We are developing a Climate Adaptation Specialist Training Program, which consists of an ongoing series of webinars and in-person workshops, held in communities around the state. This program is aimed at those who need to make long-term decisions that factor in climate change in their line of work. Nationwide, there is a documented gap between planning for climate change and actually implementing those plans. We want to help close that gap in Minnesota.

For the public, we will be rolling out a Community Climate Leaders program later this year to engage Minnesotans in continuing to lead on individual, local and community-level climate action.

We know that equitably addressing climate change requires each and every one of us. Please join us as we work to mitigate worsening climate change and respond to and prepare for the climate challenges many of our communities are already navigating.

Heidi Roop is director of the University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership and author of “The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions for Everyone.”