A Research Roadmap for U.S. Climate Assessments

Within the United States, the most well known assessment is the National Climate Assessment, required by law to take place every four years and last published in 2023 (NCA5). But climate assessments happen at many levels, across sectors, and for many needs – and it’s this entire network of assessments and scientific activity that is necessary to provide the comprehensive knowledge needed in a changing world. That’s one of the upshots in a new commentary, published today in the U.S. Climate Collection, outlining “Research priorities for robust climate assessments in the United States.”

The commentary is the effort of 175 volunteer scholars, led by IonE’s Melissa Kenney, Bob Kopp (Rutgers University), and Costa Samaras (Carnegie Mellon University). It is the first paper in the U.S. Climate Collection, a joint effort of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, created after the federal dismissal of the NCA6 authors in 2025 – not as a replacement for the U.S. national assessment, but as a venue for the synthesis papers and assessment-related research that can inform future national, sub-national, and sectoral assessments. 

We sat down with Kenney to talk about the priorities, the science, and why efforts like these matter. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In this paper, you’re laying out research priorities. Let’s talk for a moment about what that means, because it’s different from what some people might expect in a research publication.

This paper is about asking a question: What has happened since the last U.S. National Climate Assessment in 2023? What research has come out? What is ready for assessment? And what research do we – as a scientific community – need to do, in order to support our nation and its communities in making climate-informed decisions?

It is not a climate assessment itself. We are simply laying out a research roadmap to help people to understand the scientific directions that would be important to include in future assessments. 

We identify some of the research that is important in planetary-scale systems – such as our environmental systems, our climate system, our social systems. The paper also looks at key economic sectors, like agriculture and energy, and different U.S. regions and national interests. And we also identify cross-cutting priorities for research synthesis, such as how greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to alter and amplify climate hazards and how compounding extremes and cascading risks are straining infrastructure, for example. 

The paper is saying: Here’s the landscape; here’s what’s needed. Here’s how things have changed and evolved – and here’s where we should go next.

How long does an effort like this take, and how does it come together?

We started over a year ago, working together. I worked with two people in particular – Bob Kopp at Rutgers and Costa Samaras at Carnegie Mellon – to organize it. 

We had teams of scientists working on different topic areas. And we started, actually, by charging them with a seemingly simple-but-actually-quite-complex task: In a couple of paragraphs, give us the context of the topic you’re covering – of the region or the socioeconomic sector or the global system – and then give us three to five research priorities that need to be pursued in order to support future climate assessments.

The three of us worked with different teams, and each team coordinated in whatever way made sense to them. And then we would meet, and we were able to pull together an initial draft. It had lots of ideas and way too many pages, and maybe it still has too many pages. [Laughs.] But we worked to refine the sections, so that it had an easy structure to follow and to be clear that we weren’t doing the synthesis itself, but rather describing the advancements in the science since the NCA5 and the synthesis research need, as each of the teams saw it. 

And, of course, it’s a paper – so it went through a peer review process. We got a number of incredibly thoughtful reviewers who gave us detailed suggestions and critiques that helped us to refine and improve the end result.

Let’s go back to the idea of the “synthesis research need,” as you phrased it. Why are climate assessments and other forms of synthesis needed? 

Climate science is changing at such a rapid pace. There's so much research being produced – and in so many different disciplinary fields – that no one can be an expert across all of these domains. And so one of the things that we really rely on our scientific community to do is pull together that science, to understand what we know, how confident we are in that knowledge, and a bit of why it matters.

Not prescribing decisions or policies, but helping to connect the dots. Why this information matters, for example, for communities that are developing hazard mitigation plans. Or when we’re looking to make critical energy grid investments. Or investing $100 million in road improvements. If we're looking 50 to 100 years out to plan bridge repairs, we need to know precipitation projections; we need to know heat and thermal changes that are happening. Because you can make really costly decisions if you’re not able to understand the landscape of information and the full range of possibilities.

And that’s the power of synthesis. Climate assessments look at what we know about what is happening and what has happened through long historic records, but they also make projections into the future. And then we can take that information, and we can think about what does it mean. What does it mean for the agriculture sector that we have shifting growing days, for example, or changing risk related to drought. Or that heat is changing, and high heat impacts livestock.

One of the cross-cutting research priorities that we identified is actually related to that – to cascading hazards and events, where you might see, say, drought and heat combined, and you have not just an additive effect but a multiplicative impact, which then has huge implications for how communities are responding.

Are there any other cross-cutting research priorities that you want to underscore?

Yes: We found there’s a lot of desire to know more about climate responses. Associated with that is an opportunity to think about these responses not only as “adaptation” or “mitigation” or “climate interventions,” but also holistically, as a suite of decisions being made by groups of people – especially at various governance levels that include disaster management – and how climate responses are embedded into different types of decision-making processes and reports.

When we think about these types of efforts, if the responses are really siloed, then there’s real potential that groups of people can be working in ways that they genuinely believe are in the larger best interest, but in fact almost cancel each other out. You can think of that as, like, unintentional trade-offs that are happening. 

But if we can think about these processes as a portfolio of ways we respond to climate – actual changes or projected changes – then there’s an opportunity to understand how we might work together more creatively, leveraging the strengths of each approach and making better decisions.

That’s something I’m particularly excited about. Understanding integrated ways of making climate-response decisions is a huge area of opportunity within the U.S.

What do you hope people take away from this effort?

From the paper itself? I’m hoping that our scientific community is excited to tackle the science synthesis question that most speaks to them. We don't need someone to do all of them. We just need each person or each team to pick one – to tell us the state of the science and why it matters at this moment in time. Everything that synthesis is meant to do. And then to consider publishing that work in a place like the U.S. Climate Collection – so that it’s openly available to the public and others who are building climate assessments in the future. 

And someone who may not directly be doing that research?

I don’t know. Maybe that… scientists are still working. That we hear the call that society is making: that we need scientific information, and we need it in ways that better connect to our communities and our places and to the challenges and decisions that we are working on.

We don't know what is going to happen with the next U.S. national assessment, or what it might look like, but one of the things we did see in this work was the shifting landscape of climate assessments and that the need for this kind of synthesized information has not gone away. It might have even increased – and we thought it was really critical to name the network of climate assessments that exist, and how this information flows and is used to inform the science that helps our communities know what they need to know.

It is my deepest professional obligation to make sure that the specialized knowledge that I have – that our scientific community has – is not just held within the scientific community, but it is translated and shared in ways that make that science accessible and usable to everyone.
 

The commentary “Research priorities for robust climate assessments in the U.S.” is available in the open-access U.S. Climate Collection, published concurrently in Earth’s Future and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Julie Hanus is director of public interest communications and engagement for the Institute on the Environment.