NWS Climate Svcs Seminar, 6/13/2023, Climate Change Risk Assessment - User Needs and Decision Supp.

Dr. Jonassen leads climate change programs of the Environmental and Energy Management Institute at George Washington University and holds joint appointments in the engineering and urban sustainability programs there. She has supported multiple federal agencies and private industry on strategic challenges surrounding greenhouse gas mitigation and climate change adaptation. As Program Director at the National Science Foundation, she managed the Carbon Cycle Research program, and served in the U.S. Global Change Research Program where she was a lead author for the Strategic Plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. As an academic researcher, she performed high-resolution stochastic simulation of climatic response to various GHG scenarios for nuclear waste, water resources and biological impacts. Her work has been featured in eight books, more than 70 professional papers and 150 professional presentations. She currently focuses on international interventions supporting the UN, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank and serves on multiple panels at the National Academies.
Drawing from examples of climate change risk assessments performed in a dozen Asian countries, we explore five key challenges such assessments create for expert advisors: reliability assessment, Paris alignment, risk characterization, vulnerability metrics, and selection of projections. We’ll examine the spectrum of resources supporting such efforts outside the U.S. and how they compare to the decision support tools available in the U.S. and look at how AI is helping to address some of the challenges.